Paving the Path to Homeownership for Housing Choice Voucher Holders
Since the mid-20th century, homeownership has been one of the most important vehicles for building wealth in the United States. According to research from the…
Grants
Featured
Our Grantmaking Strategy
For more than 100 years, The Chicago Community Trust has convened, supported, funded, and accelerated the work of community members and changemakers committed to strengthening the Chicago region. From building up our civic infrastructure to spearheading our response to the Great Recession, the Trust has brought our community together to face pressing challenges and seize our greatest opportunities. Today, that means confronting the racial and ethnic wealth gap.
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Grant Recipient
Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago
Access Living respectfully requests $150,000 in support of our policy and advocacy work advancing the rights and promoting equity for people with disabilities in Chicago. Our efforts embody our philosophy of “nothing about us without us,” prioritizing the participation and leadership of people with disabilities in all aspects of our campaigns (i.e. strategy and tactics, circulating petitions, involvement in demonstrations, meetings with government officials, offering testimony etc.). Our goal is to build the collective power of the disability community to create systems changes that positively impact the well-being of Chicagoan’s with disabilities.
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Grant Recipient
Association House of Chicago
Association House of Chicago respectfully requests $50,000 in general operating funding from The Chicago Community Trust to support essential services offered at the agency. Services are designed to address unemployment and lack of income, food insecurity, lack of health insurance, health/mental health needs, and youth trauma. Throughout a 123-year history in the city of Chicago, Association House has remained dedicated to providing high-quality services in areas of high economic hardship. Using a trauma-informed, culturally responsive service model, we fill the gaps that leave low-income individuals and families struggling. Association House serves thousands of community members each year through direct services in four divisions that work collaboratively to meet the varied needs of those we serve: Association House High School, Child Welfare, Behavioral Health, and Community Health & Workforce Development.
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Grant Recipient
Economic Security for Illinois
In response to the worsening economic climate, there is growing public and political support for using cash to help Americans make ends meet. Research has shown that when given unconditional cash, the financially vulnerable take care of their needs and focus their energy on climbing up the economic ladder. As the leading organization in Chicago/Illinois focused on cash, Economic Security for Illinois is leveraging its IL Cost-of-Living Refund Coalition and IL Guaranteed Income Community of Practice to put more cash in the pockets of low- and middle-income Chicagoans by expanding the Illinois Earned Income Credit (EIC) as the Cost-of-Living Refund and securing other forms of cash-based support.
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Grant Recipient
International Neighborhood Collaborative
From Spring 2022 to Spring 2023, The Dovetail Project will focus on revamping our fatherhood programming and increasing our recruitment efforts to safely return to pre-pandemic application, enrollment, and graduation levels. As a family-centered organization that takes a place-based, people-of-color-led, intergenerational approach to fatherhood services -- impacting two generations of youth at once (young fathers ages 17-24 and their children ages 0-5) -- we would be honored to receive general operating support from the Chicago Community Trust to support us in re-scaling our programming to impact more students. Among the pandemic's many long-term effects is increased stress for young parents, and this summer we are amplifying our recruitment efforts to get more young men back in the classroom and back to work to strengthen themselves, their children, their families, and their communities.
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Grant Recipient
ILLINOIS COALITION FOR IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE RIGHTS
Despite our significant successes in policy advocacy at the local, state, and federal levels, permanent immigration policy solutions are still needed. ICIRR’s evolving analysis and approach is now focused on developing innovative partnerships that support not only immigrants and refugees but all low-income BIPOC communities. We believe an integrated strategy that lifts all boats is the way to create economic equity. We will: 1. Develop the capacity and leadership of our institutional members; 2. Conduct intentional relational organizing with BIPOC-led organizations and people directly impacted by immigration policies and the racial/ethnic wealth gap; and 3. Build integrated campaigns that support Black/Brown unity and economic justice.
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Grant Recipient
Annie B. Jones Civic Arts Center
Annie B. Jones Civic Arts Center (ABJ) requests funds to offer mental, physical, and emotional health, and wellness, as well as recreational activities through its Project LIFT↑ program. This unique and highly specialized Youth Development Program, which crosses three (3) Chicago Police Districts, addresses the unprecedented and extreme incidents of violence in Chicago that stem directly from unfair systems and oppressive policies. The Project LIFT↑ program is developed to provide love and care for community youth while de-programming and detoxing them from trauma and violent acts that they may have experienced or are at serious risk of experiencing. This program uses prevention and intervention measures to focus on peace, safety, healing, and wholeness. The program is designed to LIFT↑ these youth out of harmful conditions. It is a self-actualizing program that is rooted in love of self, love of others, and love of the community. The love of self, addresses biological or psychological behaviors; the love of peers/family focuses on the interactions between youth and two or more closely related people; and love of the community which addresses the health and safety of the greater community. The program is designed to help youth develop inner tranquility and replace emotional hurt and trauma leading to street and domestic violence with healing and self-acceptance which lead to paths of peace. This then, will enable them to project and express that same state of wholeness and peace through behavioral shifts. Through the proposed grant we will expand the program to include workshops in yoga, peace-breathing, healthy eating, psychology of music; a community music/dance ensemble; peace and healing circles, recreation, field trips; and social media challenges that promote positive/healthy attitudes toward one self, family/friends, and the community.
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Grant Recipient
Northern Illinois Food Bank
We are requesting $150,000 to support our vision that our neighbors will have the food they need to thrive. In FY20, we met the meal gap in 99% of our service area, yet recognized that we were not yet reaching all neighbors in need, particularly with the increased food insecurity due to COVID-19. In FY21 we responded to this increased need by distributing 100 million meals across our service area, a 25% increase over the previous year. We could not have done this without the support of federal programs that provided food and funds and the generosity of our many donors. For FY22 we are faced the challenge of continuing to meet the increased need for food assistance without the government support that we saw last year and with rising food and gas costs and supply chain disruptions. Although we saw a slight decline in numbers of neighbors facing food-insecurity in the summer of 2021, since November the numbers have been rising again and we are serving at least 20% more individuals than we were pre-COVID. For the first six months of FY22 we distributed 38 million meals; 24% was purchased, a big increase from the 10% we were purchasing before the pandemic. As we continue to pursue the goals of our strategic plan UNITE we are focused on providing a better experience for our neighbors, with more choice, better access and less stigma.
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Grant Recipient
NAMI Chicago
NAMI Chicago seeks continued funding to bring coordination and networking to Chicago’s fragmented mental health crisis system, diverting people with significant mental health needs away from arrest and hospitalization towards mental health recovery. We will organize and coordinate acute mental health care providers like hospitals, living rooms and triage centers, and build the necessary capacity, infrastructure and policy solutions to make them an effective alternative. Within this approach, we will use our Helpline as a tool to increase proactive recovery work and intensive case management within the mental health crisis and acute care system.