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
L ARCHE CHICAGO
For far too long and in the vast majority of leadership conversations, advocacy for disability justice has failed to include and intersect with advocacy for racial equity. This is true among Illinois' disability service providers and it has been true of our organization. L'Arche Chicago, with full backing from its board of directors, staff and clients, seeks grant funding to partner with Crossroads Antiracism - CROAR. The project and partnership would enable L'Arche to embark on a journey of organizational introspection and evaluation, building language, awareness and tangible systems that positively affect racial equity within our organization. We envision leveraging our learnings to influence local disability service providers.
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Grant Recipient
FREE SPIRIT MEDIA NFP
Free Spirit Media seeks funding to create and virtually screen films/videos and a collaborative PSA that confronts racism and explores potential solutions. The 3-5 hybrid screenings and round tables will showcase a multitude of independent media pieces meant to unite, build from shared experiences and dispel myths propagated to divide. The range of media produced will leverage historic knowledge and rich context from community members across Chicago, allowing for complex conversations, transparency, further understanding of intersectionality, healing and collective growth. Each event will be uniquely structured and moderated by media makers, collaborators, community members or subject matter experts, and broadcasted on multiple platforms.
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Grant Recipient
BEVERLY ART CENTER
Beverly Arts Center (BAC) requests support for the performance of “Front Porch Society,” by Beverly-resident Melda Beaty, accompanied by three moderated discussions on racial injustice with community members, law enforcement and other leaders of the 19th Ward. With themes that appear cut out of today’s headlines, the play surrounds a family facing the generational trauma of racism and police brutality, juxtaposed against the backdrop of the evening on which America elected its first Black president. Through this project, we hope that all members of the community will have an understanding and agreement that systemic racism is a root cause to the racial inequity in our community, and can identify actions to combat racial inequity.
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Grant Recipient
Court Theatre Fund
Court Theatre is committed to becoming a fully anti-racist organization by identifying structures and policies that are remnants of systemic white supremacy. Court recognizes three equal stakeholders in this work: the theatre, the UChicago community, and Chicago’s South Side residents. Internally, Court is working to create more equitable hiring practices, workday structures, racially sensitive conflict resolution, and training for all employees and partners of the theatre. Externally, Court is working to create deeper relationships with South Side community organizers and pipelines of access to education and career opportunities in theatre. Integral to this are mechanisms for accountability to stakeholders and the reporting of progress.
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Grant Recipient
COMMUNITY COUNSELING CENTERS OF CHICAGO
C4 is requesting support to provide mental health clinical staff and peer navigators with training on racial healing that will provide self-reflection and will increase competencies to engage racial healing dialogue with clients.
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Grant Recipient
Employee Connections Inc.
Our agency was established as a 501 (C) (3) organization in 2008. We have operated 17 workforce development programs & serviced over 2,000 youth/adults with barriers & those incarcerated. The issues of unrest in our community with law enforcement , high dropout rates, unemployment & high incarceration rates with African-Americans & Hispanics in our community is the reason for our proposal. We are proposing a project called “UNI’FORUM” – A Community Outreach Initiative to Rebuild Trust. Our Mission is to bring residents, law enforcement and government officials together to resolve these issues. We are seeking $30,000 to support our development/hosting of a series of forums, workshops, and events to bring healing to our community.
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Grant Recipient
Firebird Community Arts
A holistic and sustainable model for long-term racial healing and anti-racism in Chicago and beyond, our three pronged proposal includes training combined with tangible actions to put the training into lasting community use, as well as supports for healthy, sustainable growth. Training staff and youth in SELF trauma-informed curriculum to address the complex trauma of structural racism, initiating a youth-led public art interpretation of the SELF concepts as tools for healing, engaging in racial healing circles, and providing mental health support, Firebird Community Arts (FCA) will model healthy social connections and behaviors to simultaneously dismantle oppressive structures while imagining and building healthy practices to replace them.
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Grant Recipient
THE RENAISSANCE COLLABORATIVE INC
Restorative and racial justice is of the utmost importance in an organization that has many black and brown faces. The people we serve go out into the world every day with burdens that can't easily be erased and so programming around how to heal are needed and The Renaissance Collaborative's (TRC) service staff are just the people to help them learn how to do that healing. TRC have a wealth of experience working with this specific population and come to know the residents intimately over time. This program will train the TRC service staff in the areas of racial and restorative justice and provide residents with the incentive to attend racial and restorative justice group sessions to begin this healing process.