August/September Spotlight: Good Chaos

Good Chaos is a new Chicago-based family office spun out of Builders Vision, a broader impact platform. With a geographic focus on Chicago and rural places across 12 Midwestern states, our team works across philanthropic grantmaking, impact investing, and narrative shift work. Over the past 4 years, we have dedicated our resources to artists, creatives and culture bearers, mothers and caretakers, underestimated entrepreneurs, and farmed animals. 

While we’ve been working deeply with more than 100 partners focused on and led by Chicago’s artists, we also began with the understanding of how few philanthropic resources touch rural places - in the arts and in general. We’ve been honored to partner with and learn from almost 20 rural, artist-driven projects testing new models, and imagining radically different futures. For example, Good Chaos was an early supporter of the Waterers, a “conduit of giving disrupting the philanthropic space”, redistributing funds through grassroots assemblies of BIPOC artists and culture bearers across MN, ND, SD and 23 adjacent Native Nations. We provided early investment for the Department of Public Transformation’sIgnite Rural “at home” artist residency program, which uplifts early stage BIPOC and Native rural artists and culture bearers that engage in social / civic work in places with populations less than 20,000. And we’re supporting Wormfarm – a national leader in rural placemaking that brings together farming, conservation and the arts in rural WI – to lead programs fostering rural / urban creative exchange and testing shared, community ownership models around real assets.

Good Chaos is spending 2024 planning for the future. We hope to support new models and ideas, get behind good trouble-makers, join with unexpected partners, and support systems change, connecting resources to people, ideas and networks for the benefit of the communities within our special region. 

You can learn more about Good Chaos on the photo credits page.