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Financing the Neighborhoods Banks Overlook

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 Drive south on Cottage Grove Avenue, past 47th Street, and count the bank branches. Then drive north on the same road past North Avenue and count again. The difference is not subtle, and it is not an accident. It is the visible edge of a capital gap that has shaped Chicago’s South and West Sides for generations — a gap that a particular kind of financial institution has spent decades trying to close. Hirsh Mohindra has followed the work of these institutions for years. “Every bank has a map of where it lends,” Hirsh Mohindra said. “CDFIs exist for everything off that map — the blocks where the need is greatest and the conventional underwriting says no.” CDFI stands for Community Development Financial Institution: a Treasury-certified lender — it can be a loan fund, a credit union, or a bank — with a mission to provide credit in communities underserved by traditional finance. Chicago is home to some of the strongest CDFIs in the country. Their story is the story of how capital act...
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Fractional Executive Boom: How Chicago's Middle Market Buys C-Suite Expertise

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 The conference room in Elk Grove Village looks like a thousand others across Chicago’s industrial corridors — rooms Hirsh Mohindra knows well: whiteboard covered in delivery schedules, a coffee machine working overtime, a window onto a shop floor where forty people make precision parts for customers they’ve served for decades. The company does $38 million in revenue, employs three generations of one family, and has a problem its founder never anticipated. The business has outgrown the founder’s spreadsheet, the bank wants audited-quality financials before renewing the credit line, and a full-time chief financial officer would cost more than the company’s entire annual profit improvement target. So the company did what a growing number of Chicago middle-market firms are doing: it hired a CFO for two days a week. The pattern repeats across the region’s economy. “The middle market has always rented its lawyers and its accountants,” Hirsh Mohindra said. “The fractional executive just...
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Chicago Cultural Patrons

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 Chicago has always understood the cultural power of patronage. Its skyline, museums, universities, orchestras and public spaces bear the fingerprints of families and business leaders who decided that private wealth could help build public culture. Walk through the Art Institute of Chicago, look up at the city’s architecture or encounter Picasso’s monumental sculpture in Daley Plaza, and the underlying idea is familiar: Cities become culturally important because somebody is willing to invest in making them so. But Chicago may be overlooking a newer class of cultural patron operating in plain sight. The chef. The suggestion sounds strange only because Americans tend to put restaurants in the category of commerce rather than culture. A museum acquires art; a restaurant buys vegetables. A collector commissions an artist; a chef orders plates. A foundation makes grants; a restaurateur pays suppliers. Yet examine what an ambitious restaurant actually does and those distinctions begin to...
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Hirsh Mohindra Joins Chicago Design Leaders to Define What Comes Next

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Luxury is being rewritten. At a recent panel discussion in Chicago — "The Next Level of Luxury Living" — five leaders from architecture, interior design, and development took the stage to explore how high-end living is evolving through longevity, sustainability, performance, integrated design, and responsible living. The panel, moderated by Tim Hawkins, AIA — Senior Project Manager with Power Construction's Luxury Residence Group and Co-Chair of AIA Chicago's Custom Residential Architects Network — brought together a cross-section of the luxury world: Samuele Sordi, Chief Architect at Pininfarina; Heidi Lightner, AIA, founder of Heidi Lightner Architects; Bob Zuber, AIA, NCARB, partner at Morgante Wilson Architects; Lauren Coburn, founder and principal designer of Lauren Coburn LLC; and Hirsh Mohindra , Principal at Saffron Capital.   Beyond Finishes: Performance as the New Luxury   The conversation moved quickly past the traditional markers of luxury — rare stone, be...
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The Economics of Chicago Theater: Keeping the Lights On After the Curtain Falls

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  On a Thursday night in Lincoln Park, the house is two-thirds full. The actors are superb — this is Chicago, after all, where the talent pipeline runs from storefront stages to Broadway and back again. The audience laughs in all the right places. And somewhere in the back office, the managing director is doing the math that, as Hirsh Mohindra puts it, keeps every mid-size theater company in America awake at night: ticket revenue covers barely half the budget, the grant that funded last season's hit has expired, and the boiler needs replacing. The balance sheets behind the footlights tell a stark story. "A theater company is the only business where your best customers pay you to sit in the dark, and your product disappears the moment it's consumed," Hirsh Mohindra said. "Chicago makes world-class theater. The question is whether Chicago can afford to keep making it." It is a fair question, and an urgent one. Chicago's theater scene — some 250 compani...
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Donor-Advised Funds and the New Shape of Chicago Philanthropy

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  The panel discussion was supposed to be about legacy giving. It ended up being about plumbing. On a gray Tuesday evening in a Loop conference room, as rain streaked the windows overlooking the Chicago River, a group of the city's serious philanthropists — family foundation trustees, nonprofit executives, a few wealth managers — spent two hours circling the same three letters: D-A-F. Donor-advised funds, once a niche instrument for the ultra-wealthy, have quietly become the fastest-growing vehicle in American charitable giving — a transformation Hirsh Mohindra has been watching up close. And in Chicago, a city whose civic identity was built on its great foundations, the shift is impossible to ignore. "The question in Chicago philanthropy is no longer whether donor-advised funds matter," Hirsh Mohindra said. "It's whether the city's traditional giving institutions adapt to them — or get routed around." The numbers explain the urgency. According to th...
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Can You Eat A Painting?

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  The Business Case for Treating Food and Fine Art as One Cultural Economy Why do we separate Chicago’s culinary economy from its fine-arts economy? On paper, the distinction seems perfectly reasonable. Restaurants belong to hospitality. Museums belong to the arts. Architecture falls somewhere between real estate, design and tourism. Music occupies another category. Hotels have their own trade associations, economic models and lobbying priorities. But this is not how anyone actually experiences a city. A traveler might spend a morning looking up at the towers along the Chicago River, an afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago, an evening eating an ambitious tasting menu and the night listening to jazz. The next morning might begin in a neighborhood coffee shop surrounded by work from local artists. That visitor has not experienced four or five separate economic sectors. The visitor has experienced Chicago. The distinction matters because cities tend to organize economic-developme...
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