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.
Explore Our Discretionary Grants
Showing 3591–3598 of 3873 results
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Grant Recipient
Community Desk Chicago
A request for a general operating grant to support the launch and initial operations of Community Desk Chicago (The Desk), a new 501c3 organization. The Desk incubated at CCT from 2019-2023.
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Grant Recipient
Logan Square Neighborhood Association
Palenque LSNA seeks funding to support the administration, research, and coalition building components of the newly created Illinois Community Land Trust Task Force. Illinois Senate Bill 2037, passed in partnership with the Illinois Housing and Development Authority (IHDA) and the office of Governor JB Pritzker, establishes this Task Force. The bill presents a unique opportunity to further our collective efforts in promoting equitable wealth building, arriving as community land trusts (CLTs) gain momentum regionally as a tool for increasing homeownership in Black and Latinx communities. Entry level homeownership is increasingly inaccessible to families; good quality homes are too expensive in gentrifying neighborhoods and too rare in disinvested ones. However, CLTs reverse this trend by creating opportunities to build wealth while ensuring neighborhood stability in both gentrifying and disinvested communities. Through CLTs, neighborhoods retain land ownership and equitably compete with investors, leading to balanced, community-driven development and a more equitable housing development field. The state of Illinois recognized this benefit. In January of 2023, it awarded the Here to Stay Community Land Trust $5 million in American Recovery Plan Act funds to accelerate land acquisition and development and to provide equitable subsidies for new homeowners. However, policy barriers inhibit the growth and success of CLTs. The State remains uninformed and unprepared to repair racial wealth gaps through homeownership because of their unfamiliarity with CLTs as a model for neighborhood stability and their lack of relationships with budding regional CLTs. To strengthen IHDA’s understanding of the important role of CLTs in equitable development and in repairing historic racial wealth gaps, the CLT Task Force will convene at least 6-8 times over the course of 12 months. The Task Force will conduct research and lead community engagement, the findings of which will become a report published in partnership with IHDA. This report will set an agenda for strategic policy reforms to accelerate the success of CLTs, seeding future systemic reforms to increase homeownership in Black and Latinx communities. We believe that CLTs are essential to creating affordable housing options, preserving neighborhood stability, and empowering residents to build wealth and achieve economic security. With the Trust's support, we aim to leverage the Task Force to develop and implement policies that expand access to land ownership and ensure long-term affordability.
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Grant Recipient
THRIVE SCHOLARS
Economic mobility is our North Star. Thrive Scholars' mission is to help high-achieving students of color from economically disadvantaged communities get into and graduate from top colleges equipped to reach their full career potential. Thrive Scholars addresses the racial wealth gap disparities with our signature Summer Academy program and our Career Development Program. We respectfully request a grant of $200,000 to continue scaling our local program by increasing the number of Chicago Thrive Scholars who can participate in our Summer Academy and Career Development Programs–the first steps to achieving economic mobility.
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Grant Recipient
WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC
WTTW respectfully requests $50,000 from The Chicago Community Trust to launch a new reporting initiative examining disparities in homeownership for Chicago’s Black and Latino communities. Specifically, funding of this initiative will enable WTTW News to produce and present 4-6 stories on-air and online focused on homeownership challenges and successes for Black and Latino Chicagoans, a digital animated short for broadcast and social media, as well as an in-person community engagement event as part of our WTTW News Community Conversation series.
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Grant Recipient
Borderless Magazine NFP
We are requesting support from the Trust to produce a bilingual reporting package that will include English and Spanish first-person narratives, photos, resource guides and explainers about housing and homeownership in the Latinx community. The funds will be used to pay for a reporter, photographer, field canvassers and supporting staff.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago State University Foundation
Approximately two-thirds of all jobs require postsecondary education. However, Illinois public universities and colleges have experienced a significant decline in college enrollment of African American students by 26% in recent years. Designated by the U.S. Department of Education as Illinois’ only four-year Predominantly Black Institution (PBI), Chicago State University (CSU) is actively working to reverse this trend and increase college enrollment and graduation rates of traditionally underrepresented black students in Chicago. Well aligned with the Chicago Community Trust’s commitment to programs demonstrating connections to post secondary success with limited debt burden, CSU’s Rise Academy is a first-year, tuition free student success program. Designed to provide students new to CSU with an early and supportive introduction to college, Rise begins with a five-week summer orientation. During the academic year, students receive ongoing academic, cognitive, and social-emotional support in the form of one-on-one check-ins, embedded tutoring, and cohort-based monthly workshops and social events. The scholarship covers tuition, fees, and textbook costs after accounting for grants and scholarships; students also receive a laptop and internet access. With the support of leaders across the city and the state, CSU is taking swift action to dismantle barriers to education equity for Black and Latinx communities. Rise Academy, is a part of a suite of data-driven strategies for increasing CSU’s student enrollment, retention, and graduation rates; it is an initiative that will drive measurable - and sustainable - results to close the Black and Latinx education and wealth gap in Chicago and the State of Illinois.
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Grant Recipient
Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council
The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council is pleased to be invited and submit this request for the Catalyzing Neighborhood Investment - Build the Foundation Opportunity. Gathering the fiscal resources to support our ongoing operation is a consistent issue that nearly all non-profit organizations face. However, every opportunity and every dollar raised is considered only as a potential solution to problems that our community faces. Oftentimes, sustaining our mission and work has been made more difficult by the need to demonstrate specific programmatic outcomes that only seek to quantify what is being done without concern for the experiences and sentiments of those we serve. The needs of the community we serve are greater than ever, and while we are happy to institute and measure both new and existing programs, our work is ongoing and general operating support will undoubtedly help us to achieve positive results that may not be measured for months or even years to come. This is a part of our larger neighborhood investment strategy which seeks to braid a large mixed use development - the Back of the Yards Rooted and Rising - with community planning and social service to place local residents on a path to economic opportunity, while bringing in large outside investment. We will continue to strive towards our mission goal of enhancing the welfare of all our residents and our development strategy.
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Grant Recipient
North Lawndale Employment Network
NLEN is working to close the racial wealth gap in the Chicago region through increasing the share of economic prosperity for Black individuals and families through innovative employment initiatives, working directly with employers, and participating in the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council (NLCCC) coalition as its Workforce Committee Chair. NLEN proposes to expand efforts to identify quality employment opportunities, help expand access to these jobs for the hardest-to-employ jobseekers – those with criminal backgrounds – and improve their retention in these jobs. We will do this by working directly with large employers to convince them to change their hiring and employment policies towards second chance hiring, opening new opportunities for employment for residents with a criminal background.