Paving the Path to Homeownership for Housing Choice Voucher Holders
Since the mid-20th century, homeownership has been one of the most important vehicles for building wealth in the United States. According to research from the…
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
Womens Business Development Center (WBDC)
Over the last four years, the Women's Business Development Center (WBDC) has built solid working relationships with our Fund for Equitable Business Growth peers. As part of our projects and Fund convenings, we increased the frequency and intensity of our interactions. For Year Five of the Business Service Organization (BSO) Collective Impact Initiative, we will leverage our connections and commitment to build greater coordination of the educational resources that help diverse entrepreneurs access capital. As the Chicago Community Trust highlights, capital is crucial for diverse entrepreneurs to advance their businesses and grow their assets. While it's clear that capital is critical, accessing it can be complicated. BSOs throughout the City have programs to educate entrepreneurs on preparatory steps and capital options. For this year's project, our goal is to begin mapping the offerings of a handful of organizations. We plan to work with the same fantastic group of BSOs and add additional partners. When we understand which BSOs offer financial and economic literacy programs and how those programs differ from one another, we can construct a capital education pathway – a "Capital College" for small business owners. By mapping the various financial education programs offered by local BSOs and defining the typical personas of clients on this pathway, we can better discern which programs fit which business owners at the specific stages of their business, creating a logical cadence of learning progression. This order makes pursuing financial and economic literacy more achievable and allows entrepreneurs to access financial capital more successfully.
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Grant Recipient
CHICAGO COMMUNITY LOAN FUND
Chicago Community Loan Fund (CCLF) is seeking 1.5 years of funding for up to $150,000 to support hiring a Portfolio Analyst which will be a new position that will help get more capital in neighborhoods that need it most by working with current borrowers that have strong probability to become repeat borrowers.
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Grant Recipient
Change Illinois
We aim to continue work to ensure the successful implementation of the ban on prison gerrymandering to take effect in 2025 statewide for the 2030 census. We aim to build off of our Chicago redistricting work and a redistricting survey we sponsored to build support for people and community-powered, transparent ward redistricting. We seek to grow our community organizing efforts, especially in the city's South and West sides, and statewide to grow civic power and engagement in democracy reforms like equitable redistricting, ending prison gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, improved ballot access and transparent budgeting and governing.
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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 37% in recent years. Designated by the U.S. Department of Education as Illinois’ only four-year Predominantly Black Institution (PBI), CSU is actively working to reverse this trend and increase college enrollment and graduation rates of traditionally underrepresented black students in the Chicago area through its Rise Academy initiative. 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
NORTH SIDE HOUSING AND SUPPORTIVE SERVICES
A $125,000 grant would immensely help us pay the operating costs of our new 70-bed, best-in-class shelter that we expect to open this November, before winter weather hits Chicago. Construction started in April. As first-time owners of a building, we know operating a large shelter will cost significantly more than operating shelters as tenants in open-floor plan church basements. Our primary funder, The Chicago Dept. of Family and Support Services (DFSS), has said they would consider an increase in their funding for the new shelter, but would not commit to an increase. For calendar 2023, DFSS funded $480,000 in shelter operating costs. We will ask that DFSS consider starting budget discussions for the new shelter later in July.
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Grant Recipient
Heritage Museum of Asian Art
Driven by the mission of preserving, presenting, and promoting pan-Asian culture, the Heritage Museum of Asian Art aims to re-explore and convey the stories and cultural significance embedded in Asian heritage through collaboration with artists from diverse fields, emphasizing interpretation aligned with presentation.
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Grant Recipient
South Asian American Policy & Research Institute (SAAPRI)
Celebrating its 23rd year of serving Chicago’s ever-growing South Asian American (SAA) population, SAAPRI is requesting General Operating funds from the Asian Giving Circle to continue using community-based research to formulate equitable, just, and socially responsible policy recommendations that affirm the rights of and improve the lives of the under-served South Asian American community in Illinois. According to SAAPRI's analysis of the 2020 census data and recently released report "Making Data Count: South Asian Americans in the 2020 Census," since 2010, the South Asian American population in Illinois has grown by 39% and is the largest and fastest growing group of Asian Americans in Illinois, accounting for 39% of the state’s Asian American population. SAAPRI’s high quality equity research is the necessary foundation on which direct-service organizations, lawmakers, activists, and those directly involved with and impacted by policy change can act and respond to the most pressing issues in the diverse South Asian American community. Support from Asian Giving Circle would be crucial to maintain current programs that bring South Asian American voices to the table, scale up initiatives developed in response to today’s evolving crises, and bolster SAAPRI’s organizational structure to continue building the socio-economic and political capital of Illinois’s South Asian American population for the next 20 plus years.
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Grant Recipient
Japanese American Citizens League
Intergenerational Conversations: Ripples of the Past is a JACL Chicago program that brings Chicago-area Nikkei (people of Japanese ancestry) together to connect and process the trauma of WWII forced displacement and incarceration through personal story sharing. It was created to bridge the gap in programming for the community’s need for containers to reflect on and heal from the generational impact of incarceration.