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.
Explore Our Discretionary Grants
Showing 2141–2148 of 4123 results
-
Grant Recipient
Honey Pot Performance
Honey Pot Performance (HPP) requests general operating funding to support staff time as we continue to root into our organizational structure, grow our capacity, and build out the three branches of our programming activities: long-form performance projects, public humanities works, and development and production support for Black artists.
-
Grant Recipient
African American Arts Alliance of Chicago
The 25-year-old African American Arts Alliance of Chicago respectfully seeks a $25,000 general operating grant in support of our Non-Profit art service organization. The mission of the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago is to increase interaction, communication, and development of African American arts organizations and artists while delivering programs that increase their visibility, marketability, stability, and sustainability. Our membership includes organizations and individual artists in the fields of theater, dance, music, literature, film, technology, and visual arts. We serve as an advocate on behalf of our membership to ensure that they are recognized as important economic contributors to the cultural fabric of our city and state while increasing their visibility and support within the local and national funding community. For nearly three decades, the Alliance has created and produced hundreds of capacity-building workshops that encourage, educate and support individual artists and arts organizations with professional resources and career-enhancing opportunities such as auditions, mentoring programs, and artist development. The Alliance is an active member of Arts Alliance Illinois’ Advocacy Leadership, where we advocate on behalf of the Black Arts community for increased funding and media representation. With the support of the African American Legacy Fund, the Alliance’s programs and workshops will continue to strengthen and enhance the capabilities and capacity of artists and leaders to serve the needs and interests of the arts & cultural community.
-
Grant Recipient
Girls Like Me Project
GLPMI’s Soul Power Healing Summer program is a multifaceted, multidimensional, holistic, collaborative group-mentoring summer program that focuses on digital storytelling as a tool of connectivity, critical thinking, and leadership for Black girls. Our program is structured around a “3E” methodology: Exposure, Examination, and Engagement. Participants are exposed to invaluable people, places, data, and opportunities through field trips to college campuses, museums, and Black cultural & social institutions, and innovative Black businesses. Participants will then examine and reflect on the Black historical experience in Chicago and beyond - through film screenings, workshops, curated thought leadership, lectures, group discussions, and customized leadership projects. (Topics to be covered include the Civil Rights Movement, Black Wall Street, Transnational Movements, Global Citizenry, and concepts of Black Diaspora and Black Excellence.) Finally, participants will engage in job-shadowing, mentorship, and career pathways trainings, with a particular emphasis placed on media literacy and digital storytelling. GLMPI is particularly keen on working with girls (ages 11-18), as this demographic is most disproportionately targeted and impacted by devaluing stereotypes and media messages of misogyny, self-hate, and destructive behavior that adversely normalizes circumstances of poverty and violence. GLMPI seeks to address this pressing challenge by providing media literacy and digital storytelling training to help Black girls resist stereotypes, critically analyze media, and use media to control the narrative of their experience. In 2019 GLMPI launched the D.I.V.A.S program, a structured media-focused mentoring program, which empowers Black girls to document their realities and share their experiences through film/photography/blogging/audio. Footage is subsequently used across trans-media platforms as social activism tools. Work will be showcased in culminating exhibits, during town halls and community forums. It will also be used for cultural exchange with international audiences, community gatherings and festivals. Our goal is to create viable pathways for our program participants to enter digital media careers. This will be facilitated through partnerships with corporations and businesses which offer internships and apprenticeships. We’d also usher girls into fields of study that support their career choices. Informed by the challenges of COVID-19, we have infused our D.I.V.A.S. program curriculum with mental health, wellness, and socio-emotional development and support. We have hosted 3 successful D.I.V.A.S in the City Summer programs – impacting # of girls. Over 1,000 underprivileged girls have been directly impacted through our free programs and events. We have built key partnerships with the University of Chicago Charter Network to supplement their academic instruction with social emotional programming. In October 2015, Congressman Danny K. Davis, Representative of Illinois District 7 recognized GLMPI with a Congressional record as a pioneer for its efforts hosting the annual Chicago Day of the Girl which connected more than 600 girls to the United Nation’s International Day of the Girl. Over the years, GLMPI has established strategic partnerships which has enhanced our organizational capacity to implement a Freedom Schools program. Most recently our leadership traveled to Ghana where we established a partnership with Bridge to Africa Connections for our Global Connections program. This travel opportunity was funded and supported by The Field Foundation. Prior to that trip, GLMPI sponsored global travel for two local girls groups to spend two weeks in Ecuador as a part of a community leadership travel program, with the goal of advancing our mission to foster a global sisterhood and global citizenry for our program participants. GLMPI has been widely recognized for our impact in the community. For example, in 2019, Girls Like Me Project was named Organization of the Year by Zeta Phi Beta, Sorority Inc. founded in 1920 during segregation of Black and White sororities and fraternities. These accolades and achievements attest to our effectiveness in attaining our organizational objectives and goals.
-
Grant Recipient
DEEPLY ROOTED PRODUCTIONS
Requested funds will help Deeply Rooted Dance Theater (DRDT) strengthen and expand its organizational infrastructure, programming, and impact in the coming year. This will include the company’s important progress toward a full-time company and staff of equitably compensated employees, the development of a South Side Center for Black Dance and Creative Communities, and a significant expansion of programming on the South Side.
-
Grant Recipient
EcoWomanist Institute
The EcoWomanist Institute (EWI), located in Chicago, Il is seeking $30,000 from CCT to continue to provide the mental, emotional and leadership support to Black women in leadership who are on the frontline of EJ communities working to dismantle the impact of decades of systemic racism and the toll it has taken on both them and their community. The EWI mental health model; Soulcare/Selfcare was created by a collaboration of African American women and women of African descent from a cross-section of Black women who represented urban communities in Chicago and other metropolitan cites. The EWI leadership team hosted what we affectionally call, "Kitchen table Talks", much like what we grow up seeing how the women in our families gathered to talk about things that mattered to them. We meet over the course of several months with Black women ranging in age from 19 to mid 70s, who represented a cross-section of occupations, college student, educators, community activists, social workers, entrepreneurs, block club leaders, environmentalist, lawyers, clergy public health workers and retirees. From the GED to the PhD, every voice at those tables was listen to and affirmed. Together we made the decision to create a mental health and leadership support model that we deemed "culturally relevant, deeply personal and unapologetically focused on what Black from all walks of life felt be needed to give ourselves. The late Audre Lorde reminded us that, " The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House". Therefore EWI is seeking funding to continue the work of "dismantling" the effects that systemic racism has had on Black women.
-
Grant Recipient
Ladies of Virtue NFP
Ladies of Virtue (LOV), a mentoring and leadership development program for girls aged 9-24 on Chicago’s South and West Sides will provide workshops, small group and individual mental health counseling to 200 girls and workshops for their parents, staff and mentors in our program. Counseling will support emotional well-being and social-emotional learning. Adult workshops cover trauma-informed care, adolescent mental health, social-emotional development in young people, and other topics requested by parents. All counseling and workshops will be delivered via in-person or videoconference by a licensed mental health professional.
-
Grant Recipient
Light of Loving Kindness
Light of Loving Kindness (LOLK) has a successful track record of creating, developing, implementing, and managing programs. The communities we serve are often victimized by poverty, high violence rates, and lack of resources. We work within communities that are low-income and underserved. Many residents in these neighborhoods lack resources, which can fuel violence. We all know how difficult teenage years can be. Today, many children in our schools are living lives filled with trauma of one sort or another, trauma that is often beyond their control, according to the Center for Disease Control. For the youth population that Light of Loving Kindness serves from underserved and underrepresented areas on Chicago’s West and South sides, society’s most strenuous challenges are also interwoven into that young adult’s every day life. Our programs address the Mental Health Challenges of violence, poverty, toxic stress, stigma, and provide for the mental health needs of African Americans, youth affected by COVID-19, and LGBTQ. To address the challenges and respond to the needs of mental health services, we have a growing network of community programs rooted in holistic trauma-informed care and social and emotional learning: 1. Self-Love Bootcamps for Teens 2. Leadership Internship for Teens 3. Paz Mental 4. Just As I AM 5. Mindful Youth Ambassadors We visualize a future in which young people, regardless of race, economic status, gender, sexual orientation, and/or background see themselves as unique, creative, and powerful human beings. At LOLK, we are trained, certified, and experienced practitioners specializing in science-based integrative, complementary, and alternative solutions for mental and physical wellness. We emphasize understanding, respecting, and responding to the effects of trauma in individual and group settings with trained psychologists and mindfulness-based practitioners. Our interactions are to help youth believe in themselves, to develop resilience and to heal in a gentle way that allows them to release layers of trauma, while focusing on a brighter future. Over the years, we are pleased to share that LOLK has become a hub for convening community partners to create collaborative solutions around the health and well-being of our community’s youth. LOLK teams with local organizations and practitioners to offer opportunities for our youth in need, from mental and physical health to lifestyle education. Once a client is within one of our programs, they have access to all of our programs - meaning we provide wrap-around services but more importantly, connectivity and longevity to a youth’s care. The construct of our program is made to support activities that are proven to reduce involvement in the criminal or juvenile justice system, while reducing symptoms of mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, self-harming, suicidal ideations, and trauma recovery, and support related mental health services for youth, and in extension, their families and communities. The substantial collaborators we are partnering with for the African American Legacy Fund Initiative are YourPassion1st and Insight In You. All three organizations involved in this proposal are Black-Led and Black-Serving, committed to improving the quality of life of Black people throughout Chicago’s metropolitan region. Light of Loving Kindness is a 501(c)3, non-profit organization, whose mission is to empower the next generation of conscious leaders by providing access to internal streams of awareness, through holistic solutions, mindfulness-based tools, social-emotional learning, and human connection, delivered through specialized programming and community services, culminating in the self-esteem and confidence needed to pursue their life’s purpose. To strategically plan our impact and organizational direction, we follow an Operating Model, and have External Goals and Objectives for our work in the community, as well as Internal Goals and Objectives for our work as a business entity. A philanthropic contribution from African American Legacy Fund and Chicago Community Trust towards our operating dollars will facilitate both the programming and collaborating aspects of our Operating Model. LOLK’s approach to qualitative and quantitative data collection and data management is strategically tied to our program delivery, community responsiveness, and directional goals and objectives. We conduct formative assessments, cumulative assessments, Strength Deployment Inventory, and Personal Data Collection with our participants. The use of our data provides a big-picture overview of how LOLK is currently performing. This results in a more well-intentioned nonprofit and influences our decision-making going forward.
-
Grant Recipient
New LIfe K.N.E.W. Solutions Mental Health Community Center
New Life Knew Solutions is a minority-owned and operated Community Mental Health Center established in 2019. NLKS's current client population is 90% comprised of the target demographic for this funding opportunity. Treating individuals and families desiring therapeutic services is an investment in Chicago's Westside neighborhoods. Operational funding through the Mental Health Strategy will support the need for accessible mental health services while addressing the challenges. Challenges include inadequate numbers of Licensed practitioners who specialize in Cognitive Behavioral, Expressive Art, Behavioral Health, and Emotionally Focused therapies and a lack of online access for people seeking treatment.