When Elizabeth Walder was a teenager, she wanted to be a professional musician. A clarinetist by trade, she would commute to New York City to play with the Juilliard pre-college orchestra and internationally in classical and ethnic ensembles.
Like most aspiring artists, the young Walder eventually reached a figurative fork in the road. “I had to decide whether I wanted to go into music,” she told me in an early August Zoom call. “And I saw that the pathways that were available were very narrow.”
Walder opted for law school and established a successful firm in Chicago focused on immigration law. Along the way, she married Dr. Joseph Walder, who, in the 1980s, founded a biotech company, Integrated DNA Technologies. Elizabeth joined the company’s board in 1999 and later served as its chief sustainability officer.
The Walders sold Integrated DNA Technologies in 2018 and used the proceeds to establish the Walder Foundation. Support from the Skokie, Illinois-based family foundation primarily flows to organizations and individuals in the Chicago metropolitan area through its five focus areas — science innovation, environmental sustainability, the performing arts, migration and immigrant communities, and Jewish life. Elizabeth is the foundation’s president and executive director.
Joseph passed away in March. About three months later, the foundation announced the inaugural winners of its Platform Awards. Drawn from Elizabeth’s experience as a talented musician who faced limited professional options, the prize, which is tied to the region’s living wage, provides 12 mid-career performing artists committed to living and working in Chicago with $67,000 in unrestricted funding per year over three years, for a whopping $200,000 in total per person, plus ongoing professional development and networking opportunities.
By aiming to build a more equitable and sustainable cultural sector in Chicago, the prize encapsulates the six-year-old foundation’s commitment to what Walder called “outsized philanthropy.”
“It’s the idea of punching above your weight,” she said. “We’re not billionaires, so we have to be strategic about how we allocate our funding, and that means seeing what a field is missing and building that infrastructure so that domain can move forward.”
Pivoting to more strategic giving
Like countless couples, the Walders were active philanthropists before Integrated DNA Technologies was sold in 2018. Support for the city’s Orthodox community was “the cornerstone of our philanthropy before we started the foundation,” Walder said. Joseph also founded Walder Science to galvanize Jewish students’ interest in science and helped establish Walder Education, which provides tools and resources to educators in Chicago’s Jewish schools.
While the couple had an extensive track record of giving, like many couples who decide to start a private foundation after exiting the private sector, they wanted to approach their burgeoning philanthropy from a more strategic vantage point. “We had always been giving in a reactive way,” Walder said. “We wanted the foundation to be a platform where you can envision the change you want and develop an approach for making it happen.”
Looking back on the foundation’s formative stages, Walder said she was “surprised as to why the nonprofit community hadn’t put together a Chicago guide to charitable giving to clarify the opportunities for funding” in its focus areas of science innovation, environmental sustainability, the performing arts, migration and immigrant communities.
And so the Walders hired staff and tasked them with creating regional landscape analyses for each area. “The idea,” Walder said, “was to find out what was happening in Chicago. What were other funders doing? Where could we be most impactful in our work?”
Developing an arts grantmaking strategy
Walder and her team’s efforts to get a lay of the land generated a set of interesting and surprising takeaways about the health of Chicago’s philanthropic sector.
For example, Walder noted that around 2019, some Chicago funders were exiting the performing arts and migration spaces. She also became intrigued by how some of the foundation’s peers developed signature investments with a fairly modest budget. “I was impressed by foundations achieving ‘outsized impact,’” she said. “Striving to achieve ‘outsized philanthropy’ in our grantmaking and awards programs is a hallmark of the Walder Foundation. The Platform Awards is a product of this philosophy.”
Walder pointed to another example of this mindset in practice, this time as it applies to an investment made by the Walders’ venture capital firm, Walder Ventures, that aligns with the foundation’s goal of advancing science innovation.
In February 2020, the Walders began conversations with John Flavin, the founder and CEO of life sciences venture capital firm Portal Innovations. Flavin told them that Chicago’s life sciences infrastructure suffered from a dearth of lab space, which prevented companies from setting up shop in the city. Seeking to remove this obstacle, Walder Ventures made an initial $5 million investment in Portal Innovations in late 2020.
Since its launch four years ago, Walder noted that Portal Innovations has brought 45 biotech companies to the Chicago area. “This is the example I like to share about ‘outsized philanthropy,’” Walder said. “We had an enormous impact in a very short period of time.”
This thinking extended to how the Walders approached their performing arts portfolio when, in 2019, senior program director of performing arts and operations Meg Leary came on board to help craft a strategy. A former opera singer who was previously the director of programs at United States Artists, a national funder that provides unrestricted grants to artists, Leary was deeply attuned to the needs of performing artists and the value of unrestricted support.
Leary kicked off the landscape analysis in 2019, tabled it during the pandemic as the foundation disbursed emergency relief grants, and restarted it in 2021. She and her team conducted focus groups, interviewed artists, foundations and nonprofit leaders, and partnered with the Chicago-based arts consultant Suzanne Callahan to develop the foundation’s performing arts program. (I previously interviewed Callahan for IP’s white papers on music, theater and dance.)
In 2023, the foundation put in place its performing arts strategy, consisting of three strategies and focus areas — “Thriving Artists & Creative Workers,” “Sustainable & Equitable Organizations” and “An Aligned & Collaborative Sector.” The foundation disbursed $22.5 million in grants in 2023.
Tying the Platform Awards to a living wage
The foundation’s launch of the Platform Awards selection process in May 2023 was a welcome and refreshing addition to the performing arts grantmaking conversation.
First and foremost, the awards provide artists with unrestricted support, which, as we frequently note, is something of a rarity in performing arts philanthropy. “The goal was always to create a program that provided unrestricted support,” Leary told me this month. “We also wanted to make sure that we were adding something to the existing support structure that’s available in Chicago.”
For example, the foundation backs organizations like 3Arts, MAP Fund and New Music USA, which provide artists with project-based and unrestricted funding. Rather than duplicate efforts, the Platform Awards sought to complement these programs by addressing a specific funding gap in Chicago’s performing arts ecosystem — the relative dearth of opportunities for mid-career artists.
But the contours of the award were also striking. Recipients are not required to use the funding to create a specific performance. Rather than take a national approach, the Platform Awards recognizes artists operating exclusively in the Chicago metropolitan area. And not only is the $200,000 grant award notably large; Leary and her team landed on the annual grant amount — $67,000 per year over three years — after tying it to an approximate living wage in Chicago for one person with a dependent. “The cost of living calculator changes a bit based on the zip code,” Leary said, “so we tried to find the average.”
By tying the award to a living wage for the city, the foundation hopes it will incentivize artists to stay in Chicago and expand and deepen their practice there. “We do have this perception of being ‘the Second City’ and that artists need to go to the coasts to thrive,” Leary said. “So what’s driven our performing arts strategy and the awards is to give artists opportunities to continue to live and make a living wage doing their work.”
Leary and her team have also rolled out professional development sessions for the award’s inaugural cohort. Topics have included how to manage finances, work with an agent and address health issues.
The foundation designed the Platform Awards as a triennial grant program, so it will issue the next call for nominations in 2026. Walder, meanwhile, said the foundation commissioned the creation of a guide designed to help donors interested in supporting Chicago as a welcoming region for immigrants and refugees. The guide, which the foundation will make available to the city’s grantmakers in the fall, hearkens back to the foundation’s early days, when the Walders noticed that the region’s migration and performing funders were exiting the space.
Ever the proponent of “outsized philanthropy,” Walder hopes the forthcoming migration guide and the Platform Awards inspire more funders to help make Chicago a welcoming place for newcomers and recognize the importance of supporting individual artists. “These are the things that I feel very passionate about,” she said.
