The Billion-Dollar Blind Spot: How Two Chicago Founders Built Nearly $1B in Community Impact

Two of Chicago’s most accomplished social enterprise founders, Leon Walker IV (DL3 Realty) and Nicole Chavas (Greenprint Partners), have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in community economic impact across real estate development and green infrastructure. Yet the impact investing community rarely recognizes firms like theirs as social enterprises. This Collaborative Forum challenges that blind spot. Through practitioner-led dialogue, Leon and Nicole will share the innovative capital models that enabled their scale, the community outcomes their work has produced, and why expanding our definition of social enterprise is one of the most urgent equity and prosperity questions in impact investing today.