President & CEO, The Cara Program
Eric Weinheimer, '94, is president and CEO of The Cara Program, which helps people with significant employment barriers—including low levels of education, a dearth of work experience, and in some cases, criminal records—identify sustainable work and housing opportunities, and a path to self-sufficiency. Weinheimer received Chicago Booth's 2012 Distinguished Public Service/Public Sector Alumni Award.
Eric Weinheimer, ’94, worked in banking for ten years before he was presented with an opportunity to pursue mission-driven work as executive director of The Cara Program.
“The organization was started by a philanthropist named Tom Owens, who got to know Mother Teresa of Calcutta and wanted to help the poor here in Chicago,” Weinheimer says. “He started The Cara Program and was looking for an executive director who was going to bring the business disciplines to the non-profit sector.”
An analytical approach to social business
Weinheimer did just that. He and his team, which includes two other Booth graduates, are applying values of critical thinking and analysis to present data on social impact in a completely new way. “Investors and funders are expecting more, are demanding more of the quantitative measurements,” Weinheimer says. “That’s something we’ve been doing for 17 years, so we have the infrastructure in place, we have the people in place, we have the culture that we’ve established, and much of it came from Booth.”
Determining social return on investment
The culture that Weinheimer describes is heavily steeped in data analysis, but on a much deeper level than most nonprofits. The Cara Program does measure basic statistical data: the nonprofit receives 1200 referrals a year; accepts 550 people; and places 270 in permanent jobs and 200 in transitional jobs. The average wage of the permanent jobs is $11.25 an hour, and 75 percent of the people placed in permanent jobs remain employed for at least one year.
Weinheimer’s team, though, goes beyond the traditional metrics, using data to answer the question: what is the social return on investment (SROI)? “This is a relatively new measurement for our sector. As philanthropists are getting a little bit more sophisticated, they’re looking for SROI. The challenge is that there are no generally accepted principles for how it’s measured, no vetting process, so we reached out to companies like Deloitte and organizations like Chapin Hall to create it, review it, and vet it.” By delving deep into numbers that tell the story of not only The Cara Program’s successes but the ways that those victories affect society at large, Weinheimer’s team strives to understand the deeper, long-term affects on society. They were able to determine that every dollar invested in The Cara Program returns $5.44 to society. This figure includes contributions to society by program participants and savings due to reduced public assistance, not just number of jobs and average wage. “For so long, investors have been moved and inspired by the good that is achieved. They’re willing to invest in organizations that are doing good work for a good cause, but investors are becoming more savvy and asking, at the end of the day, ‘Am I having an impact?’ I think we’re getting better as a sector, people are asking hard questions, but what complicates this work is that the heart is involved, not just the head.” Weinheimer said doing good and feeling good about it is critically important, but the Chicago Approach can help the social sector better emphasize qualitative change while proving impact through quantitative measures, adding, “I think that’s the unique value proposition of SEI.”