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‘A force of nature’: How nonprofit founder Connor Schoen, 26, bought a downtown office building
Connor Schoen, the leader of homelessness nonprofit Breaktime, engineered a $6.3 million deal to purchase the five-story building at 63 Franklin St.
Imagine being 26 years old, at the start of your career, and figuring out how to buy an office building in the middle of downtown Boston for your fast-growing nonprofit.
The improbable scenario is all too real for Connor Schoen, who in December engineered one of the most surprising real estate deals in the city: a $6.3 million purchase of a five-story building on Franklin Street for the nonprofit he leads, Breaktime.
Schoen’s social entrepreneurship quickly became the talk of the town. Nonprofit executives and philanthropic leaders reached out to him about what they could learn from the deal, and whether they, too, could invest in downtown at a time when office building values have plummeted. For Breaktime and other nonprofits that might follow its lead, owning instead of leasing provides some control over their destiny.
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To understand how Schoen pulled off something that many established nonprofits have been unable to do, it helps to know his background.
Schoen is the youngest of three brothers, his mom a corporate recruiter and his dad an IT project manager. At age 14, he was selected for Project 351, a Boston nonprofit that taps eighth-graders across the state to take on social missions within their communities. For Schoen, that meant being the lead wrangler for clothing donations in his hometown of Westborough for Cradles to Crayons, a Newton nonprofit that distributes supplies to families in need. He stuck with that volunteer work through high school.
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As a Harvard freshman, he volunteered for a homeless shelter for young adults in Cambridge, a time that proved to be an important inflection point: Schoen said he came out as pansexual, as he was “figuring out my sexuality, my identity,” and was inspired by the challenges that the young adults at the shelter faced, many of them LGBTQ+.
“They were so brave and authentic about who they were,” Schoen said. “Working at the shelter was life-changing.”
It was there that Schoen and Tony Shu, a like-minded Harvard student, came up with the idea for Breaktime. Assisting young adults with getting and keeping a job, their thinking went, would go a long way toward helping people achieve housing security. They were still teenagers — Schoen was 19 and Shu, 18 — when they launched Breaktime in 2018, initially to open a cafe in Boston’s West End where homeless young adults could work.
Schoen “dove in headfirst and never looked back,” Shu recalled.
To focus his energies on Breaktime, Schoen structured his class schedule to graduate from Harvard in three years, in 2020. Shu and Schoen lined up permits to open their cafe on Portland Street. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
They quickly pivoted to plan B: scrapping the cafe idea in favor of a job-training platform involving a variety of employers. The trainees, referred to as “associates,” go through three weeks of job readiness and life skills training, and then they’re placed in three-month work or internship opportunities, with matches set up by Breaktime.
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Schoen’s parents became an important support system in the early months of the pandemic, as he returned home to Westborough for that time. They talked during daily walks with the family dog, Sammy, and helped him brainstorm and troubleshoot during Breaktime’s pivot.
“I wasn’t fitting into the vision of what other people expect, graduating from Harvard,” Schoen said. “It’s not the normal path. But my parents turned that into something I should be proud of.”
At first, Schoen recalls, it was hard to be taken seriously, as a new college graduate asking well-heeled donors for money.
“A lot of people thought, ‘It’s great he has the energy and the creativity, but he’s not going to stick with it,’” Schoen said. “I had to prove it.”
The forced pivot helped. Grant money began to flow from foundations. As the program developed a track record — in 2022, 126 associates went through the program, and 79 percent of graduates had found stable housing — donations came in from wealthy benefactors such as Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel and his wife Brenda Bancel.
In addition to job training, Breaktime offers associates follow-up coaching, mentorship, and a modest amount of financial help for three years.
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Lowell resident Arnetia Jean was among the success stories. She was staying in a shelter in Dorchester with her young daughter when she enrolled in Breaktime courses — one of the first students to attend the online training program. Through that work, she landed a paid internship with Samaritans Inc., the suicide hotline operator, and then a full-time job there. She still sounds incredulous that Breaktime’s leader is only a few years older than her.
“To find out he’s 26 years old, and he’s doing all these amazing things, I think it’s awesome,” Jean said. “It was honestly inspiring to hear.”
Around the time in 2023 that Jean started taking Breaktime’s virtual classes, the nonprofit’s board decided it needed more physical space — in part to provide more services such as showers, washers and dryers, donated food and clothing, and closed-door rooms for confidential conversations.
With downtown commercial real estate still in the doldrums after the pandemic, the board eventually gave Schoen the green light to buy a building — assuming he could find one and raise the money necessary. Breaktime hired real estate brokerage Avison Young, and Schoen would stroll through downtown looking for potential opportunities. That’s how he came across the building at 63 Franklin St., which was largely empty at the time. His hope was to offer a “one-stop shop” for homeless young adults.
Michael Nichols, who runs the Downtown Boston Alliance, wasn’t that familiar with Breaktime when Schoen began looking around about a year ago. “But I think Connor has proven to be a force of nature in the work that he’s doing … and clearly was able to identify supporters of his vision,” Nichols said.
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Among those who backed the building purchase: the Bancels, Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine (chairman of Boston private equity firm Bain Capital), and Linda Hammett Ory and Andy Ory (interim chief executive of quantum computing startup QuEra and cofounder of Acme Packet, now part of Oracle).
“The way everyone has stepped up is truly remarkable,” Schoen said.
Brenda Bancel said she and her husband were driven to support Breaktime in part because youth homelessness is on the rise, and it was important for Breaktime to have a better physical space where the people it serves could be supported and educated.
“Connor’s leadership is inspiring,” she said in an email. “He has the knowledge and heart to lead [through] this complicated crisis.”
Schoen’s charisma and Breaktime’s results also impressed Andy and Linda Hammett Ory, according to Jeremy Cramer, a philanthropic adviser to their family foundation. “He has a unique ability, especially for someone [his age], to find himself at the epicenter of the power and influence centers of our city,” Cramer said.
Rishi Shukla, cofounder of the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association, said Breaktime fills a pressing need to reach young people at formative times in their lives, to get them on a career track and teach them how to stick with it.
Buying the empty 34,000-square-foot building on Franklin Street was just a first step. Now, Schoen has to retrofit it for Breaktime’s needs. His nonprofit’s 40-plus employees will eventually settle into the third, fourth, and fifth floors while Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program opens a clinic on the second floor. He’s still seeking a retail tenant for the ground floor, to do what Schoen and Shu originally wanted to do: employ homeless young adults.
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Life is moving at a breakneck pace. The stress had started to get to Schoen after working nonstop, and so he took a one-month break in July 2023 — inspired in part by sabbaticals taken by a few of his mentors.
Buying the building, he said, might not have happened without that break from the day-to-day grind. “I don’t think I would have been able to dream that big if I hadn’t taken that step back,” Schoen recalled.
Now, he is focused on putting his problem-solving and community-building skills to work for a noble cause — and for his dream job.
“Being a social entrepreneur has been a natural fit for me,” Schoen said. “It’s certainly not the easiest job. It can be taxing emotionally, physically. It’s a lot of stress. It’s a lot of pressure. But I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”
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