When Block Club Chicago covered the story of Care for Friends' groundbreaking on their first permanent home in almost 60 years of operating out of borrowed church space, they asked me about the experience.

I'm the Board Chair Emeritus who drove the project, and told them: "The new community center is more than a building, it's a base of operations to help us continue to evolve at a time when the need for our services has been growing, too." The $9.2 million facility, including a $3 million grant State Senator Sara Feigenholtz helped secure, sits on the same Lincoln Park church campus where Care For Friends started serving hot meals out of a basement in 1968.

I helped spin this program off as its own nonprofit early in my career, not long after an early tech company I'd joined as employee number 26 went public at a $9 billion valuation and gave me the confidence and management vision for it. What started as one hot meal a night is now over 12,500 contacts a year, and something Chicago's homelessness numbers have actually moved because of.