3C Community Profile: Humboldt Park
Take a stroll down the Paseo Boricua corridor on Division Street and it’s easy to see why Humboldt Park is one of Chicago’s most vibrant…
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
MANO A MANO FAMILY RESOURCE CENTER
Mano a Mano is requesting general operations funds in support of overall agency goals to empower our immigrant community to reach their best immigantion status, to have access to health call and education leading them to pursue opportunities and success within an integrated community.
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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
ALL CHICAGO MAKING HOMELESSNESS HISTORY
All Chicago respectfully requests $150,000 in support of a reconstituted, flexible, Chicago COVID-19 Homeless System Agency Emergency Fund. All Chicago is partnering with Chicago Funders Together to End Homelessness to reactivate this fund, which in 2020 provided $768,292 in emergency assistance to thirty-seven of All Chicago’s partner agencies. Support will focus on immediate and unanticipated needs brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of the Omicron wave and its impact on people experiencing homelessness—and the staff and systems that support them—All Chicago seeks support to offer a second round of flexible, unrestricted funds to agencies in 2022. Flexible funding via the Agency Emergency Fund can support costs related to staff retention, recruitment, well-being needs for staff, temporary housing, outreach, transportation, food, supplies, facility modification or expansion, technology, staffing, or other demonstrated costs related to the pandemic. Anticipated awards will range between $10,000 to $15,000, from a pool expected to be in excess of $800,000.00 Applicant organizations for Agency Emergency Fund support will initially include approximately forty core service providers who receive funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, under the Continuum of Care (CoC) program. With sufficient support, All Chicago will extend this invitation to shelter providers and other homelessness service agencies that are closely connected with these core service providers. Agencies will be invited to complete a brief online application with a few questions to minimize barriers to accessing dollars. The timeframe for spending the collective funding received will be determined by the amounts awarded by private philanthropy and the number of applications submitted. All Chicago will issue an initial round of provider payments within three weeks of the invitation to providers and will make additional rolling payments as additional funding is received and the invitation network is broadened. Rolling payments will continue until all funds are exhausted. All Chicago's partners have been extraordinarily responsive and resilient in their support of people experiencing homelessness during the last two years, and they are continually faced with unanticipated challenges. In the early days of the pandemic, the Agency Emergency Fund provided crucial support for agencies. Leading the reactivation of the Agency Emergency Fund are Northern Trust and several other members of Chicago Funders Together to End Homelessness (CFTEH), a local philanthropic collaborative incubated at Michael Reese Health Trust. In a matter of weeks, foundation members of CFTEH which have mobilized resources include: Blowitz-Ridgeway Foundation, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, the Chicago Community COVID-19 Response Fund, Crown Family Philanthropies, Cuore e Mani Foundation, Northern Trust, The Owens Foundation, Pierce Family Foundation and Denis Pierce, Polk Bros. Foundation, Waterton Philanthropic Fund, and an anonymous foundation funder.
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Grant Recipient
DEPAUL UNIVERSITY
DePaul University, which has a long history of welcoming immigrants and those who otherwise might be excluded from higher education, seeks philanthropic contributions to support ten displaced female students, whose lives and academic plans have been interrupted by conflict in South Asia. These students have urgent and significant financial need, having been required to unexpectedly and quickly leave the region. In addition to scholarship support provided by the university, funding will be critical to providing necessary resources to enable these students to continue their education in Chicago, covering costs that include tuition, fees, room and board, books, supplies, transportation, technology and personal items.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Public Media Inc
Chicago Public Media is committed to serving the public as a trusted, independent source of news and information that makes our region and our democracy stronger. We have always believed that robust local journalism is at the heart of a well-functioning society, and now more than ever, we are committed to serving our region with award-winning coverage of local, national, and international news that connects Chicagoans to each other — and to the world. With the Trust’s investment of $150,000, we will amplify the public conversation by telling the stories that matter; stories that provoke thought, entertain, capture emotion and inspire action. Chicago Public Media shares in the Trust’s desire to connect residents to one another and amplify authentic community narratives. Underpinning all of Chicago Public Media’s work is a theory of change and intended impact centered around empathy: We aim to create a more informed, connected, and empathetic Chicagoland. Our process of identifying a topic for investigation, reporting, and engaging the community is interconnected by design. With intentional community engagement throughout the process, we are more aware of the needs of our community and better positioned to accurately reflect the lived experiences of Chicagoans. As a trusted, independent source of news and information, we leverage our strengths in investigative and enterprise journalism to shine a light on the consequential issues affecting local communities and empower individuals to make informed decisions and advance what’s important to them. In an annual audience survey, we asked our audience members what, if any, actions they have taken as a result of hearing or reading a WBEZ story. We found that 73% of our audience felt they were more informed when they voted, 69% reconsidered or broadened their perspective on an issue, 49% were inspired to take a more active role in their community, and 46% became involved with a local or national cause. These results demonstrate that inclusive storytelling can serve as a pathway toward understanding and that audio storytelling, in particular, has a unique power to connect people, and in many cases, move people to take action. In the coming year, WBEZ will deliver more impactful journalism for the people of Chicago. Our human-centered, solutions-oriented approach to local journalism will shine a light on deep challenges and systemic inequities to effect positive change. Our strategy, approved by Chicago Public Media’s Board of Directors in June 2021, is to invest in daily journalism and build addressable direct relationships via digital platforms to build daily habits and grow the diversity and engagement of our audience. To deliver on our strategy, we have identified priorities across four pillars: Content, Audience Growth, Funding, and People and Culture. Specifically, we seek to: Invest in our journalism to build a compelling daily news product that focuses on the Chicago region, builds daily habits, and earns the trust of our audience. Build direct addressable relationships through digital platforms, converting one-time listeners to email subscribers and mobile app users to increase diversity, frequency, duration, and support among our audience. Fueled by support from our community and generous philanthropic partners, we nourish the public conversation by telling the stories that matter—stories that provoke thought, entertain, capture emotion, and inspire action. With your continued support in the coming year, we will preserve and strengthen that public service mission for our audience today and in the future.
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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.