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
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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 2041–2048 of 4124 results
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Grant Recipient
Inner-City Computer Stars Foundation
i.c.stars respectfully requests $60,000 from the Chicago Community Trust to support our market-facing technology training program with wraparound support for underserved adults. Through i.c.stars’ 4-month intensive technology bootcamp, followed by 20-months of additional targeted wraparound support, marginalized Chicago adults will launch careers with household sustaining wages, allowing them to attain stability and prosperity and to grow their household wealth. Research has shown that to be successful, workforce development programs must address not only job skills training and connection to employers, but the “social determinants of wealth” including access to quality child care, transportation, counseling, and case management. i.c.stars provides a technology workforce training program with wraparound support and continuing resources following job placement, ensuring that participants are successfully launched into high-growth careers and on track to growing their household wealth. Our proposed project is an expansion of i.c.stars’ existing model and will develop teaching strength and capacity at i.c.stars while further developing our alumni relations and stewardship of the organization. First, the support of the Trust will enable us to provide intensive technology training and wraparound support to underserved Chicago adults while also providing the capacity to explore launching program enhancements that will deepen and expand the training, including the Sprint Leader’s Model. In the Sprint Leader’s Model, i.c.stars graduates would be incorporated into two staff areas: 1) Subject Matter Experts, who would become specialized in different segments of the training and would provide instruction ranging from one day to one week within a specific “Sprint”; and 2) Sprint Leader Facilitators, who would either be 6-month contractors or permanent staff. This expanded staff capacity would strengthen our program delivery and allow us to serve more individuals. It would also provide an additional skills-building opportunity for alumni and demonstrate successful career progression to participants, providing motivation and improving program outcomes. Second, the investment from the Trust would support marketing activities for our 50th cohort celebration and beyond. Over 23 years and 50 cohorts, i.c.stars has launched the technology careers of hundreds of underserved young adults from our Chicago communities. Our 50th cohort celebration campaign is highlighting this work and impact, and our marketing efforts are increasing our visibility and engagement with new audiences.
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Grant Recipient
mHUB
mHUB requests funding to expand its Catalyze Initiative (CI) to reduce structural barriers to entrepreneurship and innovation in manufacturing for women and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC).
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Grant Recipient
B U I L D INCORPORATED
BUILD THE FUTURE is a bold $24 million strategy to invest in Chicago’s West Side youth by dramatically expanding BUILD’s facilities, capacity, programming, and community engagement. On September 1, 2021, BUILD broke ground on Phase I of the project: the renovation of our existing 10,000-square-foot building in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood and the construction of an additional 41,000-square-foot facility, while remaking the surrounding greenspace on our full city-block site. This phase completes all critical infrastructure and youth spaces, including the specialized STEAM workshops, gym and fitness center, café and kitchen, youth lounges, technology labs, restorative justice space and mental health center. With a budget of $20M, fundraising goals have been met, and construction is on schedule, expected to be completed before Thanksgiving, 2022. Phase II is smaller but plays an outsized role in the community: 7,780-square-feet of reservable office and workspace for community partners. On the disinvested West Side, there is a profound need for safe, professional spaces where smaller neighborhood groups can work and meet; or host events, trainings, and open houses. Extending the third floor all the way to the West wall will help meet this need, while also expanding the positive community around our young people. BUILD has a current budget gap of nearly $5M for Phase II. The resulting transformed campus will be a hub for the South Austin community, and for BUILD’s own wraparound programs of Violence Intervention and Prevention, Education, Creative Enrichment, Mental Health Care, and Community Outreach. The increased capacity, longer hours, and expanded offerings available in our new facility will dramatically increase the number of youth, families and residents BUILD serves - from 100 to over 2,000 daily, providing facilities and a base of operations for staff to support hundreds more young people at sites and schools across the region. It will also provide badly needed space for our community partners to do the critical work of expanding the resources available to Austin residents – and reimagining its future.
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Grant Recipient
SOUTH SHORE PLANNING AND PRESERVATION COALITION
The South Shore Works Planning and Preservation Coalition (South Shore Works) is an emerging community-based 501c3 organization dedicated to the revitalization and restoration of the South Shore neighborhood. What began as a volunteer movement (2016) established to serve as an umbrella for existing organizations in the community has evolved into a structured nonprofit organization (2020) with a board of directors, core staff, physical location and growing reputation as THE pivotal planning entity for South Shore. Our growth, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, has positioned our organization to answer the clarion call for comprehensive community development in South Shore. We are poised and prepared for change.
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Grant Recipient
The Neighborhood Network Alliance
This grant continues the capacity-building in conjunction with the Community Accelerator Program of the University of Chicago, including: Leadership Development Strategic Planning Board Development Fundraiser Staffing Plan
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Grant Recipient
Latin United Community Housing Association (LUCHA)
The LUCHA New Office project will revitalize a vacant commercial building as a community facility on the North Avenue corridor in Humboldt Park. The building is a 2-story masonry building totaling 11,232 square feet, and the first phase of the project is a substantial rehabilitation focusing on the site, the building envelope and the first floor and basement. The proposed use is commercial/office as LUCHA's flagship headquarters for the long term, plus shared community meeting space. The project will serve as an anchor institution supporting community resilience and self-determination through the critical housing services LUCHA provides. On a high-profile corner in the middle of a busy commercial corridor with few public- and pedestrian-oriented spaces, the site will be activated with installations, furniture and art, focusing on the Karlov streetscape to create gathering spaces for neighbor-focused programming and spontaneous social activity.
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Grant Recipient
Greater Chatham Initiative Inc
This project will support Black-owned restaurants and food businesses to strengthen and grow Black food culture on Chicago’s South Side. The proposed project is comprised of four components that provide Black restaurants with the tools they need to be successful: (1) Cost effective local food delivery services for South Side restaurants through the Soul Delivered platform; (2) Black cultural trail storytelling and communications avia marketing training and visioning through FoodLab Chicago; (3) Technical assistance focused on food labeling and nutrition innovation; and (4) A youth-focused culinary skills and internship program to build a greater talent pipeline for local food businesses in the FoodLab Chicago network and beyond.
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Grant Recipient
Bottom Line Inc
Bottom Line’s mission is to support first-generation, degree aspiring students from low-income backgrounds get into college, graduate, and go far in life. Our vision is to create a far-reaching ripple effect, launched by the transformative power of a college degree and a mobilizing first career that will uplift individuals, families, and entire communities. Bottom Line was founded in 1997 as a small nonprofit organization supporting 25 high school seniors in Boston and has grown into a nationally recognized organization serving more than 8,000 first-generation students from Boston, New York City, and Chicago. Bottom Line launched its Chicago office in July 2014 serving an initial cohort of 156 first generation students from low-income backgrounds residing in over 50 neighborhoods. Currently in our eighth year in Chicago, we are serving more than 1,500 students to and through college, and the Success program has produced 453 college graduates. It is a pillar of our common social ethics that all people – regardless of their background or identities – deserve equal access to the basic goods of life. Equally evident is the fact that a college degree is a necessary precondition for accessing many of these goods. Unfortunately, an interlocking set of factors – chief among which are racism, poverty, and under-resourced educational systems – raise deeply entrenched barriers to college graduation and strong first jobs for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) Americans. This, in turn, leads our society to fall dramatically short of the promise made by our commonly held values. Of course, by failing to provide sufficient access to educational opportunity to BIPOC communities, our higher education system deepens and perpetuates the damaging inequalities under which these communities already labor. On average, college graduates earn about $600,000 more over their lifetimes than high school graduates,2 a fact which implies disproportionally negative effects for people of color with regards to their overall quality of life as well as the capacity to pass on benefits to others. Further, it is abundantly clear that students of color have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis, a fact which will certainly exacerbate these inequalities long-term in the absence of concerted remedial measures. A Department of Education report from June 2021, for example, affirms that students of color are enrolling and persisting in college at disproportionally lower rates overall than white students.3 The specific causes of the various outcomes discrepancies BIPOC students experience are many and varied, but they include the following: Poverty and financial instability, which have been deepened by the pandemic and which direct students’ energy away from their studies and towards meeting basic needs The pervasive and damaging mental and physical health effects of living as a member of an oppressed community in the United States (e.g., nearly all Bottom Line’s students come from communities that have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19) The sub-standard public school education that many first-generation students of color from low-income families receive A lack of consistent, helpful guidance from often overworked school staff (Chicago Public School counselors frequently serve hundreds of students each), as well as from family and friends who have not attended college themselves Further, when students from low-income backgrounds graduate from college, they can struggle to find jobs in which they thrive. For example, a survey from LinkedIn found that 85% of new college graduates who find jobs land them through personal connections; but, of course, graduates from low-income backgrounds often do not have well-developed professional networks in fields that typically pay middle-class (or higher) wages. This obstacle, like the others discussed above, will only continue to be made worse by the economic effects of the pandemic. In light of this situation, Bottom Line’s programs continue to represent an absolutely essential intervention promoting college and career success. By pairing our students with advisors who serve as expert allies in relentless pursuit of their ambitions and connect them with a best-in-class set of resources tailor-made to fill the gaps in our education system, we help clear a path for accessing the educational opportunity these students deserve. Our work thus represents a significant investment of hope in our students, their communities, and the vision of a more equitable America. Bottom Line is inspired by the Trust’s commitment to evidence-based programs that support students while they’re in high school, and bridge to and through college. We share the belief that attention must be given to ensure higher education is more affordable for students, particularly those from under-resourced communities. Bottom Line closely partners with 13 Illinois colleges and universities, all of whom make affordability a priority for under-represented populations. We believe our holistic, long-term, and relationship-based program provides necessary resources that lead to college graduation, and to upwardly mobile career outcomes. Given our shared values, Bottom Line humbly seeks to partner with the Chicago Community Trust to provide resources for one caseload of college students in the Success Program (85 students) attending one of Bottom Line’s 13 priority partner colleges, for 30 students in BluPrint to receive virtual case-management support, and for the opportunity to facilitate innovations and build additional capacity for our regional career and employability work.