Give and Let Give

When his third-grade teacher asked students to submit potential storylines for an upcoming class play, a young Graham Grady knew exactly what to write. 

“When the postman would come down the street, I would run outside and interrogate him: How many houses do you deliver to? Can I push the cart? And where do you get the rubber bands?” recalls Grady of his obsession with airmail, zip codes, trucks and all other things mail. “I’ve just always been enthralled by the postal system, going back to Benjamin Franklin.”

The teacher didn’t choose Grady’s idea, centered around the Pony Express. But a decade ago, when a mentor called and offered him a spot of his choosing on one of the Smithsonian’s Advisory Boards, Grady went with the National Postal Museum. He still sits on that board—and about a dozen others for civic and nonprofit organizations. “It’s probably too many for any sane person,” he says with a laugh, noting that he has previously volunteered for another dozen. “I think it’s a bit of a sickness … much to my law partners’ chagrin.”

Volunteering is in Grady’s DNA. Both of his parents were active in community organizations and with their church. Grady’s first taste of nonprofit work came in the mid-1990s when, after law school, he joined the board at YMCA Camp Pinewood in western Michigan, which the native Chicagoan had attended in his youth. The organizations he currently serves as a director for include: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, public television and radio stations WTTW and WFMT, the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and AAREP Chicago, an African-American real estate professional organization Grady founded in 2018.

Prioritizing one organization over another is like picking a favorite child, Grady says. But the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, for which he is board chair, is undeniably close to his heart. Since Grady joined the board in 2008, it has granted approximately $170 million to local nonprofits dedicated to improving educational outcomes, arts programs, and job readiness for students in the city’s public schools. 

Recently paying a site visit to one of the Fry Foundation’s community violence intervention grantees, Grady viewed a rap music video created by teens facing some harsh realities. “I came away hopeful that even these youth who face so many challenges—single-parent households, drugs, crime, poverty, mental health issues—could be so positive,” he says. “I work in a big steel-and-glass building in downtown Chicago, so getting out and being involved with some of my organizations helps keep me grounded and also helps keep me with a great sense of gratitude.”

Volunteering not only keeps the corporate real estate attorney in touch with civic and government leaders, it places him in the communities where some of his clients’ projects take place. More importantly, Grady says, “I serve because it gives me great joy to be involved with organizations that are making a difference in the lives of people who are in need.”

Devoting so much time to nonprofit groups is “both exhausting and energizing simultaneously,” says Grady, whose role at Taft has increasingly, and deliberately, become more strategic and less hands-on. To take care of himself and avoid burnout, Grady bikes to work every day. “But I also find a sense of renewal in the nonprofit work. When you work side by side with other people who are well-intentioned, who share similar perspectives and goals, it makes it easier.”

To fellow attorneys trying to figure out how to juggle volunteering with a busy legal practice, he says to focus on one or two issues that matter to you. “What do you care about? Homelessness, domestic violence, the environment, social justice, women’s rights—we have no shortage of need for improvement in our country. Lawyers are intelligent, well-educated, hardworking people, and it’s a good thing if they devote some of their energy to making the world around them a better place.

“I could make a lot more money if I were to put 100 percent of my energy into practicing law, which I greatly enjoy,” he continues. “Being a corporate real estate attorney is what I do, but it’s not who I am.”