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
LUBC - The Let Us Breathe Collective
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Grant Recipient
Working Family Solidarity
We request support for general operating expenses, to increase our organizational capacity and stability, and help us be more effective in our fight for workers rights/jobs, housing rights/affordable housing, and to develop the leadership of our members & constituents. This support will help us build on our victories for justice in disinvested communities, primarily with African American and Latinx families. We have organized low-wage workers to win workplace rights, justice in housing issues, and we are in leadership positions on several Chicago area coalitions. We now need to develop more leadership among our Board, staff, member-leaders and volunteers, and our community constituents in neighborhoods on Chicago's west, southwest, and south sides.
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Grant Recipient
University of Chicago Urban Labs
To support Chicagoans on their path to upward mobility, the City of Chicago will soon launch the Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot, a $31.5M monthly cash assistance program within the Chicago Recovery Plan. The program will provide 5,000 Chicago residents with $500 per month for one year, making it the largest-scale unconditional cash pilot in the country. Preference will be given to Chicagoans living in communities disproportionately harmed by COVID-19. Through this guaranteed income pilot, the City seeks to accelerate Chicago’s progress toward an equitable recovery and address long-term racial disparities. At the request of Mayor Lightfoot, the UChicago Inclusive Economy Lab has provided support with the articulation of a research program that will allow policymakers, elected officials, funders and advocates to learn from this ambitious initiative. This learning agenda seeks to accomplish three goals: • Measure the impact of this program on outcomes of policy interest • Share the impact of this program in participants’ own voices • Improve the design of future cash assistance programs. The evaluation will consist of a mixed-methods study that incorporates quantitative and qualitative research approaches. Because the City is likely to receive more than 5,000 applications for assistance from eligible individuals, it plans to conduct a lottery to distribute resources in a fair and transparent way. This creates an opportunity to generate rigorous evidence of the program’s impact for recipients and their households through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design. This evaluation will assess the program’s impact on household financial stability, economic mobility, mental health, material hardship, and sense of agency. The study will leverage both administrative and commercial data, as well as a quarterly survey of study participants. A subset of study participants will also participate in structured interviews and ethnographic participatory observations.
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Grant Recipient
Bronzeville Trail Task Force, Inc.
The Bronzeville Trail aims to convert the abandoned Kenwood ‘L’ Line to an elevated linear park and trail that will celebrate the deep historical roots of the Bronzeville community and enliven surrounding neighborhoods with new opportunities for recreation, exercise, and gathering. Abandoned in 1957, the Kenwood Line of the Chicago 'L' system running through the Bronzeville community is a historical asset and an environmental and recreational opportunity. The adaptive reuse of this industrial infrastructure site and re-envisioning of the elevated line and adjacent parcels will be catalytic for the community. This will improve recreational and open space access in this primarily Black community by creating nearly two miles of multi-use trail from State Street to the 41st Street pedestrian bridge, providing a direct connection to the Lakefront Trail. The trail will provide key community connections to the Indiana Avenue Green Line station, connect vital corridors including MLK Drive, Cottage Grove Avenue, and Drexel Boulevard, and connect educational institutions including Northeastern Illinois University, multiple neighborhood churches, and the Pershing Road commercial corridor. By activating a variety of adjacent vacant land parcels, the Bronzeville trail will provide opportunities for commercial and civic ventures and address the area’s history of disinvestment, realizing a vibrant urban landscape that supports a walkable and bicycle friendly community where people can meet their daily needs easily and comfortably using active transportation. Currently, the site is defined and, while still in the hands of the Cook County Land Bank, is being held for the development of the trail. The project supports the goals of several community plans including, Reconnecting Neighborhoods (City of Chicago), Quad Communities: Reconnecting Past, Present, and Future (LISK) plan, and the Bronzeville Retail District Land Use Plan (CMAP). It also aligns with the goals of the City’s Invest South/West Initiative, in which Bronzeville is one of the focus communities. The Bronzeville Taskforce solicited responses to an RFP for a variety of support services and a consultant project team has been selected that combines rail-to-trail conversion, multi-modal mobility, urban design, parks and open space, equitable engagement, real estate, and economic development expertise. The team includes SmithGroup, Moody Nolan, Infrastructure Engineering, Botanical City, and McLaurin Development Partners. Vernon Williams, owner of Vernon Williams Architecture, is providing project management support to the Board. Finally, support from the City of Chicago, Cook County, Trust for Public Lands, and Rails to Trails Conservancy has been secured, along with support from Aldermen and other leaders. This grant will provide necessary funding to advance the project. Like other rails to trails projects in Chicago (Bloomingdale, Lawndale, Englewood), each started with an active community organization leading engagement, building support, and executing planning initiatives, leading to governmental and non-profit construction and stewardship. Following this successful model, we will leverage this grant to evolve trail access, alignment, placemaking, and community integration, further site due diligence, prepare high-level cost estimates for future phases of work, refine the long-term stewardship plan, and engage the community. In particular, we are considering the following services: ARCHITECTURAL SERVICES: PLANNING/PRELIMINARY SCHEMATIC DESIGN AND COST ESTIMATING · Refine proposed alignment and define potential access points /open spaces · Conceptual renderings to build public interest and support future grant applications SITE DUE DILIGENCE · Further investigate adjacent property ownership /gaps in Land Bank ownership/ public right of way coordination PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONALS/CONSULTANTS: PROJECT APPROVAL SUPPORT · Strategic phasing plan and high-level cost estimates associated with phases · Partnership building and refining long-term stewardship plan · Define scope of work for future Framework Plan COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT + COORDINATION · Key stakeholder interviews · Material preparations and public engagement events/activities to build support, interest and to understand community priorities and align economic and cultural opportunities. The total budget for this phase of work is anticipated to be $1,350,000. The City has committed $250,000 which is to be spent this fiscal year, and the Taskforce has submitted for the Chicago Prize and has submitted a letter of interest to the Mellon Foundation and been invited to apply.
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Grant Recipient
Trustees of Princeton University
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Grant Recipient
The Chicago Community Trust
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Grant Recipient
The Chicago Community Foundation/Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance
This is the re-funding application for the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance. The Chicago Community Trust is a founding member and the host to the Funder Alliance. This application will support the Funder Alliance in FY22 and FY23. It re-confirms CCT as a "Leadership Funder" which means that funding (at least in part) pools with the other Leadership Funders, and that a CCT representative sits on the CWFA Management Committee to direct the funder collaborative's strategies, staff and grant-making. The application itself, as agreed to by Leadership Funders, is mainly cut and pasted from the latest version of the CWFA Leadership Funder Generic Proposal.
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Grant Recipient
ARAB AMERICAN FAMILY SERVICES