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
Chicago Community Foundation
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Grant Recipient
Inner-City Muslim Action Network
Since 2013, the Granville T. Woods Academy has stood vacant, vandalized and a blight on the surrounding community. Englewood is home to two of the ten zip codes receiving the highest number of returning citizens every year. Multiple studies establish housing, health care, and employment as the critical components of successful reentry, yet many returning citizens struggle to access all three, creating instability at the individual, family and neighborhood level. The Regenerator, a project of the Go Green Development Group - comprising IMAN, Teamwork Englewood, Resident Association of Greater Englewood and E.G. Woode - will remediate and repurpose the Woods Academy to tackle these three integrated components with a robust health and wellness ecosystem, permanent supportive housing and workforce development opportunities, along with a range of reentry services. IMAN will be the owner and operator of the health and wellness ecosystem at The Regenerator. IMAN is requesting pre development funding from CCT for the interior buildout of this wellness ecosystem which includes a Federally Qualified Health Center, urgent care and pharmacy, bringing critical primary, behavioral and oral health care access and jobs to the entire community. This project is phase II of the Regenerator buildout.
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Grant Recipient
Inner-City Computer Stars Foundation
The Inner-City Computer Stars Foundation (i.c.stars) requests $300,000 across two years from Bridges to Brighter Futures to fund our Chicago program implementation. These funds will support our 4-month hybrid technology job skills training, resulting in thriving wage jobs, and our 24-month residency program, where participants receive continued case management, career advising, and professional skills development while working in the tech sector and assessing our cutting-edge curriculum and skill assessments. i.c.stars' vision is to break barriers and create transformational opportunities for one million untapped learners and leaders to reach and advocate for economic freedom and generational wealth by 2030. The support of the Bridges to Brighter Futures will ensure i.c.stars has a direct impact on our participants and an indirect impact on all the lives they touch in their families, workplaces, and neighborhoods.
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Grant Recipient
The Chicago Community Foundation/Scaling Community Violence Initiative
As an essential piece of a comprehensive approach to reducing gun violence, Scaling Community Violence Intervention for a Safer Chicago (SC2) builds on promising evidence that CVI is effective in reducing violent behavior and victimization among individuals at highest risk. Our preliminary hypothesis is: If SC2 successfully facilitates peace among groups in conflict, integrates the delivery of CVI's five core services, uses data to inform decision-making, and reaches at least 75 percent of the highest-risk individuals in a community, then there will be fewer shootings and homicides and, through spill-over effects, the overall environment will change, further reducing shootings and retaliatory shootings, the incentive to carry weapons, and other conditions that fuel gun violence. CVI organizations currently are active in 37 of the city’s 77 communities but serve only 10-15% of the estimated 20,000 of the city’s highest-risk individuals. Building on lessons from an initial effort to integrate and scale CVI in North Lawndale, SC2’s goal is to reach 50 percent in five years and 75 percent in 10 years through fully-resourced, locally-led, at-scale efforts in the communities most affected by gun violence. Our hope is that successfully scaling CVI will make a significant contribution to an ambitious goal of reducing shootings and homicides citywide by the same amount – 50 percent in five years and 75 percent in 10 years. We urge broad adoption of this goal and a “one-table” approach where government, philanthropy, the corporate community, and the social sector commit to a shared plan that includes long-term strategies and investments in local communities and more immediate interventions, including CVI.
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Grant Recipient
Carole Robertson Center for Learning
The Carole Robertson Center for Learning (the Center) seeks support for our TransformED, apprenticeship model that allows us to recruit, train, and provide educational and credentialing opportunities to individuals from the communities we serve. TransformED addresses both a need for qualified employees within the early childhood sector, and a need for employment and education opportunities for Chicago residents. By addressing the needs of both families and the workforce in tandem, the Center promotes socioeconomic mobility across multiple generations within our communities, while also providing our youngest learners with high-quality, culturally responsive teachers and support staff. Grant funding will enable us to continue offering this initiative as well as pursue expansion of the model to the youth development sector.
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Grant Recipient
LiftUp Communities
This project grant will support the employer practice innovation efforts of the LiftUp platform, comprised of LiftUp Communities NFP and LiftUp Enterprises for-profit MBE-certified social enterprise, specifically to: 1.) fortify our ability to pilot, iterate, and scale our suite of employee benefits and wrap-around services to accelerate the stability and mobility of low-wage workers and their families and social fabric, 2.) launch LiftUp Advice to formally codify insights from our management approach grounded by dignity-based operating principles, that demonstrate improved growth, profitability, and scalability of social enterprises, and 3.) aid working capital needs and directly impact our ability to unlock our Benefit Chicago $750,000 credit enhancement joining multiple sources including MacArthur and McCormick Foundation that believe in testing and scaling our dignity-based employment model.
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Grant Recipient
North Lawndale Employment Network
North Lawndale Employment Network is requesting an additional $225,000 from We Rise Together to retire its remaining debt and loan with IFF. NLEN previously received $495,000 as part of the first cohort of We Rise Together grantees, which significantly contributed to the successful completion of our new 20,000-square-foot Workforce Campus at 1111 S. Homan Ave. This state-of-the-art campus now serves as a thriving community hub, providing workforce development, financial literacy, and digital skills programs. It also hosts NLEN’s social enterprises, including Sweet Beginnings LLC and the Beelove Café, alongside a community event space, pop-up retail for local entrepreneurs, and a Wintrust Bank branch. Since moving into the campus, all programs and activities have been thriving, with the campus serving over 1,100 individuals annually. The new funds will ensure the full repayment of NLEN's construction loan with IFF, allowing us to close this final financial gap and continue our mission without debt constraints. Our goal remains aligned with reducing North Lawndale's unemployment rate by 10% by 2027 and contributing to the broader revitalization of the community through critical job training and economic development initiatives.
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Grant Recipient
Julie's Test Organization
GO renewal application summary.