UW Major: Sociology
President, Lefkofsky Family Foundation
In 2015, videos began to appear online of teenagers across the United States giving checks for $1,000 to people in need. The money came from an anonymous project called VING, and celebrities and national news helped to spread the word. Eventually, in order to reassure pandemic-era recipients that the money was legitimate, the founder agreed to reveal herself.
VING’s mysterious benefactor turned out to be philanthropist Liz Lefkofsky, which in hindsight didn’t surprise anyone in Chicago’s nonprofit circles. A decade and more than 1,000 gifts later, VING is still going strong — and Lefkofsky still watches every tearjerker video of teens presenting gifts to special adults in their lives who are experiencing financial challenges.
That single project would have been more than enough to cement Lefkofsky’s reputation as a uniquely generous donor. Yet VING is only one of several core initiatives that she leads at the Lefkofsky Family Foundation, which she established with husband Eric Lefkofsky, a tech entrepreneur.
One of their most impactful is the Success Bound program for middle-school students, which is a research-informed curriculum that prioritizes self-exploration and skills to help students build the social capital, awareness, and life goals to succeed in high school, college, and beyond. After the 2024–25 school year, Success Bound will be fully integrated into every public middle school in Chicago, and the foundation is currently piloting the curriculum in several schools nationwide.
The foundation’s priorities stem from Lefkofsky’s perspective that “small moves” can have a big impact over time. As a philanthropist, she’s most interested in filling overlooked gaps and helping smart people with good ideas experiment to see what works.
It’s a vision that evolved from watching her own mother cofound the American Brain Tumor Association in the early 1970s, after Lefkofsky’s older sister died from a tumor in her brain stem. “From the earliest time I can remember, my mom was sitting at the table putting together these Christmas card brochures, and we would all sit around the table stuffing envelopes,” she says. “Our family business was raising money for brain-tumor research.”
However, nonprofit work didn’t immediately call to Lefkofsky after college. Instead, she moved to Colorado to sell lift tickets for a year and eventually gravitated toward hospitality and event planning. She returned to her hometown of Chicago and eased back into fundraising efforts for good causes, including for brain-tumor research. For several years, she worked at the Near South Planning Board and directed the Printers Row Book Fair, which later led to an invitation to become the special project director at a youth-arts program called Gallery 37.
When Lefkofsky and her husband decided to move to the suburbs to raise their children, they decided the time was also right to launch a family foundation, in 2006. Lefkofsky’s original interest was to improve educational outcomes in Chicago’s public schools, and the foundation has since expanded to a broad portfolio of medical, arts, and human-rights grants.
And just as her mother did for her, Lefkofsky involves her children in the foundation’s efforts, in the hopes of sparking a deep passion in all of them to make a difference. “I have no doubt that what the foundation will look like in five or six years will be really different, because there'll be three new lanes of interest for us, from our three kids,” she says.
