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
CIRCA Pintig
Project Name: Arts for Humanity and Compassion: For 2023-24, CIRCA Pintig continues to build upon the theme of promoting the arts for community empowerment and cross-cultural understanding. Arts-for-healing is embedded in CP’s arts creation-performance and community engagement programming. Healing as a process also should build upon the promotion of compassion as a cultural ethos, one that installs arts and social justice not as a binary but an integrated approach for the greater good of humanity. With people of color and LGBT people being at the center of cultural wars in America, CP embarks on a programming that expands the discourse on Anti-Asian hate, mental health and queer identity. Such programming will be implemented through the following activities and events: Arts Creation and Performance: 1. "Daryo’s All-American Diner” Outreach Performance: After its successful run in May 2023 at the St. Ebenezer Auditorium, CP will bring the play to different performance venues in greater Chicago area from October 2023 to May 2024.. The play will kick off with a weekend run at the Rizal Community Center on Irving Park and Clark in October for the Filipino History Month. This strategy is also seen a part of CP’s continuing dialogues with community members in the Filipino and Asian American communities. Excerpts from the play will also be performed in schools and universities in the Chicago area in partnership with Hana Center and Filipino Student organizations at University of Illinois-Chicago and Loyola University. 2. Now in the process of script finalization, “Panther in the Sky” by Lani Montreal will see its full production in partnership with Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble in the Fall of 2023 at St. Ebenezer Auditorium. The production will be a stylized performance that integrates poetry, drama and dance. It will run for three weekends in November-December, 2023. 3. “Short Acts: Queerantine, Love in the time of Corona”: CP will present a collection of short plays (10-15 minutes) by CP’s resident playwrights Lani Monteal and RJ Silva. The anthology will feature stories that speak of gay, lesbian and transgender themes. The collection aims to give voice to LGBT issues as a response to the silencing of queer voices and the banning of queer-themes books happening in some parts of the country. Performances are scheduled in May-June 2024 as CP's contribution to Gay Pride Week. Community Engagement: CP is renewing its partnership with Dr. Rooshey Hasnain of UIC in a project called WAANT (Wellness Through Asian American Narratives and Theater). The project addresses an under-examined areas of research with college students of all races and ethnicities, especially Asians, whose voices have too often been silent due to cultural stigmas. CP artist-teachers will conduct writing and scene improvisation workshops with the students in the Fall 2023 semester to culminate in a series of stage performances in the Spring 2024 semester.
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Grant Recipient
APIDA Arts
Art and creative expression are the beating heart and breathing soul of the Asian, Pacific Island, and Desi/South Asian American (APIDA) community in Chicago. Without creativity, our community is hampered from fully expressing or realizing itself and audiences are denied access to the multi-dimensionality our Asian American culture. Even though Asians are the fastest growing population in Chicagoland, we are still underrepresented on Chicago’s main stages, which is why the APIDA Arts organization produced the largest APIDA Arts Festival in the history of the Midwest this past May. Centering on our identity and grounded in self-expression and wellness, we brought over 130 APIDA artists to Chicago’s premiere venues such as the Chicago Cultural Center, Goodman Theatre, Museum of Contemporary Arts, and Lookingglass Theatre. Over 1,100 multi-racial audience members experienced the fullness of the APIDA community through its artists and makers at the festival. In order to continue to bring exposure and expression of APIDA artists in Chicago, the APIDA Arts organization needs funding to amplify and unify the booming local APIDA arts community through producing more arts festivals and showcasing new work. Our new Board includes long time APIDA arts advocate Mia Park, a professional actress, MC, event producer, and volunteer; Dr. Ada Cheng, master story telling, story telling instructor, organizer, and playwright; Richard Costes, deaf actor, director, and disability advocate and consultant; and Jonald Reyes, director of the inaugural Victor Wong Improv Fellowship at Second City, director, producer. Other pending Board members include a Goodman Theatre employee, an arts magazine publisher, two attorneys, the director of the South Asian Film Festival, and other luminaries from the APIDA community. To meet the urgent need of APIDA representation in the arts, the APIDA Arts organization will host a minimum of two annual public arts events, with a major festival every May. In addition, we aim to support new works throughout the year by supporting developmental workshops. We will continue to bring APIDA arts and creativity before the eyes of Chicagoans and internet users. Expected outcomes will be at least one work per year from the festivals and showcases to be developed and featured at professional venues. We will track audience members and increase them by 10% per event. We will continue to solicit work from new and unknown APIDA artists from Chicagoland to be represented with a minimum of five new artists per year to be featured. Board members will have a minimum amount of $1,000 donations they must raise as well as a minimum of $500 worth of donated goods and services towards supporting the APIDA Arts organization. We anticipate our return venues to provide financial support for the May festival again, and for ticket sales to raise the capital needed to secure spaces and resources for the smaller events. The $8,000 AGC grant would go towards: Infrastructure 8% to Fiscal Sponsor: $640 Developing a new Wordpress website: $1,000 Quicken software: $120 Staff wages for 4 months: $4,000 Autumn Event Space rental: $250 Public relations: $600 Photographer: $300 Videographer $300 Artist hospitality: $200 Artist pay: $500 nMisc: $90 The APIDA Arts organization is focused on supporting APIDA artists and makers bring life to themselves, to our community, and to the world by showcasing and developing their work. These displays will, in turn, educate and empower audiences members to become better participants in our conversations of self-discovery, which is a discovery for all.
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Grant Recipient
Fathers Families Healthy Communities
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Grant Recipient
IL Muslim Civic Coalition
The promise of America is that all citizens have the same rights and opportunities to prosper, but that is simply not true. Asians in the U.S. are a diverse group of people from different countries of origin who speak different languages, represent different cultural and faith traditions and have a wide range of wealth and educational achievement. While many see Asians as the "good minority," there are groups and subgroups in the U.S. who are among the poorest, least educated and most likely to face issues of unemployment, hunger and poor health. There are many barriers to overcome for the voices of all Asian Americans to be heard, including racism, religious discrimination, language barriers and gaps in cultural understanding. The Muslim Civic Coalition (Coalition) is working to help people overcome those barriers and realize their full rights and opportunities. The work of the Coalition meets the overall goal of helping members of Chicago’s API communities achieve improvement across quality of life issues by empowering them to participate in civic structures in the U.S., in Illinois, and in Chicago. Understanding communities, collaboration with organizations that serve them and participating in elections, and town hall meetings and forums that set policies and elect candidates who represent their interests, helps ensure that API communities throughout Chicago can affect policies that benefit them.
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Grant Recipient
National Cambodian Heritage Museum & Killing Fields Memorial
The National Cambodian Heritage Museum & Killing Fields Memorial seek a general operating support from the Asian Giving Circle. The grant support help NCHM strengthen its organizational capacity and provide holistic and integrated programs to the Cambodian community, which facilitate the community to heal through art, language, memory, and history.
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Grant Recipient
Muslims for Just Futures
Muslims for Just Futures is requesting seed funding ($8,000) to support MJF’s 2023-2024 powerbuilding programming focused on Northside Chicago. MJF’s powerbuilding strategies will focus on organizing and movement-building. These funds will support Muslim Women’s Summer Powerbuilding Institute, networking mixers to connect organizers and community builders, as well as a year long movement-building project to examine the ways the War on Terror impacts Chicago communities and affirmative visions for Chicago’s just futures.
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Grant Recipient
Gilloury Institute Silk Road Rising
Silk Road Rising respectfully requests support from Asian Giving Circle to grow our storytelling capacities. We have served Chicago’s AAPI, immigrant, and refugee communities across Chicagoland for over twenty years. With your partnership, we will launch new artmaking projects, foster new community partnerships, and deepen our commitment to expanding the representation of Pan-Asian cultures.
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Grant Recipient
Center for Neighborhood Technology