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
SMALL BUSINESS MAJORITY FOUNDATION INC
Small Business Majority [SBM] requests support to continue Pathways to Entrepreneurial Growth, offered in partnership with Rogers Park Business Alliance [RPBA] and New Covenant Community Development Center [NCCDC]. Pathways increases access to business support, financial management training and capital for entrepreneurs of color by linking together SBM’s Business Bootcamp, RPBA’s GROW/PROGRESANDO and NCCDC’s Financial Dashboard programs. Partners monitor outcomes and feedback from multi-program participants and identify adaptable best practices aimed at boosting cultural competence and humility in service delivery—key to increasing effective, fair service delivery for entrepreneurs disproportionately harmed by structural discrimination, public disinvestment and the pandemic.
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Grant Recipient
AUSTIN COMING TOGETHER
The Austin Community Hub is a radically hospitable space where we welcome Austin Coming Together (ACT) member organizations and Austin residents to collaborate, connect and get support. The Hub, as an Initiative, is a collaboration between the Service Delivery Enhancement and Engagement teams at ACT. Together, the Hub responds to community engagement, youth and family engagement, ACT member and partner engagement, as well as counseling & case management and network capacity building. One of the primary goals of the Hub is to thoughtfully engage with as many Austin residents as possible and to refer them to services and opportunities in our vast network of providers and resource partners.
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Grant Recipient
Brighton Park Neighborhood Council
Brighton Park Neighborhood Council (BPNC) is requesting funding support to expand our HUD-certified Financial Services programming to include Workforce Development and enhance our comprehensive Case Management services. We aim to increase the number of clients served on Chicago’s southwest side through our provision of free financial literacy skill-building, foreclosure prevention counseling financial planning assistance, pre- and post-purchase homebuyer counseling, and connections to quality employment training and job placement opportunities in partnership with PODER, a local nonprofit organization also serving Chicago’s southwest side.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Community and Workers Rights
Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights (referred to in this application as Chicago Community) houses a worker-owned cooperative incubator (EJE - Economic Justice and Equity for Collective Development), which includes providing outreach and education surrounding general cooperative concepts, and provides alternative business models that empower workers to create collective wealth and opportunities for their communities. There is a lack of equity and justice that leads to the poverty rates in the community we serve; the types of jobs offered to workers provide no unions, unsafe working conditions, lack of a liveable wage, and no opportunities for growth. We believe in economic justice, and are working to support low-income workers and Latinx communities by helping them access more opportunities to set their own business goals, work standards, and create their own wealth through cooperatives, collectives, or family businesses. Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights will provide outreach and education on Worker Cooperatives to Latinx immigrant communities on the Southwest Side of Chicago. The organization’s goal is to provide outreach and education on worker cooperatives, and ensure that the community we serve familiarizes itself with the concept of worker-owned cooperatives, and how beneficial they are to both the community and workers. Not only do we hope to find workers who want to participate in our cooperative incubator and successfully create a cooperative, but our organization will work to encourage community support for emerging and existing cooperatives. Worker-owned cooperatives benefit the community because they give back the neighborhoods, and our organization hopes to conduct outreach to help those we serve understand how important it is for them to support these businesses. Chicago Community will work to create an ecosystem that supports each other, and towards expanding equity, social justice, and workers rights. Our organization will continue to work with Raise The Floor to advance pro-worker laws, as well as the Illinois Worker Cooperative Alliance to promote economic equity and support for worker cooperatives in communities of color. We will continue to work and collaborate on initiatives, projects, and campaigns with many organizations across the state to defend the rights of workers, fight racial inequity, and advocate for laws and policies to promote and advance the living conditions of workers of color and their families.
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Grant Recipient
Greater Englewood Chamber of Commerce
The GECC is a Black-led organization dedicated to working in the Englewood community with a high concentration of African-American residents. With an emphasis on the following area, the Chamber's workplan closely fits with the Catalyzing Neighborhood Investment strategy: • Economic opportunity: By assisting small businesses, offering job training, and connecting locals with employment prospects, the GECC seeks to enhance economic opportunity in Englewood. The GECC has a proven track record of achievement. The VIP Shopper Card program, the Englewood Business Incubator, and the Chamber's continued participation in the Englewood Business Plan Competition are just a few of the successful programs that have been developed in Englewood.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Jobs Council
A good job should be within reach for everyone, regardless of where they start or where they’ve been. But it’s not that simple. For generations, the systems and policies intended to serve us — including workforce, education, housing, and criminal justice — have created an inherent set of disadvantages for people of color. That’s why Chicago Jobs Council (CJC) works with lawmakers and community leaders to redesign policies with a racially equitable and just lens. We aim to improve workforce services and skill-building programs, eliminate systemic barriers to employment, and foster employment access that benefits those who need it the most. We work with our member organizations and advocacy partners to advance policies that increase access to family-sustaining jobs and remove structural barriers to employment that disproportionately affect people of color. This grant would support CJC to convene the Transit Table coalition and the Illinois Skills for Good Jobs Agenda table. We will integrate our newly launched anti-racist workforce development framework into our policy initiatives. This framework envisions a workforce development system that prioritizes every worker's future financial stability, career pathway, and economic security. It honors the humanity of all people and centers those most impacted by systemic racial injustice. We will build transformative relationships between people and systems, providing quality jobs, and removing funding obstacles that inhibit progress.
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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
Economic Security Project Inc.
Economic Security Project and Economic Security Illinois have been the drivers of the Guaranteed Income movement since its inception. Chicago has emerged as a guaranteed income leader—this past February, the City released research from the University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab underscoring the critical need for its guaranteed income programs; and the Chicago Future Fund launched a new round of guaranteed income funding. These moves will increase support for cash and help achieve wins that give more families stability, freedom, and dignity. To capture the energy of our Guaranteed Income Community of Practice—which grew to over 620 members—we will identify local leaders and build them up as champions across the ideological spectrum where cash policies are gaining popular support. As an organization, we have taken the GI concept from theory to pilot to policy. Our cash work provides a stabilizing force for vulnerable populations. Now it is time to expand that idea and stabilize entire communities through Public Options. One of the bold market-shaping ideas gaining traction across the country is a public option. Public options are goods and services that are 1) government-provided, procured, or authorized; 2) available to all; and 3) can coexist with private options, creating positive outcomes for communities. Through public options, the government can provide a baseline of products or services essential for everyday families, such as affordable healthcare, housing, groceries, education, and basic utilities. The underlying premise is that no one should go without the basics because of the failures of “free” markets. ESP is supercharging the public options field by building a network of practitioners, campaigners, government leaders, and experts across sectors and geographies and populating the narrative on the expansion and effectiveness of public options. They are gaining steam in many states and municipalities: California’s CalRx initiative to produce low-cost insulin, the push for public power in Maine, and Oklahoma and Boston’s universal Pre-K initiatives are all prominent examples. Washington, Colorado, and Nevada have all passed legislation to create a public option for health insurance, as Virginia begins discussions to do the same. In a survey of the landscape, however, we’ve identified that many of these efforts are under-resourced, unaware of each other’s efforts, and falling under the national radar. These campaigns are eager to accelerate their work and have the talent to do it. We believe that concentrated attention and resources, convening power, and wrap-around support could take these nascent efforts and turn them into a national movement. Another aspect of this pilot to policy work we are embarking on is simplified filing for income taxes. Right now, EITC uptake is 80% – so at least 20% of eligible families don’t get their credits because it’s too hard and expensive to file taxes. A disproportionate number of likely households of color and those with extremely low incomes. This project would create a public option for tax filing, get us closer to our goal of automatic filing for tax credits, and help more low-income Americans keep their own money. For taxpayers who don’t itemize, average tax prep costs $220 – that’s often more than the value of their state tax credits that go right into paid tax prep’s profits.