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
Centro Sin Fronteras Community Services Network
Centro Sin Fronteras is applying to receive the Nuestro Futuro 2022 grant award. CSF has been Latina founded and operated since 1987 and serves Chicago and surrounding areas in the form of immigration support services. We are applying for the general operating support and the leadership building support.
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Grant Recipient
Centro De Trabajadores Unidos United Workers Center
The conditions under which CTU was formed remain true today: undocumented and low-wage workers continue to be exploited with impunity, given a regulatory environment steeped in white supremacy that favors employers and profit. As we know, these conditions have been exacerbated by the global pandemic. Consequently, CTU needs more organizers, particularly in the areas of immigration, labor, and economic justice. More organizers permits expansive, deep base-building (outreach, education, orientation, communications) and one-on-one support, and translates into more opportunity to identify shared experiences, generate collective demands, and mobilize as a community. Growing and strengthening our organizing teams means not only that individual community members and their families access real, needed economic and legal resources, but also that our groups and campaigns have the support needed to articulate demands and plans and exercise real power. In the process of striving to provide pandemic safe means of engagement, staff have identified several infrastructure needs that must be met to properly transition CTU from a formerly purely in-person/high-touch means of working to sustainable digital and hybrid means that provide secure, consistent, and accessible opportunities for our membership including but not limited to an upgraded telephone and data systems; and new tools and expertise for functions such as co working, mass communications, and meeting/training. Current and future organizational growth brings with it additional infrastructure needs including, but not limited to, the services of skilled, experienced information technologies professionals to audit existing resources, establish and keep our systems and practices up-to-date and secure, provide customized support to staff members, and grow with us as needed. With respect to our request for leadership development support, our former Organizing Director left in August 2021 and we have since been reflecting on how the position could be reshaped to support organizers in all areas of CTU organizing - labor, immigration, economic justice, and education - and, one day, organizers in our membership and the region. At present, we want to support all staff to develop as organizers, by providing and strengthen the education, tools, and pathways for skills- and knowledge-building and collaboration among our teams. For that, we seek to expand staff development to include deep organizing training; bring trusted, experienced organizers familiar with our communities and contexts (East Side, south suburbs, immigrant, low-wage workers, people of color) to provide an all-staff intensive for 2-3 weeks this summer; and follow up fieldwork for 4-6 CTU organizers. We consider this integral to our leadership development, given that our theory of change is that our communities must articulate priorities and needs, and develop and implement the solutions necessary to effect meaningful change and justice. Our staff are community members and we organize in service to community; in other words, developing CTU organizers is, by definition, developing organizational and community leaders.
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Grant Recipient
PODER
PODER appreciates the invitation to apply for this funding opportunity (Nuestro Futuro) for continued general operating support. This funding will support PODER in its day-to-day operations to deliver on our mission to provide the necessary academic tools to promote human dignity, to increase employment potential, and to facilitate participation in the larger community. Since 1997, PODER’s objective has been to empower Spanish-speaking adult immigrants to create successful and fulfilling new lives in the United States. Through a deep commitment to the needs of the immigrant communities on Chicago’s southwest side, PODER provides critical societal and workforce integration services with both immediate and long-term impact for families, communities, and employers throughout the City of Chicago.
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Grant Recipient
Organized Communities Against Deportations
With this funding and in partnership with the Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC), we will offer supportive mental health resources to individuals recently released from detention. Through our Release Not Transfers campaign that implemented the IL Way Forward over the last couple of months, we were able to release about 80 individuals from detention. In collaboration with CTJC, we will offer support to community members healing from the trauma of that experience. Potential offerings include one-on-one therapy, monthly healing circles, a care package and zine in Spanish sharing tools and practices for well-being, and a train-the-trainer session for OCAD and CTJC staff to prepare to hold future healing circles.
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Grant Recipient
National Museum of Mexican Art
The NMMA is requesting continued support in offering Latinx preschoolers and their families programming geared toward supporting cognitive development. School readiness is a concern among caregivers and parents, and Latinx families struggle with many institutional barriers when it comes to preparing their children to enter the classroom. The Museum seeks to be a community resources for parents looking for unique, culturally relevant ways to support their children’s development. The NMMA also seeks to build its capacity to engage with disabled members of Chicago’s Mexican communities. Latinx children are often diagnosed with Intellectual Development Disorders (IDD) at later ages than their peers. Increasing staff and institutional knowledge on how to accommodate and interact with disabled visitors is an important piece of the NMMA’s inclusion-based mission.
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Grant Recipient
Youth and Family Center of McHenry County
By the end of June of 2022, Youth and Family Center of McHenry County (YFC) will have received $182,668 in funding throughout a period of 18 months from the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) to hire, train, and supervise community health workers to work specifically with the Latinx population to address the disparate impact the pandemic has had on Latinx youth, adults, and families. This critical IDPH funding will end in June of 2022, at which time YFC will lose over $36,000 in general operating support in addition to over $150,000 in program support funding. While the organization has been able to supplement some of this funding from other sources, at least one staff position - the Community Health Worker will be lost at the end of June. Additionally, there is a critical need in McHenry County and at YFC for a bilingual (English/ Spanish) and culturally competent licensed clinical social worker to address the disparate impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the Latinx population. Funding from Nuestro Futuro would provide $20,000 in general operating support for YFC to allow it to provide critical services to the marginalized Latinx, largely immigrant, community in McHenry County. Additionally, Nuestro Futuro funding would provide $20,000 to support and improve YFC’s existing mental health programming for youth and adults.
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Grant Recipient
FOX VALLEY UNITED WAY
The mission of Fox Valley United Way (FVUW) is to empower its community of diverse families to strive to help children birth to five years old become Strong, Prepared, And Ready for Kindergarten as exemplified by the SPARK Early Childhood Collaboration. FVUW continues to expand SPARK through Play.Learn.Connect and the Family Math Initiative to increase participation of Latino families in Aurora, Montgomery, Oswego, and Plano. SPARK staffing includes a bilingual Latino Engagement Coordinator whose efforts increase our visibility and engagement with key stakeholders and agencies to ensure broadening and effective engagement with our Latino families and their children.
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Grant Recipient
LATINO UNION INC
Latino Union requests support from Nuestro Futuro in support of our work developing immigrant community leaders in Chicago among the day laborer and household worker populations that live and work in the city and surrounding suburbs.