EnFocus: the fellowship corporation the city's institutions built together

Launched May 2012 — the newest form in this section: imported talent as civic infrastructure

The founding: enFocus was launched in May 2012 out of a diagnosis shared by the University of Notre Dame and the city's civic leadership: South Bend was spending its economic-development energy on outside employers while its own graduates left. The mechanism was new to this section's record — a fellowship corporation. Notre Dame's ESTEEM program and the city's business leaders recruited entrepreneurial graduates to stay: the first cohort, seven ESTEEM graduates hired in August 2012, went to work as fellows inside eight sponsoring institutions — the City of South Bend, Transpo and Memorial Hospital among them — on the sponsors' hardest operational problems. A South Bend native, Andrew Wiand, co-founded the organization and became its executive director. In December 2013 Lilly Endowment gave $3 million to Notre Dame in support of the program — the endowment-scale gift that converted an experiment into an institution; the first year's fellows identified $3.2 million in savings for their sponsoring institutions, more than paying the model's way in its own accounting.

The course: A decade on, enFocus's own tenth-anniversary accounting counts more than 450 projects completed, thirty-two fellows and five full-time staff, with about 70 percent of its fellows remaining in the region — the retention rate being the entire point. The corporation became part of the region's research-and-development machinery, partnering in the LIFT Network work that followed Lilly Endowment's $42 million regional grant. It is included at full survey size in this section because it is the newest civic form the record offers: where the twentieth century's answer was an association (1909) and the rebuilding era's answer was a development corporation (1974), the twenty-first century's was a talent corporation — a nonprofit whose product is the people it keeps.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, ESTEEM program (esteem.nd.edu) — enFocus launched in May 2012 by Notre Dame, the City of South Bend and area business leaders; the first seven fellows and eight partner organizations (City of South Bend, Transpo, Memorial Hospital among them); Lilly Endowment's $3 million gift of December 2013; the $3.2 million of first-year identified savings.
2. Notre Dame Magazine — Andrew Wiand, South Bend native, co-founder and executive director; the $3 million grant "in 2013" (the magazine styles the giver the Eli Lilly Foundation; the university's program account names Lilly Endowment, which governs).
3. South Bend Regional Chamber magazine, spring–summer 2022, and Inspiring Good — enFocus at ten years: 450+ projects, 32 fellows, five staff, ~70% regional retention; the LIFT Network partnership.