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.
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Grant Recipient
FOLDED MAP PROJECT
The purpose of this application is to secure funding to use Tonika Johnson/Folded Map’s existing projects to create at least 4 Englewood community-based events and activations as well as forge or strengthen at least two partnerships with Chicago-based cultural institutions, thus laying the foundation for building a long-standing Arts and Culture Hub in the Englewood neighborhood. We seek to help re-shape the story about Englewood so that it includes being a destination for innovative and meaningful resident-lead arts and cultural experiences.
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Grant Recipient
Hope Chicago
Through a unique two-generation approach, Hope Chicago provides the resources and support for families to access and complete postsecondary education and workforce development opportunities, increasing family income, building household wealth, and addressing economic disparities. This project centers on Hope Chicago’s support for both student and parent Scholars.
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Grant Recipient
NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING SERVICES OF CHICAGO INC
The 3C Developer Alliance is a group of BIPOC and mission-focused developers collaborating to leverage financial resources and explore utilizing complex capital structures to support the acquisition of 100 city-owned vacant lots in the geographic areas of East Garfield Park and Humboldt Park in Chicago as well as the development newly constructed residential homes on those parcels. The Chicago 3C Initiative seeks to revitalize these once historically disinvested, but now gentrifying neighborhoods and counteract the displacement of its long-time residents by creating a housing ecosystem that supports the construction and sustainable ownership of affordable, new homes in these areas. This application requests funding to assist these mission-focused and BIPOC developers in the 3C Developer Alliance with funding that strengthens their balance sheet and that they may use to either secure competitive construction financing or use to fund developer cost gaps enabling them to build at scale to reach their collective goal of 25 homes for the 3C Initiative.
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Grant Recipient
Common Ground Foundation, Inc.
During our program year, mentees are introduced and participate in one of the six disciplines listed below: Dance: Mentees will be exposed to a wide range of dance styles, such as Contemporary, Hip Hop, Jazz, Lyrical, Modern, and more. Hip Hop / Spoken Word: Mentees will participate in lessons that will include rap, poetry, and production. Sessions will highlight free writing and interpreting lyrics which will provide participants with a better understanding of how creative writing (rap/poetry) can have a variety of purposes as well as be beneficial to your emotional wellness. Music / Vocals: Mentees will explore the world of vocal music, singing various genres of music, discussing the value of being an original composer and songwriter, as well as the importance of joining a performance rights organization to ensure that each songwriter's rights are safe and secure. Photography: Mentees will learn about photography and how it connects with the world around them. Mentees will also explore the power of "use what you have" by learning how to take pictures using their cell phone devices. Video Production: Mentees will learn the fundamentals that go into making videos as well as entrepreneurship in film. Using a cellphone, participants will learn the skills needed to capture, direct, and edit videos. Visual Arts: Mentees will learn to use art as a way to express different ranges of emotions and feelings. Participants will also be exposed to different artistic techniques as well as learn about the fundamentals of art. The activities and instructions are the building blocks of the year-end celebration’s final performances for each group, where students will present their talents to peers, parents, and partners during our End of Year Celebration next summer 2025.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Commons
Chicago Commons’ Family Hub promotes racial and social equity and economic mobility by addressing families’ multi-faceted needs, not just through asset development, but by providing a supportive, holistic environment and resources that enable success. Family Hub reaches participants from underserved neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West sides. Participant recruitment and program implementation occurs predominantly within our four early childhood education (ECE) centers. Programmatic components include financial literacy and empowerment, entrepreneurship, job success skill development, degree/accreditation attainment services, health and wellness services, and self-advocacy.
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Grant Recipient
NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING SERVICES OF CHICAGO INC
In recognition of each partner’s own individual success in the field of housing, and our shared interest in addressing lending inequity and racially based disinvestment, Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago (NHS), the Chicago Urban League, and Self-Help Federal Credit Union have joined together to continue work started in the first year of our partnership, and continue advancing our strategies to implement innovative loan products and outreach programs that reach Black and Brown potential homebuyers to help them obtain a fairly-priced home loan. This year, we are joined by the Woodstock Institute, and Self Help’s policy affiliate, the Center for Responsible Lending. Affordable homeownership is still the main driver of household and generational wealth, and is a driver of mixed-income, sustainable neighborhoods. Through the support of the Chicago Community Trust’s 2024 Home Lending Partnership Program opportunity, this collaborative partnership will work towards opening equitable CDFI lending to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac secondary markets, fundamentally changing the accessibility and availability of such lending, not only in the Chicago area, but nationally. To this end, we will convene a Council with the goal of discussing how we can combine private and government resources to create a pilot loan program, fundraise for its loan pool, and develop multi-year performance data to act as qualified evidence to support systematic change at the federal level.
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Grant Recipient
Braven
The mission of Braven is to empower promising, underrepresented young people—first-generation college students, students from low-income backgrounds, and students of color—with the skills, confidence, experiences and networks necessary to transition from college to strong first jobs, which lead to meaningful careers and lives of impact. Our vision is that the next generation of leaders will emerge from everywhere and be as diverse as our future demands. While Braven is a national nonprofit, our Founder and CEO Aimée Eubanks Davis is a Black woman raised on Chicago’s Southside with a deep commitment to creating economic mobility for the Black and Latine populations in our city. Therefore, Chicago is our national headquarters and serves as the birthplace of Braven's most innovative programs (explained in more detail below): Braven at National Louis University (NLU), BravenX, and Braven at Northern Illinois University (NIU). Braven-Chicago is requesting funding to execute the Braven Fellowship inclusive of the Accelerator Course and post-course supports to Chicago-based Fellows at NLU, NIU, and through BravenX in FY25. We have served over 2,000 Fellows across our three sites (NIU, NLU, and BravenX), of which nearly 1,200 are Chicago-based since Spring of 2018. In FY23 alone, we served 306 Chicago-based Fellows. Our desire is to continue to scale all three programs, recognizing the urgency to ensure that underrepresented young people coming from low-income backgrounds are able to obtain the American Promise on pace with their white peers, and we anticipate we will serve 350-400 Chicago-based Fellows in FY25, when this grant would be received. Braven works in deep partnership with higher education partners and employers to empower students with the skills, confidence, experiences and social capital they will need to land strong first jobs that put them on the path to upward economic mobility through our 2.5 year Fellowship experience. Students begin their Braven Fellowship with the one semester Accelerator course, typically during their sophomore or transfer junior year, and then join the Braven network and can take advantage of post-course supports including our one-on-one Professional Mentor program, Career Communities, industry workshops, and referral networks. Our North star is to ensure Braven Fellows get quality first economic opportunities within six months of graduation. We desire to make good on America’s promise. Braven intervenes at just the right moment – in students’ sophomore or transfer junior year – and we help them over the finish line, catching them before they undermatch in the job market. Rather than wasting all that potential talent, we unleash it on the job market in ways that build economic equity. Innovation Programs: BravenX: This innovation program is virtual and identical in length (14 weeks), content, and cohort structure as our core product, however it is made possible through partnerships with college access and success organizations instead of universities. In lieu of academic credit, BravenX Fellows earn a financial stipend upon completion of the program. BravenX’s goal is to extend the critical work of college success organizations and charter high schools into strong career outcomes after college. By partnering with such organizations, Braven helps ensure that their alumni who share the demographics of our target students not only graduate, enroll and persist in college, but also build the foundation for a lifelong career path. NLU: Since 2018, Braven has been executing an innovative pilot of the university model at National Louis University (NLU) in Chicago, a private university whose students represent a higher-need demographic (in terms of financial and academic readiness) compared to our other partners nationally, and complete a 10 week-modified version of the standard Accelerator since the school is on a quarter system. NLU is an open-access (98% acceptance rate) university, which means greater access to college education, but students may come in less academically prepared. This Chicago program is an important pilot for evaluating our model with a higher-need student body and shortened course. In terms of outcomes, we anticipate that these students will outpace peer students at NLU but not see the same level of strong job attainment that we do with our public universities.
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Grant Recipient
Connections for the Homeless, Inc.
Homelessness is solvable. for the Homeless provides critical eviction prevention, shelter, and housing services to over 5,000 individuals per year in 52 Chicagoland communities while mobilizing our community to combat systemic inequities and build innovative and responsive programs and partnerships that create a thriving community.