Fund for Shared Insight: How Chicago Beyond’s Leader in Residence Model Shifts Power to Community

Fund for Shared Insight recently wrote a new insights piece on Chicago Beyond’s work. 

Published August 26, 2025

Jeanine Valrie Logan is a busy midwife also working to bring a community vision to life: creating a birth center on the South Side of Chicago.

It hasn’t been easy. She had to advocate for the expansion of an Illinois law just so the Chicago South Side Birth Center could operate as a nonprofit birth center, the first in the state. The center’s first building site fell through; and now the second, a former Baptist church, requires extensive renovations. Logan has built up a staff of five to support the center’s development, operations, and community building, but the project is still a steep climb. Fortunately, she says, she has had the team at Chicago Beyond, a national funder based in Chicago, by her side.

Logan is Chicago Beyond’s second Leader in Residence, a program that provides a multiyear fellowship for leaders making an impact in their community. Shruti Jayaraman, Chicago Beyond’s former chief capital and insights officer, describes the program as being “grounded in listening, not just for answers to a predetermined or prescribed question, but listening for the questions that visionary leaders within their own communities hold.”

To identify potential leadership fellows and other people, organizations, and ideas they might want to support, Chicago Beyond team members follow threads from what they hear at community events and meetings and from speaking with existing partners. The team learned about Logan through conversations with a group of street medics, Ujimaa Medics, which Chicago Beyond supported to grow into a full-time operation, providing emergency first response and offering community workshops to teach life-saving skills. The Ujimaa team said Logan had a lot of trust in the birth worker community.

“Another beautiful thing about listening is that things emerge that you couldn’t have predicted,” says Jayaraman.

read the full article here