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…
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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.
Explore Our Discretionary Grants
Showing 4341–4348 of 3857 results
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Grant Recipient
La Raza Chicago, Inc.
The Latino community faces growing attacks, frequently from the very top of presidential campaigns and other groups, that exacerbate xenophobia, racism, stigmatization and present threats to the community wellbeing, its cultural identity, and to the American democracy and society in general too. Hateful narratives and disinformation, that include threats of mass deportation and community dislocation, produce fear, hurt the Latino community, and make Latinos vulnerable facing distorted communications, unfair representation and marginalization, and even aggressive behavior from individuals permeated by confrontational, polarized, and misleading discourses. In that context, La Raza's Latino Community Intelligence and Media Engine is a transformative and narrative-changing initiative aimed to empower the Chicago Latino community, with its large component of Spanish speakers, immigrants, and mixed-status families, with two major goals. One, with solidarity, to engage the Chicago Latino community to cultivate cohorts of thinkers, writers, and citizen reporters that, during study and discussion sessions with support from La Raza’s journalists, will release their collective intelligence, leverage the power of journalism and storytelling, and apply new digital technologies -especially Artificial Intelligence tools- to create a corpus of community knowledge, analysis, testimonials, proposals, stories, and statements to describe and analyze the current realities affecting Latinos, to change narratives by expressing their true community values, and to help to counteract the xenophobia, racism, stigmatization, misinformation, and harmful political rhetoric that is growing in our society. This is particularly acute considering the real possibility of this dangerous rhetoric becoming actual government policy after the 2024 election. Two, to provide the community cohorts with access to La Raza’s know-how and media platforms to disseminate their stories, research, statements, and other contents, and to train and motivate them to use and use more digital technologies and AI tools to catalyze their thinking and messages, raise their voices, and reduce the digital gap. Through study circles, capacity building and community-focused journalism, we aim to generate a corpus of community intelligence, stories, and collective knowledge that will allow our people to better understand the issues affecting Latinos and immigrants in Chicago and the USA and will motivate them to work collectively to craft and disseminate narratives that are fact-based and reflect their truth and values, their relevance for the American society overall, and the magnificence of their cultural heritage, fostering a more democratic, inclusive and equitable society. In the context of the present crisis of media, this solidarity project will be also key to La Raza’s goals of transforming itself to better adapt to our audience needs, to produce innovative, engaging, and relevant content, to experiment and thrive in the digital technology realms, and to increase our sustainability and community engagement options. The success of this project will allow it to consolidate, gain additional funding, and become a permanent institute, a core activity of La Raza’s, with the possibility of expanding and replicating to include more participants, tackle new issues, and serve more communities in Chicago and beyond.
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Grant Recipient
Reparations Media NFP
Build the capacity of the Change Agents lab to build upon the proven success in our audio series and our collaborative relationships with community organizations to amplify community-driven grassroot solutions to society’s most pressing issues – including reentry after incarceration, homeownership disparities, anti-Blackness, and violence in Chicago’s marginalized communities and across the Midwest.
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Grant Recipient
Lambda Publications, Inc.
Windy City Times (WCT), Chicago’s legacy LGBTQ+ newspaper, respectfully requests funding to support additional staff capacity on our Newsletter and Audience Engagement team. During the two-year capacity-building period, two new part-time staff members will help WCT grow our recently launched “Chicago Social Butterflies” newsletter, launch three new newsletters that will serve Chicago’s diverse LGBTQ+ community, and grow our audience base. These new products, in turn, will lead to increased earned and contributed revenue streams that will ultimately support WCT’s other vital reporting on Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community.
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Grant Recipient
Cicero Independiente
Cicero Independiente requests $125,000 in grant funding over two years to increase our organizational capacity. Grant funds will partially support the salaries for a new position - an Operations Manager - and support for an existing role - an Audience and Digital Communications Director. During the two-year capacity-building period, these staff members will enable Cicero Independiente’s transition to a nonprofit organization, board development, the development of a corporate sponsorship program, and a significant increase in digital reach. These efforts in turn, will lead to increased earned and contributed revenue streams that will ultimately support Cicero Independietne’s vital reporting on Cicero and Berwyn.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago News Weekly, LLC
Chicago News Weekly is seeking support for capacity building to increase opportunities for BIPOC journalists and community members.
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Grant Recipient
Respair Production & Media
Respair Production & Media (RPM) is an ecosystem hub initiative creating and supporting the media needed to reshape culture toward liberation. Based in Chicago, Respair Production and Media builds new media projects in partnership with social movement participants and visionaries, enabling their work to reach new audiences and creating space for the ideological frameworks and material needs of those reimagining our world to be heard, shared, and supported. Respair contributes programming, production, publishing, development, and personal tools to emergent media makers, while encouraging the autonomy necessary to independently build transformative media. A resilient, sustainable media ecosystem is both a necessary tool for liberation and a difficult structure to build. Respair makes it possible for movement mediamakers in Chicago and beyond to have access to the resources and support they need to create without compromise.
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Grant Recipient
Lansing Journal LLC
The Lansing Journal is uniquely positioned to serve overlooked communities in southern Cook County, but we lack the financial capacity to sustain and grow our operations. We have seen incremental growth since launching in 2017, but we need outside investment to hire the revenue-generating staff we need to support the journalism our community deserves. We are working hard to diversify our income sources, and these efforts will pay off in the long term, but we need help in the short term to reach these long-term sustainability goals. The impact of the local news we provide is already growing. Our diverse community is increasingly engaged because of the information we provide and the trust we have earned. We now need financial investment to sustain our work.
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Grant Recipient
Invisible Institute
The Invisible Institute is planning to expand its practice of “immersive engagement” in support of our team’s groundbreaking investigative reporting. Our project is oriented toward a specific need: while long-form reporting on public issues is vital, these kinds of lengthy investigations do not always reach the communities most impacted by government failures and abusive structures. The primary aim of this project is to create space and resources for an ongoing practice of experimentation and innovation with strategies for reaching the people most impacted by police abuse and official neglect with our reporting.