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
Network for Young Adult Success
UtmostU empowers young adults from marginalized backgrounds to realize their professional aspirations by supporting them as they earn college degrees, certifications, and launch their careers. The Bridges to Brighter Futures 2024 initiative will utilize our post-secondary coaching model to support 125 students in the City Colleges of Chicago system as well as students who have transfered from City Colleges of Chicago to four year institutions. Our program will ensure that young adults from under-resourced Chicago neighborhoods have the tools and guidance to earn degrees and attain careers of their choosing. Through a combination of strong partnerships, structured student interactions, and the use of technology, Bridges to Brighter Futures will build upon our previous learnings to have even greater city-wide economic and social impact.
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Grant Recipient
The Chicago Community Foundation/Scaling CVI
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Grant Recipient
One Million Degrees
Since its founding in 2006, One Million Degrees has grown from a small opportunity scholarship initiative to an institutional partner pursuing an agenda for equitable systems change, while providing direct supportive services to 1919 scholars in the 2023-2024 school year. Scholars with access to OMD’s services are proven to succeed compared to their unserved peers. An ongoing evaluation by the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab’s found in a randomized control trial that accessing OMD increases a students’ likelihood of enrollment by 70%, increases their chances of persisting from fall to spring by 94%, and ultimately OMD students were 73% more likely to earn their degree. Under the current strategic plan, OMD is continuing to focus on community colleges as an open access institution capable of profoundly improving students’ economic mobility through in-demand middle-skills careers. OMD is pursuing this work through three primary channels: City Colleges Campuswide Expansion - In the City Colleges of Chicago system, OMD is working to eliminate equity barriers in persistence and completion (currently Black and Latinx students are 25-35% less likely than their white peers to complete) by removing barriers to program participation through the Campuswide Expansion’s inclusive recruitment model. Launched in Fall 2022, the City Colleges Campuswide Expansion notifies students eligible for services automatically, giving them the option to opt out of services rather than applying for a limited number of seats in the program. The long-term goal is to sustainably scale this partnership to extend OMD’s holistic, evidence-based support to every eligible new and re-enrolling City Colleges student. By 2026, OMD will serve an estimated 4,000+ students annually through this partnership, on a pathway to serving 5,000+ by 2028. Career Readiness & Connections to Jobs - Equally important, the Campuswide expansion embeds career exploration and exposure opportunities that will help students develop a sense of agency, integrating and collaborating with CCC at an institutional (through shared goal setting and partnership infrastructure) and individual level (student data sharing, OMD program coordinator-CCC advisor collaboration, embedded college success course), and continuing to provide scholars with OMD’s personalized holistic supportive service model (personal, financial, academic, and professional supports). This will work to address gaps in the local workforce by equipping students to transition into “middle skill” roles, identified by the bureau of labor and statistics as a particularly in-demand workforce segment for the next 10 years in the Chicagoland area. This will work to address some of the conditions and systemic inequities resulting from generations of academic gatekeeping and economic marginalization, particularly for the most marginalized communities to establish financial security and develop generational wealth. Furthermore, OMD will continue implementing Earn & Learn partnership programs as an equitable and accessible pathway to economic opportunity. This year, OMD will extend opportunities for smaller employers to implement work-based learning programs designed to prepare OMD scholars for success in future apprenticeships, full-time employment, or in their transfer to a four-year institution. This will further produce positive outcomes on both sides of the workforce intervention, serving as equitable talent pipelines and directly supporting advancement of equitable workforce practices and policies in the organization. This bi-directional flow works to deconstruct institutional biases, engage new voices, and build a more robust and equitable workforce for the city of Chicago. National Advisory & Capacity Building - OMD additionally plans to launch partnership programs outside of the Chicagoland area through the newly developed Advisory and Capacity Building practice, which will connect local partners (and their local knowledge) with OMD’s unique solutions to accelerate the pace of systems change in support of equitable outcomes for community college students in their pursuit of career pathways and economically mobile jobs. These three programmatic focuses all work to advance OMD toward its 2028 vision statement, to be a national model for scaling holistic student supports through sustainable partnerships in service of equitable education and career outcomes for community college students.
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Grant Recipient
NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING SERVICES OF CHICAGO INC
The 3C Non-Conventional Secondary Market Loan Fund is essentially a revolving loan fund that supports the liquidity of entities that lend to underserved communities in their region. The loan fund leverages no-to-low interest rate philanthropic dollars and funding from municipal and the private market to either originate below market interest rate loans or provide the capital into which this funding mechanism will securitize and sell tranches of performing loans to provide capital that recycles back to the lending entity. The 3C loan product will be made available to mortgage-ready buyers counseled by 3C housing counseling agencies who purchase newly constructed homes by BIPOC and mission-focused developers participating in the 3C Developer Alliance. While this loan fund will be piloted in two neighborhoods in Chicago – East Garfield Park and Humboldt Park – as a countermeasure to displacement of long-term residents, we are building the infrastructure and partnerships based on scalability nationally. The Chicago Community Trust (CCT) grant will help fund an estimated 25 loan originations and support fund start-up costs.
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Grant Recipient
The Chicago Community Foundation/The Fund for Equitable Business Growth
Over the past three years, the Fund for Equitable Business Growth has focused on strengthening the small business ecosystem through funding individual business serving organization (BSO) partnerships, building those individual partnerships into a networked coalition of service provides, piloting approaches to enhancing data infrastructure, and addressing barriers to capital access. The BSO Collective is the foundation of the work of FEBG driving the other work of the fund. To date, FEBG funding – over $10 million since 2019 – has provided resources for BSOs to develop the capacity provide more robust services to entrepreneurs. For the first 3 years, FEBG has supported partnerships of BSOs on the theory that collectives of BSOs can provide better, more cohesive service to business owners than individual BSOs. In the current year, FEBG is focusing on the cross-collaboration of BSO partnerships to further build the social and knowledge capital, thus strengthening the broader network of entrepreneurial support. This grant will allow FEBG to advance the collaboration of BSO partnerships, particularly in the areas of capital access and educational resources sharing.
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Grant Recipient
La Raza Chicago, Inc.
The Latino community faces growing attacks, frequently from the very top of presidential campaigns and other groups, that exacerbate xenophobia, racism, stigmatization and present threats to the community wellbeing, its cultural identity, and to the American democracy and society in general too. Hateful narratives and disinformation, that include threats of mass deportation and community dislocation, produce fear, hurt the Latino community, and make Latinos vulnerable facing distorted communications, unfair representation and marginalization, and even aggressive behavior from individuals permeated by confrontational, polarized, and misleading discourses. In that context, La Raza's Latino Community Intelligence and Media Engine is a transformative and narrative-changing initiative aimed to empower the Chicago Latino community, with its large component of Spanish speakers, immigrants, and mixed-status families, with two major goals. One, with solidarity, to engage the Chicago Latino community to cultivate cohorts of thinkers, writers, and citizen reporters that, during study and discussion sessions with support from La Raza’s journalists, will release their collective intelligence, leverage the power of journalism and storytelling, and apply new digital technologies -especially Artificial Intelligence tools- to create a corpus of community knowledge, analysis, testimonials, proposals, stories, and statements to describe and analyze the current realities affecting Latinos, to change narratives by expressing their true community values, and to help to counteract the xenophobia, racism, stigmatization, misinformation, and harmful political rhetoric that is growing in our society. This is particularly acute considering the real possibility of this dangerous rhetoric becoming actual government policy after the 2024 election. Two, to provide the community cohorts with access to La Raza’s know-how and media platforms to disseminate their stories, research, statements, and other contents, and to train and motivate them to use and use more digital technologies and AI tools to catalyze their thinking and messages, raise their voices, and reduce the digital gap. Through study circles, capacity building and community-focused journalism, we aim to generate a corpus of community intelligence, stories, and collective knowledge that will allow our people to better understand the issues affecting Latinos and immigrants in Chicago and the USA and will motivate them to work collectively to craft and disseminate narratives that are fact-based and reflect their truth and values, their relevance for the American society overall, and the magnificence of their cultural heritage, fostering a more democratic, inclusive and equitable society. In the context of the present crisis of media, this solidarity project will be also key to La Raza’s goals of transforming itself to better adapt to our audience needs, to produce innovative, engaging, and relevant content, to experiment and thrive in the digital technology realms, and to increase our sustainability and community engagement options. The success of this project will allow it to consolidate, gain additional funding, and become a permanent institute, a core activity of La Raza’s, with the possibility of expanding and replicating to include more participants, tackle new issues, and serve more communities in Chicago and beyond.
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Grant Recipient
Reparations Media NFP
Build the capacity of the Change Agents lab to build upon the proven success in our audio series and our collaborative relationships with community organizations to amplify community-driven grassroot solutions to society’s most pressing issues – including reentry after incarceration, homeownership disparities, anti-Blackness, and violence in Chicago’s marginalized communities and across the Midwest.
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Grant Recipient
Lambda Publications, Inc.
Windy City Times (WCT), Chicago’s legacy LGBTQ+ newspaper, respectfully requests funding to support additional staff capacity on our Newsletter and Audience Engagement team. During the two-year capacity-building period, two new part-time staff members will help WCT grow our recently launched “Chicago Social Butterflies” newsletter, launch three new newsletters that will serve Chicago’s diverse LGBTQ+ community, and grow our audience base. These new products, in turn, will lead to increased earned and contributed revenue streams that will ultimately support WCT’s other vital reporting on Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community.