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
Black Researchers Collective
In the second year of our funding with CCT, we would like to spend time deepening our engagement with the south side communities that we've been engaging with. We plan to select one community project from each neighborhood to amplify with the accessible data platforms and research skills of the Collective. In addition, we plan to host a Black Researchers Thought Summit where we can bring together funders, researchers, community partners, and program participants who will present to the public on how they've been leveraging research and data to strengthen and sustain their communities.
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Grant Recipient
YEAR UP INC
At Year Up, we believe every young adult deserves equal access to opportunity and racial and economic justice. Year Up’s mission is to close the Opportunity Divide by ensuring that young adults gain the skills, experiences, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through careers and higher education. In 2010, Year Up Chicago launched as the local branch of the national Year Up organization to reach young adults across Chicagoland. To date, Year Up Chicago has served more than 2,500 students on their journeys to economic empowerment and welcomed 1,500 graduates to our alumni network. Now in 2022, we aim to serve 120 students in our Information Technology (IT) and Data Analytics training tracks and operate our workforce development program at two sites: our downtown Chicago site in the Loop, and our college-embedded site operated in partnership with Harold Washington College. To ensure students’ success and progression through the program, we provide wraparound supports such as financial assistance, a Student Services team of social workers, and a dedicated Employment Placement team. Through this work, we will help young adults secure full-time jobs with strong wages and promising career pathways, lifting more young adults toward economic stability and progressing toward closing the Opportunity Divide in Chicago.
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Grant Recipient
LIFT INC
LIFT-Chicago's mission is to break the cycle of poverty by investing in parents. We do this by partnering with parents to achieve economic stability and mobility through our holistic, two-generation coaching model with wraparound support, including financial capabilities workshops and quarterly cash infusions. With the support of Bridges to Brighter Futures, LIFT-Chicago will: (1) Engage 70 student-parents in LIFT’s coaching program to provide cash assistance and help young parents enroll and persist towards their education goals (2) Expand our capacity to track members’ education outcomes so that data can be leveraged to support policy and advocacy centered on the experiences and needs of student-parents.
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Grant Recipient
Fresh Taste
Chicago Region Food System Fund respectfully requests $2,000,000 over 2 years [$1,000,000 a year for 2 years] to support the Fund’s regional food system grant work. CRFSF is a collaborative project that will continue to build on the success of its first two years, in which $11,438,150 was granted to 156 non-profit organizations who are working to strengthen the regional food system. CRFSF is working to secure two- to three-year funding to ensure the continuation of its work as the CRFSF shifts into a participatory grantmaking model.
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Grant Recipient
Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project
FLAP will provide twelve consecutive months of in-person and virtual, bilingual, and culturally-sensitive community outreach and education for low-income Latinx workers in the food industries in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, and Will Counties. The goal of FLAP’s work, and of this grant, is the sustainability of the local food worker population that is critical to the area’s food supply. Economic and social sustainability can be achieved when workers understand their rights, have access to information and resources whenever they need it, and trust the team of individuals providing information.
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Grant Recipient
Legal Action Chicago LLC
Legal Action Chicago ("Legal Action") seeks a $75,000 general operating grant for its program of policy and systemic advocacy on behalf of people in poverty in Cook County, with priority on racial justice and the racial wealth gap. Legal Action is a close partner of Legal Aid Chicago ("Legal Aid"), provider of free legal help to tens of thousands of people every year. Legal Action's agenda arises from the real-world problems presented by Legal Aid's clientele and from other community partners. The program uses litigation, organizing, legislative and administrative advocacy and other tactics to change systems and policies to solve those problems. A major racial wealth gap focus in the coming year is reform of the debt collection system.
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Grant Recipient
Fresh Taste
This application is a request for $135,000 to support the Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative [IRAI], a collaborative project to build a sustained research, education, and outreach effort in regenerative agriculture at the University of Illinois, with goals of developing and promoting regenerative agriculture to attract talent in the field and build a culture of collaboration both between departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and between the University and regional stakeholders.
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Grant Recipient
Transform Capital
Transform Capital seeks to innovate within the community lending space. After substantial diligence and the evaluation of a gap-analysis related to lending access and support services offered by large financial institutions, traditional CDFIs/MDIs, and payday loan and other informal predatory lenders, Transform Capital was formed in 2020 to deliver a fully recyclable pool of capital that minimizes regulation, operating cost and complexity, while maximizing structuring flexibility in serving deeply deserving families in disinvested Illinois communities. These are families often caught between the historic (and continuing) discrimination of large institutions, and the ravages of payday lending. We seek to have the heart of a CDFI while eliminating 90%+ of the operating complexity of a traditional CDFI model (made possible by philanthropic funding and mission innovation), allowing profits to fully recycle for the benefit of communities served. In this way, our clients become an integral part of a pay-it-forward ecosystem to make ownership possible for a neighbor. Our work began in the great community of North Chicago, IL, a community beset by decades of discrimination and the apathy of surrounding wealth. Our model is working, and we are now scaling and extending our dialogue to other communities across the nation, including our work with the CCT's 3C initiative, where we were invited to add our lens of innovation to the Lending advisory team--dreaming about how to better serve families in both Humboldt and Garfield Park. As an all-volunteer organization with almost no operating cost, we were fully sustained by recurring loan revenue in Year 1, and therefore now recycle 100% of all new donated capital in an innovative mission model that creates a ~10x wealth impact over 20 years in communities served. We see enormous potential to continue to prove out our model in North Chicago, in the Chicago region and beyond, and seek to "give away" our model to other communities who may desire to replicate our approach. A funding partnership with CCT would further solidify our progress toward a $4 million local funding goal, while continuing to extend the reach of our influence as we seek to drive meaningful innovation in community lending. On behalf of the growing TC Community, thank you for the invitation to apply. We would be honored to partner with you as we deliver "Capital and Catalyst to Lift up (and Learn from) our Neighbors." (www.tccommunity.org, and a fully updated Organizational Profile certified on 9/7.)