Liz Dozier

Chicago, Illinois

Founder & CEO
Chicago Beyond

To appreciate the salience of Liz Dozier’s work at Chicago Beyond, the privately funded organization she founded in 2016, you have to first revisit her previous life as principal of Fenger High School, once renowned among the most violent and long-failing schools in Chicago. Dozier’s assignment as its then-newly installed leader: Fix it. Fix the abysmal 47% graduation rate, fix the instances of student arrests — around 300 a year — and fix the number of dropouts, which, at the time, hovered around 19%.

To do that, Dozier and her team built more intentional, proximate relationships with students and families to understand the challenges and traumas they experienced outside of school. They replaced harsh discipline with restorative justice practices, academic interventions, social-emotional learning, and mental health and wellness strategies. In six years, from 2009–2015, Dozier led Fenger from academic impoverishment to a holistic ecosystem of healing, inclusivity and excellence. Graduation rates rocketed to 80%, dropouts plummeted to less than 2%, and arrests became rare.

A lifelong educator, Dozier saw the opportunity to apply her real-world learning and experience to help entire communities overcome inequity. She launched Chicago Beyond to invest philanthropic dollars into innovative ideas and scalable programs that improve the quality of life for young people, always working hand-in-hand with community partners to realize their goals and make them more expansive.

To date as CEO, Dozier has invested more than $47 million to strengthen communities of color in Chicago, from co-creating the Healing-Centered Framework that supports 330,000 public school students to launching the Holistic Healing Fund, a $10 million commitment to Black and brown leaders and organizations who work to reverse the harm of gun violence, systemic racism, trauma and disinvestment. — Janelle Harris Dixon