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.
Explore Our Discretionary Grants
Showing 1291–1298 of 4394 results
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Grant Recipient
Upwardly Global
Upwardly Global requests funding in the amount of $25,000 to support efforts to empower our community of unemployed and underemployed immigrant and refugee job seekers (82% of whom identify as BIPOC) with the skills, networks and credentials needed to rebuild their lives and careers in the U.S., contributing to a thriving and more inclusive Chicago workforce and economy. Those served will emerge from our program having secured gainful, "thriving-wage" professional employment in sustainable industries like tech and healthcare, earning an average starting salary of $55,000 and experiencing an income increase of $45,000 on average. As a result, we will put mobility within reach and contribute to a reduction in income inequality among Chicago's immigrant families.
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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
Forefront
Forefront requests a $200,000/1 year general operating grant from the Chicago Community Trust (CCT) to support Forefront’s continued mission for a vibrant social impact sector that serves all of Illinois and our work and shared goals of an equitable recovery. This renewed and increased support from the CCT will fortify Forefront’s ability to offer deeper public policy supports for our sector's pressing needs and solutions informed by the voices and community leaders and the Trust and Forefront’s shared network of NPOs and philanthropy stakeholders. This support will increase Forefront’s capacity by fueling the necessary staffing and resources to: - Update of our free NPO sustainability and capacity building resources - Support Mission Sustainability Initiative (MSI) resources and grants - Advance and improve our public policy and advocacy efforts with added staff working on systemic issues and policies critical to the Chicago, Cook County, and Statewide social impact sector. -Build our internal/external capacity and staff to provide backbone support through a sectorwide Advancing Racial Equity (ARE) Collective; key work in the coming year will include the hiring of a full-time Advancing Racial Equity Director and landscape scan, maps of current racial equity/justice initiatives, policies at the local, state and federal levels, and the available and emerging resources, stakeholders at work. Forefront will compile and continue to share these resources through a digital center open for the sector. As part of this work, Forefront will apply a racial equity lens to all our work and teams. Our goal is to leverage our recent experience and insights as a collective action convener through efforts like Census 2020 and use our broad and far-reaching network to center and help reduce silos, fuel collaboration and accountability, and amplify longstanding racial equity leaders and experts and community- and BIPOC-informed solutions.
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Grant Recipient
Lawndale Christian Legal Center
LCLC believes that a community-based, co-located, interdisciplinary, and culturally competent legal-social team advocating for high-risk, justice involved youth while simultaneously connecting them to community-based services and assets within their community can avert the damaging effects of youth criminalization, mass incarceration, violence, and poverty. Our holistic representation is designed to prevent our youth from suffering unjust debilitating punishment while also helping them become young leaders in our community equipped to accomplish their educational and employment goals. Our goal is to meet their legal and social needs such that we not only provide them with the highest-quality legal representation, we also provide them with the highest-quality social support so they can move forward with their lives, accomplish their goals, and never return to the criminal justice system again. Our youth have suffered serious harm and learned to survive with basic physical, mental, and emotional needs unmet. Our programming targets individuals at the highest risk for violence, both as perpetrators and victims. In 2021, over one-third of the clients we represented had gun charges. Our holistic representation is designed to prevent further systemic harm while also addressing the underlying unmet needs that contributed to their criminal behavior to prevent further harm to them and our community. By addressing both, LCLC’s model of holistic representation provides us with a meaningful path forward to substantially reduce violence and improve public safety in Chicago.
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Grant Recipient
MIKVA CHALLENGE GRANT FOUNDATION INC
Mikva Challenge was established on the premise that youth voice and participation matter, and that our civic and political life will be stronger when youth help shape their own destinies. Mikva Challenge requests $125,000 in support from the Chicago Community Trust to deepen, scale, and connect our youth civic engagement programs to elevate the voices and priorities of young people in city institutions. With support from the Chicago Community Trust, Mikva Challenge will amplify youth leadership programming, specifically in regards to our Neighborhood Leadership Initiative and Citywide Youth Council programs, to build collective power and strengthen youth civic engagement in local decision and policy making.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Jobs Council
The Chicago Jobs Council works with its member organizations (primarily community-based organizations that provide employment and training services to marginalized job seekers) and advocacy partners to advance policies that increase access to family-sustaining jobs and remove structural barriers to employment that disproportionately affect people of color. A renewed grant would support personnel to manage the Transit Table coalition and the Illinois Skills for Good Jobs Agenda.
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Grant Recipient
Kids Above All
Kids Above All (KAA) is requesting funding to expand our therapeutic counseling services for families enrolled in our Chicago Early Childhood programs. KAA will use a trauma-informed approach to heal children, families & the community through therapy, along with other modalities & supports, to address stressors exacerbated by the pandemic.
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Grant Recipient
Metropolitan Tenants Organization
The Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) and UChicago Medicine (UCM) system will collaborate to advance housing policies aimed at high utilizers of Emergency Health Service (EMS). Unstable housing is a key social determinant of health that causes homelessness and a reliance on EMS for health care. The project will uplift that community members' voices in making recommendations and creating policies that makes greater positive impact for the entire community. In particular, the project will pilot intervention models that promote housing stability for high users of EMS and advance policies aimed at mitigating sudden displacement of renters such as just cause eviction, right to counsel in evictions and proactive rental inspections.