Mary Jo Schuler met her husband Stephen in pre-school at the Longfellow Park Recreation Center in the 1960s.
“I tell people he was chasing me a long time,” says Schuler, 48, a 1980 graduate of Oak Park and River Forest High School.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago when the Park District of Oak Park received a grant from the Kellogg Foundation (through the Oak Park Community Foundation’s Access to Recreation Endowment) to make the new Longfellow Park playground universally accessible.
They were $35,000 short of the funds needed to complete the project, recalls Gary Balling, executive director of the park district. So he put in a call to David Weindling at the Community Foundation, who sent out an e-mail.
Less than an hour later, Balling heard from Schuler’s Good Heart/Work Smart Foundation, offering $35,000.
“But that’s just the start of the story,” says Balling.
A week later, he showed Schuler the master plan for Longfellow Park. What’s that little box attached to the end of the rec center? she asked. Balling explained that the master plan involved long-range thinking, and they hoped someday to put in an elevator.
Two hundred thousand dollars later, Balling says, “we have a new elevator at the Longfellow Park Rec Center.”
Turns out, Schuler not only had a soft spot in her heart for Longfellow. She also has a niece born with cerebral palsy.
“She has been a special gift in our life,” Schuler says, “and she turned us into advocates.”
For the park district, it seems, what goes around, comes around.
“That’s never happened in my career before,” said Balling, adding that Schuler has also been “a very good friend to the West Suburban Special Recreation Association and the Oak Park Conservatory.”
In fact, he testifies, “there aren’t too many things in this community that Good Heart/Work Smart isn’t involved in in some way.”
Schuler’s first venture into philanthropy came after her sister, Andrea Hall, an electrician, was killed in a workplace accident in 1996. One of nine siblings, “all of whom played field hockey,” said Schuler, the family decided to donate funds for the scoreboard that now stands on OPRF’s South Field.
She practices what she calls “venture philanthropy,” which she describes as “new-age donors who want to invest their philanthropic dollars in a manner that positively impacts the delivery of services and the advancement of organizations and people. Stephen and I don’t give philanthropically to feel warm and fuzzy inside, but to impact change and contribute to a vibrant community.”
Those values, she says, were forged growing up on the south side of Oak Park – in her case, the 800 block of South Kenilworth, a block known for its strong sense of community. In fact, the block still holds an elaborate neighborhood parade and block party on July 4.
“We saw the examples of our parents and neighbors engaged in social justice advocacy and community service,” she recalls. “That was a constant element of our experience growing up in south Oak Park. The community taught us to live this way.”
She and her husband also learned to work hard and enjoy the intensity of taking on several projects at once – work, in other words, that is “kind of like play.”
After earning her Ph.D. in higher education at St. Louis University, she planned a career in university-level administration. Her last post was dean of students at Triton College, which she left in 1999, “supposedly for two years,” to help her husband, who was leaving the Chicago Board of Trade start his own company, GETCO (Global Electronic Trading Company).
“Starting up a new business is 24/7, year after year after year,” Schuler says. In other words, more than two. “You get caught up in the cycle and it’s hard to leave until you feel some sense of stability.” Eleven years later, the company has 300 employees and offices in Chicago, London, New York and Singapore.
She never did get back to academia but still feels the same sense of mission about “serving young people and helping them get on the right path.” She does that now through Good Heart/Work Smart, which she started in 2005.
“Stephen and I benefited tremendously from youth programming,” Schuler says, citing the YMCA, park district, and public schools, “while growing up in Oak Park. We want to help perpetuate those opportunities for others.”
One of those opportunities is West Suburban Tennis Patrons at the Oak Park Tennis Center, where the Schulers are season passholders. The program introduces tennis to kids from Maywood and the West Side of Chicago.
“It encourages them to work hard and believe in themselves,” she says. “A busy kid is a happy kid.”
Schuler also took on the task of overseeing the overhaul of their 1885 Victorian on North Euclid Avenue. That experience gave her the confidence to tackle a much larger project when Eric Larson, owner of the Marion Street Cheese Market, invited her to become partner and co-owner of an ambitious expansion of the business.
“I felt I had an adequate toolbox for taking on the challenge,” she says. “Turns out there’s about a five percent transfer of knowledge to building a full-scale commercial operation in a new-construction building.”
Mixed-use developments (commercial spaces in residential buildings), she says, are “a new area of engagement in our community. We learned the hard way.” She includes the village and the build-out team in that assessment.
“We all put our heads together,” she noted. “When you approve a 5,000-square-foot commercial space under condominiums, you need adequate accommodations for that commercial space.”
The outcome, she says, was “a very positive thing for the community, the Opera Club property owners and the other businesses in the South Marion district. We believed our community would embrace an expanded Cheese Market, and they certainly have. We now have over 50 employees because the demand is there. We’re busy generating tax revenue, supporting local producers, and customers love it.”
Contrary to the complaints one sometimes hears about working with the village building department, Schuler says that during the 10 years she has been involved in construction in Oak Park, “I have always found them very helpful and skilled in helping us complete our projects.”
Though Schuler isn’t directly involved in day-to-day operations, she still stays in touch as a member of the “strategic leadership team,” which meets weekly.
“I vividly remember the first day she walked into the original Marion Street Cheese Market,” recalls Eric Larson. “She turned to the friend she was with and said, ‘This is exactly the type of store that Oak Park needs more of.'”
Two years later, Larson broached the idea of an expanded market that would include a bistro and wine bar.
“We both hold the strong belief that a local business really is a vital part of the fabric of the community, creating jobs, helping charities, serving as a place for people to relax and enjoy themselves – a true community resource.”
They became partners in 2006. Larson describes Schuler as “incredibly focused on the job at hand. … Essentially she served as the overall project manager and did an amazing job. She and I both wanted to do a build-out that was environmentally sustainable, and many of the design decisions were made with that goal in mind. She wanted to create an environment for our guests that was warm, calming and relaxing, and I feel she accomplished that goal.”
Her latest enterprise is Greenline Wheels, a shop that rents bikes and electric vehicles to residents and tourists. The name refers partly to her family’s interest in environmental stewardship and partly to its location, 105 S. Marion St., which is close to the CTA Green Line station.
The business uses the new L3C corporate structure, whose purpose, according to Schuler is to “fill the continental divide between for-profit and non-profit entities.”
In this case, the Good Heart/Work Smart Foundation owns 75 percent, while the managing partner, Tom Olis, a “green” entrepreneur and River Forest resident, who is responsible for achieving an economically sustainable operation, owns the other 25 percent.
Schuler credits her kids with the idea’s inception, describing them as “keen on being good stewards of the environment.” But they were also responding to mom’s reluctance to let them randomly cycle around town. To address that, they developed designated tour loops through the historic districts and cultural attractions in Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park.
She’s also hoping the business gives the village further impetus to implement the recently adopted bike network plan, which Schuler strongly supports.
Greenline Wheels hopes to coordinate with the school districts, the YMCA and Youth Baseball/Softball and anyone else “to promote bike safety in the village.”
Schuler was delighted that a family from Quebec, Canada was the first online reservation they received. A grand opening is planned for Friday, Aug. 20 at 11 a.m.
Among her other involvements, Schuler has helped lead fundraising efforts for initiatives like the Oak Park-River Forest Community Works Campaign, which she co-chairs with Marty Noll of Community Bank and Ralph Mandell of The Private Bank. If they can raise $2 million by September of 2011, the Grand Victoria Foundation will match those dollars. They’ve raised $900,000 to date.
“The campaign has three goals,” Schuler says, “the success of all youth, environmental sustainability and developing emerging leaders. Not-for-profit entities who are engaged in these areas will be eligible to apply for funding.”
The economic downturn the last two years doesn’t seem to have slowed down her venture philanthropy. She is one of the investors, for instance, in the Madison Highlands development proposal and says there should be news on that front within a few weeks.
“Creating rewarding, challenging job opportunities for people is fun for me,” she says. “I enjoy the quarterback role, helping people work together to build something highly functional and aesthetically pleasing. As long as the capital is available to build and there’s a need – and I can sell it to my husband – I’ll keep building.”
