We have finished Idea to Impact, and we came out of it with the thing we most needed: a plan specific enough to put a price on.

When we started, Southside Life House was a conviction and a building. The conviction was that a pregnant woman on the South Side should be able to keep her baby without losing her housing. The building was the 1875 convent on our campus — ours, paid for, and empty above the first floor.

What we did not have was the middle. How many apartments. In what order. At what cost. Who staffs it, and what a resident's year actually looks like from the day she moves in.

Idea to Impact made us answer those questions out loud, in front of people who had no reason to be polite about the answers. That was the value of it.

What we can now say plainly

• Fifteen apartments, phased — not fifteen at once.
• Roughly $5.5 million to finish the construction, based on general contractor pricing rather than our own guesswork.
• No mortgage on the building, so every dollar raised goes into the work itself.
• One apartment open now, with a resident in it, while the rest is built.

That last point matters more than it sounds. We could have waited for the whole building. Instead the pilot apartment opened in March, which means the program is not a proposal anymore — it is something we are already doing, at small scale, and learning from while the drawings sit ready.

If you want the full picture of what is built, what is priced and what is left, it is on The Building Project.