Community Development

The Trust seeks to keep foreclosures and unemployment at bay while preparing the Chicago region for a sustainable future.

Thriving communities are essential to the prosperity of metropolitan Chicago. This year The Chicago Community Trust supported priorities that ensure neighborhoods across the region can address the economic crisis effectively and are able to build a sustainable future.

On the Home Front

The Trust continued to provide significant support to mitigate the foreclosure crisis in the region. With funding from the Trust, the Regional Home Ownership Preservation Initiative (RHOPI), a network of organizations working collaboratively to address the foreclosure crisis, matched homeowners with federal, state and private financial products and programs to help prevent them from losing their homes to foreclosure. In addition, RHOPI helped suburban communities work together to address foreclosures effectively in their areas. The organization assisted them with initiatives such as jointly applying for government funding instead of competing against each other, prioritizing those funds for the communities hit hardest by foreclosures, and sharing resources and ideas.

Homeowners dealing with foreclosure also received help through the Circuit Court of Cook County Foreclosure Mediation Program. The Trust coordinated the outreach activities for this program in which nonprofits went door to door to tell homeowners about how the court’s mediation program could help them avoid foreclosure. In addition, the Trust funded six homeowner outreach events in suburban communities, where more than 2,500 homeowners facing foreclosure worked with housing counselors and lawyers to help them obtain loan modifications.

Overcoming Barriers to Employment

To help the growing number of unemployed people in the Chicago region retrain and find jobs, the Trust supported World Business Chicago to implement Chicago Career Tech, an innovative training program that creates a new corps of highly skilled professionals who use technology as a platform for new career opportunities. Fifty-one percent of the pilot class graduated from the program with employment, while 25 percent elected to pursue further training. The average salary of those who became employed was more than $50,000.

The Trust also supported the Chicago Workforce Investment Council to develop the Back to College program, designed to improve Chicago’s economic competitiveness and reduce unemployment. The program will encourage roughly 300,000 Chicagoans with some college credits to return to school and earn postsecondary degrees. It aims to serve 20,000 of these “comebackers,” enroll 6,000 in college, and help at least 3,000 complete degrees in the next 10 years.

Green Opportunities

To ensure metropolitan Chicago addresses sustainable development successfully, the Trust supported the Environmental Law and Policy Center to develop alternative energy resources for the region, Center for Neighborhood Technology to improve transportation solutions, and the Rebuilding Exchange to create a business model using recycled building materials.

See the complete list of 2011 Community Development grants