Promoting pathways to opportunity

Chicago Connected works to provide access to the internet to those most in need and has become a model for similar initiatives across the country.
The ability to fulfill your potential should depend on your commitment, not your circumstances. We identify on-ramps to opportunity—and break down barriers to achievement.

Our Impact Stories

Closing the Digital Divide

The internet is a gateway to opportunity. In-home connectivity enables people to further their education, pursue jobs, and access healthcare. But all that remains out of reach for the 18 million American households that can’t afford to get online.

Griffin Catalyst continues to be at the forefront of efforts to close the digital divide. In partnership with local nonprofits, the City of Chicago, and Chicago Public Schools, we helped create the Chicago Connected initiative to provide fast, free internet to over 100,000 students across the city. Based on its success, we convened and funded a similar effort in Miami and supported EducationSuperHighway’s national campaign to ensure that no home is left offline.

Creating Safe Environments for People to Pursue their Dreams

People thrive when their communities are safe. That’s one of the reasons reducing crime is a critical priority and why we’ve partnered with community-based organizations and researchers, including the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

We are bringing better training, technology, and data into policing to help deploy officers more effectively and helping to launch the Community Safety Leadership Academies to train rising police and community leaders from across the nation. Our goal: reduce violence while improving relations between the police and the communities they serve.

400K+

People connected to free internet at home through Chicago Connected and Miami Connected

32%

Reduction in shootings one month after the first Strategic Decision Support Center was established in Chicago’s neighborhoods with the highest rates of violent crime

48%

Decrease in violent-crime arrests among youth in Choose to Change’s intensive, trauma-informed programming in Chicago

Claiborne Wade, a member of Kids First Chicago's Parent Advisory Board and a longtime parent leader with the group, with his wife Philloniece, Howard and their four children: Chloe, Connor, Serenity, and Stacey.
Photo Credit: Kids First Chicago
When everyone's voice is at the table, it will take us further than we've ever been before.
CLAIBORNE WADE
Kids First Chicago, Parent Advisory Board Member, Chicago
Claiborne Wade, a member of Kids First Chicago's Parent Advisory Board and a longtime parent leader with the group, with his wife Philloniece, Howard and their four children: Chloe, Connor, Serenity, and Stacey.
Photo Credit: Kids First Chicago

Featured Partners

Our partner organizations are doing vital work to enable upward mobility. We’re proud to support them.

In Brief

June 30, 2020
Griffin Catalyst has made the largest gift in the history of the Navy SEAL Foundation, to provide critical education, health care, and financial support to members of one of the U.S. military’s most elite special operations forces and their families.
September 8, 2023
In 2022, Griffin Catalyst joined with partners to support the Organs Initiative, a coalition leveraging data to drive change with broad bipartisan support. The challenge: To fix a broken, inefficient organ donation system that leads to tens of thousands of healthy organs going unrecovered each year and contributes to 30 Americans dying every day for lack of an available organ. In August 2022, the group achieved the first major overhaul of the organ donation system in 40 years, projected to save over 7,000 lives annually. Almost a year later, in July 2023, Congress unanimously passed legislation to break up
May 31, 2024
Launched in 2023, the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority leverages the power of competition and innovation to support start-ups, scale solutions to local problems, and improve lives.
October 28, 2024
Griffin Catalyst provided a seed gift of $2.5 million to accelerate the efforts of Feng Zhang, a faculty member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, to develop “programmable therapeutics,” an approach that holds promise for revolutionizing medicine by reprogramming cells to cure a wide range of human diseases.
August 30, 2024
Since 2023, Griffin Catalyst has announced transformative gifts to three major health care institutions in Miami. Taken together, the support—totaling $125 million—represents an investment in the future of medical care and research in South Florida.
May 23, 2024
To pay tribute to the nation's most distinguished military heroes—and to unite our country around the values their stories represent—Griffin Catalyst is supporting the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation with a $30 million gift. The National Medal of Honor Griffin Institute is a key component of a three-pronged, $300 million effort that also includes a new museum in Arlington, Texas, and a new monument in Washington, D.C.
May 20, 2024
In December 2023, Griffin Catalyst and the David Geffen Foundation announced a gift of $400 million to New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), one of the most renowned and advanced cancer research and treatment institutions in the world. This landmark gift—the largest donation to the institution in its nearly 150-year history—will allow MSK to significantly expand and upgrade its research, educational, and treatment facilities toward a singular goal: eradicating cancer.
February 12, 2024
The Lincoln Memorial has long been one of America’s most visited monuments and the scene of some of the defining moments of the last century. In time for the 250th anniversary of the country, a new expansion project will transform a massive, long-hidden space beneath the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall into an immersive museum, exhibition, and theater space, encouraging visitors to explore the story of one of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, and to learn about the nation’s progress toward becoming a more perfect union.
December 27, 2023
The success of Operation Warp Speed in 2020, which brought forth an effective COVID-19 vaccine in less than twelve months, was not only a scientific breakthrough but also a demonstration of the power of an approach called an advanced market commitment (AMC). By creating a demand so that pharmaceutical companies could invest in production prior to proving the efficacies of vaccines, this successful approach accelerated time to market and highlighted the opportunity for a class of similar “market-shaping tools” to accelerate progress. To expand this approach, Griffin Catalyst and Schmidt Futures have partnered with the University of Chicago to launch

News & Announcements