Elizabeth "Eli" Cole (she/her)
Director, Creative Schools Fund
Eli joined Ingenuity as in-house consultant in 2016 to oversee arts education grants in the Chicago Public Schools.
Outside of Ingenuity, her firm has engaged in sustainable growth planning with A Better Chicago grantees, led a collaborative project across the music sector to create a pipeline for under-represented students to attain professional orchestral seats, overseen efforts to launch universal interventions for every newborn in the City of Chicago, and worked to re-structure and fortify the public-private partnership of the State’s Early Learning Council. Eli is also an Adjunct Lecturer, teaching nonprofit management courses for undergraduates at Northwestern University.
From 2008-2012, Eli oversaw $40 million in annual grants to over 250 health and human service agencies as VP of Community Investments at United Way of Metropolitan Chicago. Eli also spent ten years at YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, ultimately leading that organization’s transformation to a focused ‘Model YWCA’ structure, with economic empowerment and racial justice programming in neighborhoods of greatest need across the metropolitan footprint. Eli has served on the board of the Apollo Chorus of Chicago, Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, and Center for New Community. She was one of Today’s Chicago Woman ‘Women to Watch’ in 2012.
Eli holds a BA with honors from Wellesley College, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Masters in English from the University of Chicago.
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Meaning likes to look in only one direction. It is as base and baseless to ask of a poem what does it mean as it is to ask the same question of life. Not what's the meaning, but where's the music?”"
—Dan Beachy-Quick, Of Silence and Song