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
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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
Brown Sugar Bakery DBA I Hart Corporation
Brown Sugar Bakery is the only black woman owned chocolate confection manufacturing company in America, and we are in the process of finalizing a modern manufacturing factory that will help grow the national brand and create new employment opportunities. The Brown Sugar Bakery Factory is an urban manufacturing project that is transforming the former Cupid Candies factory into a state of the art chocolate manufacturing facility, and developing an epicenter for workforce development on the southwest side through creation of 50+ new jobs.
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Grant Recipient
Immigration Project Inc.
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Grant Recipient
Skills for Chicagoland's Future
Skills was created as a demand-driven workforce organization because the traditional workforce system has not closed the income and wealth gap, particularly for Black and Brown communities. Employers must be meaningfully engaged – alongside workers and communities—in the solution for the workforce system to move beyond its inherent biases and barriers to access, advancement, retention, and wealth generation. Skills has sought to play this critical intermediary role by bringing together the job seeker, partner community organizations, education/training providers, and more than 40 employers in Chicagoland, to drive better access to quality, livable wage jobs and career paths that provide upward mobility and advancement opportunities. Skills serves the unemployed and underemployed, focusing on communities that have the highest rates of unemployment and poverty. The top 10 communities that Skills served in 2022 include South Shore, Austin, Chatham, Auburn Gresham, Greater Grand Crossing, Roseland, North Lawndale, Near West Side, West Englewood, and Englewood; these communities’ unemployment rates ranged from 12-27% at a time when the citywide average is at 4.5%. These communities are predominantly Black and Brown, and the correlation between disinvestment and lack of access to economic opportunity is stark. Over its 11-year history, more than 90% of the candidates that Skills has served have been people of color due to our commitment to bridging access gaps to employment. Skills has also deepened partnerships with CBO partners in three communities and located staff and resources in these three areas (Englewood, North Lawndale, and Gage Park) to increase this work's impact and connect more candidates to jobs and career paths. Skills’ Career Pathways is a program that targets unemployed and underemployed participants seeking middle-skill roles, for which they may need an industry-recognized degree or credential, including licenses, certificates, and certifications. Skills' Career Pathways program provides intensive support and engages the job seeker before they begin their education and training journey. Through Pathways, Skills helps jobseekers enroll in classes with our education partners and places them into entry-level roles where they can earn income and gain work experience, ultimately connecting them to a middle-skill job opportunity as they advance or complete education and/or training. Since Skills developed its pathways program in 2018, the organization has executed 29 pathways cohorts, each time documenting learnings and refining program processes. In 2022, Skills placed 34 individuals into roles through Career Pathways, achieving 88% job retention at 90 days. Skills currently offers pathways in the healthcare sector for Certified Nursing Assistants and Pharmacy Technicians. - Individuals placed as Certified Nursing Assistants build on their credentials to advance in a career as a Medical Assistant, Licensed Practical Nurse, Registered Nurse, Emergency Medical Technician, or Paramedic. - Through the Pharmacy Technician Pathway, participants are trained to become Licensed Pharmacy Technicians. Once their license is achieved, they can earn a certification to become a Certified Pharmacy Technician and advance to Advanced/Senior Pharmacy Technician roles or into a position in Store Management. Skills is eager to expand its pathways offerings into additional industries, particularly those where Black and Brown candidates face barriers to entry, retention, and advancement. These industries also provide higher, livable wage earning and advancement potential. Skills is well-positioned to explore creating pathways are Financial Services, as the organization already does significant direct placement into banking roles and has well-established hiring partnerships with numerous banks, many of whom are represented on Skills' Board of Directors.
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Grant Recipient
Urban Juncture Foundation
The lack of locally-owned restaurants in Black communities is a key barrier to the revitalization in Black Chicago. Good food builds good community: the absence of quality restaurants and other food enterprises results in poor health, an absence of jobs, and a dearth of social and financial capital creation opportunities. By bringing together key community, industry, and resource partners in a proven model to facilitate the launch and growth of Black culinary businesses in Bronzeville, our project is addressing this problem head on. We are creating an enterprise - the Bronzeville Culinary Connection - that identifies and nurtures Black culinary professionals and entrepreneurs and develops a hub of Black cuisine in Bronzeville, the heart of Black Chicago. This investment in Black cuisine is already transforming our community and will provide the culinary seeds for transformation far beyond it. We’ve made great progress in our first two FEBG project years. Building on 20 years of investment in key spaces and initiatives at 51st Street and the Green Line and 43rd Street and the Green Line, we’ve established the BCC, engaged key BSO partners, and advanced a substantial number of Black culinary enterprises. Moreover, in the past 12 months we have secured approximately $2.5M in capital commitments to invest in our 51st Street culinary facility and to rehabilitate the West Annex of The Forum. In this third year of work, we propose to double down on building relationships with a small set of key partners and on focusing our collective effort on establishing a powerful Black culinary hub in Bronzeville. By substantially expanding culinary spaces at Boxville, creating a restaurant incubator in our 300-314 East 51st building next door, and bringing culinary enterprises (back) to The Forum at 43rd & the ‘L’, we will create the foundation necessary to catalyze the creation of Black culinary enterprises in Bronzeville and beyond. In order to accomplish this task, the BCC will coordinate the culinary enterprise support efforts of five key Urban Juncture initiatives: 1. The Illinois Small Business Development Center at Build Bronzeville will provide broad business support to culinary enterprises 2. The Boxville shipping container market will provide accessible "popup" and "first" spaces for incubating and accelerating culinary enterprises at 51st & Green Line 3. The Bronzeville Cookin' culinary facility will provide fully built out and outfitted hospitality spaces at 51st & Green Line 4. The Forum will return culinary, cultural, and event spaces to 43rd & the Green Line for the first time in a generation 5. Engage Bronzeville will provide complementary beautification, wellness, storytelling, and partner development support across the two locations In addition, the BCC will invest in developing a strong culinary community by supporting network building, leading development of key concepts, bringing deep culinary expertise to enterprises at - or seeking to come to - 51st/43rd & Green Line, and facilitating connections with industry and resource partners. This approach will allow us to establish - over the next 3 to 5 years - a vibrant core of Black-led and -owned culinary enterprises ranging from ‘micro’ to ‘large’ in the heart of Bronzeville; rapidly spreading stories of success and support, with a second generation of enterprises rising from the pioneers; a destination for patrons from the neighborhood and from across the region; a buzz from offering fully-outfitted, turnkey spaces in a sector starved for resources; and a magnet for leading Black chefs desiring to share their wisdom… and to share in the experience. This culinary hub will generate the jobs and the capital - social as well as financial - to drive the revitalization of Bronzeville, while providing the models and the inspiration to spark development of culinary hubs in other Black communities. * * * Our project advances an innovative and effective approach to executing the FEBG’s two core strategies: increasing access to capital for entrepreneurs and deepening collaboration across BSO partnerships: - Our primary strategy is to provide our entrepreneurs space and equipment - rather than capital itself. This allows us to lower the overall investment risk and thereby attract more capital into our ecosystem. We are much larger and more diverse than a typical startup and therefore reduce capital providers’ risk. Moreover, we benefit from economies of scale in building commercial infrastructure and, if one of our entrepreneurs fails, we can repurpose the space and equipment at relatively low cost rather than having to suffer the substantial losses typically resulting from emergency sales of distressed assets. - Our “Build Bronzeville" initiative comprises a set of complementary Business Support Organizations, including our SBDC (broad, sector-agnostic business support with a strong link to the State of Illinois), our BCC (deep culinary-specific business support with strong links the hospitality industry), and Boxville (accessible micro-spaces for incubation and acceleration), that combined with our ‘captive’ brick & mortar spaces (Bronzeville Cookin’ and The Forum) provide a deeply collaborative and integrated support system to the culinary entrepreneurs of color that we support. When we lean into this collaboration, as outlined in this proposal, we further strengthen our capacity to take entrepreneurs from concept to enterprise.
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Grant Recipient
NORTHWEST SIDE CDC
The Northwest Side CDC is requesting general operating support from the Chicago Community Trust to support our efforts in creating and supporting a thriving local economic ecosystem bolstered by community commerce, affordable housing options, and place keeping in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood
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Grant Recipient
Reform for Illinois
General operating funds request for Reform for Illinois, August 2023 grant cycle.
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Grant Recipient
Raised the Floor Alliance
Raise the Floor Alliance seeks $150,000 to advance our community-driven low-wage worker policy agenda, including the Work Without Fear Act and the Secure Jobs Act. These policies will address historical harms against low-wage, excluded, workers of color by transforming the culture of fear that chills their ability to claim employment rights. Over the next year, the key strategies will focus on building knowledge and narrative, building public and political will, escalating awareness and salience of our issues, and increasing coalition, constituent, and organizational power.
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Grant Recipient
North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council
The North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council (NLCCC) is an organizing and planning body for the North Lawndale community led by and for residents and deep stakeholders. We have created a comprehensive Quality of Life Plan that we are now implementing – catalyzing neighborhood investment in support of the projects and capital developments as planned by and for residents. Funds requested here would support operations and ongoing expansion of the NLCCC, convenings, and organizing efforts.