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
Injustice Watch NFP
Injustice Watch is in the middle of a three-year strategic plan that culminates at the end of 2025. Our team is working to assess and determine the proper organizational structure, size, and funding model for long-term sustainability and impact. To do so, we must better understand our audience and community's information needs. We are seeking funding to support several audience-related initiatives that we hope to learn from as we consider our future.
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Grant Recipient
FINANCIAL HEALTH NETWORK INC
Leveraging the unique research methodology pioneered by the U.S. Financial Health Pulse, FHN will launch this second round of the “Chicago Financial Health Pulse” to understand how the financial lives of diverse communities in Chicago are changing over time. The Chicago Community Trust commissioned the 2022 Financial Health Network (FHN) Chicago Pulse® to understand the multiple dimensions of financial wellbeing that are foundational for wealth building and to inform targeted approaches to building a more prosperous, equitable Chicago region. That study established the baseline by documenting the stark racial and ethnic disparities in asset ownership, debt burden, income growth, and financial security within Cook County and Chicago based on responses from over 5,400 participants across Cook County. By conducting a Chicago Pulse survey every three years, FHN hopes to be able to track changes that occur as a result of the interventions that the Trust and others make to improve the financial wellbeing of Cook County residents. This project would be one pillar of the Trust’s broader strategy to close the racial wealth gap in Chicago over the next decade. By understanding how Chicago residents are spending, saving, borrowing, and planning, researchers could identify policy and industry solutions that would help close the racial wealth gap. Findings from the study could be used to galvanize conversations across an array of stakeholders committed to investing in solutions to close the racial wealth gap over the next ten years.
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Grant Recipient
Growing Community Media NFP
For 38 years, Growing Community Media’s Austin Weekly News has covered Chicago’s West Side, offering a strong mix of policy, politics, spot and breaking news, and feature stories. We provide this at no cost to the West Side daily online and weekly in print. During the past five years, GCM has become a nonprofit newsroom with four news outlets, including AWN. We operate with a diversified funding stream supported by advertising in four papers, subscriptions in three of them, and by donor and philanthropic assistance across all of our properties. We recently restructured our newsroom. We are now led by a woman and award-winning veteran journalist Erika Hobbs, the editor-in-chief who sets the vision and growth blueprints for all four of GCM’s publications, including AWN. GCM believes in equity, diversity, intersectionality and inclusion, and we try to reflect that in our vision: “We are accessible and accountable to our communities. Our coverage is authentic, fair and accurate. We are conscious of and willing to acknowledge our biases. We address complex issues and ask difficult questions of ourselves and others. We incorporate all voices and perspectives in our reporting, particularly those who are marginalized.” We embrace these values because we believe they create a respectful, welcoming, vibrant world to live in, and because we believe that we need to break down barriers in journalism that have prevented groups of people from speaking up or out, and have prevented them from narrating their own stories. Intersectionality is key to this, and we’re intentional about that in our practices and reporting, particularly when it comes to race. We strive for authentic representation, full and empowered participation, and a true sense of belonging for all people — readers and employees alike. We believe that all voices need to be at the table for us to make our best decisions. We have found that the ad-driven model of the business constrained our ability to put our vision in practice, and in fact, we don’t think that model alone is a sustainable practice on the West Side. In contrast, we have found our new, nonprofit status to be freeing. Through active philanthropy and visionary staff, we can “blow up” old practices and craft a better AWN for our readers. To that end, we are ready to amplify our West Side reporting with a bold and ambitious plan to build a bureau on the West Side so that we can establish a strong physical presence there and, possibly, open our doors to others in Chicago’s news ecosystem that cover the same or similar areas. This would be the first of its kind in the Chicago region. We call this the Building Big on the West Side Project. We plan to expand AWN from a 12-page newspaper with a half-time reporter and freelancers to a full-fledged newsroom with a managing editor, funded largely, we hope, by a Press Forward grant, two reporters and a digital team so that we can authentically and accurately represent the West Side. Because we believe “nothing about us without us,” this expansion ensures that the bureau will be led and staffed by journalists of color. It includes reimagining and crafting editorial content unique to West Side readers. It’s not just stories: We envision a change to design and digital strategy, as well. We’ll expand those ideas in coming sections of this application. To be clear, there will be no other Chicago news outlet of this size on the West Side. AWN is best positioned to build this bureau because of the trust, relationships and partnerships it has forged in those communities over the decades, and because of the impact its journalism already has had on the West Side. To assist us, we will be partnering with Austin Coming Together, the West Side’s leading collective impact nonprofit, and under our Implementation Partnership agreement with ACT – which is attached – will align our efforts with the community narrative goals of Austin’s Quality-of-Life plan. We will also reach out to local schools, NABJ, NAHJ and other associations to recruit top talent, and will convene a hiring committee made up of diverse interviewers from inside and outside GCM. And to ensure our workplace is a safe, welcoming space that practices antiracism and multiculturalism internally and in reporting, we plan to contract with Media Bridge for intensive DEIB training for the entire GCM staff. We envision this as a multi-year project before we’re fully staffed. Our $125,000 request will start us on that path. We will actively seek additional philanthropic support to fully realize our plan.
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Grant Recipient
Investigative Project on Race and Equity
The Investigative Project on Race and Equity, through its data-driven journalism and collaborations with other newsrooms, trains and mentors the next generation of journalists on investigative reporting techniques. The Project bolsters the capacity of newsrooms to do more in-depth reporting through a lens on race and equity and helps emerging media organizations seeking to improve coverage of under-represented communities.
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Grant Recipient
Borderless Magazine NFP
Thanks to the support of Chicagoans, Borderless has made tangible – and independently documented – impacts in our region since our launch in 2020. Borderless is reaching communities in our region and filling gaps in news coverage through our multilingual reporting. We provide critical information to Chicagoans through our resource guides, by centering the voices of immigrants in our feature stories, and holding those in power accountable with our investigations into industry and local government. Every story we publish is available for free on our website in Spanish and English, with additional stories available in Dari/Persian, French and Arabic. Chicagoans have come to trust Borderless’ reporting over the last five years because of our journalists’ deep connections to the communities we serve and our commitment to fairness and accuracy. “Borderless Magazine is such an important publication for our community,” one reader recently shared on Instagram. “They fearlessly demand space for refugee and immigrant stories to be told and celebrated.” Our small team punches above our weight. In the last six months alone, we broke what became an international story when we published our investigation into the dangerous conditions at a city-funded migrant shelter where a five-year-old boy later got sick and died. We were highlighted as a leader in local immigration coverage in a University of Texas study on Chicago’s news ecosystem. Last year, we won the national Gather Award in Community-Centered Journalism at the Online Journalism Awards for our innovative use of field canvassers to reach Spanish-speaking Chicagoans, who represent one-third of the city’s population. We are now asking for Press Forward’s support to make our community connections sustainable. We want to build on what we have learned over the last five years by expanding our capacity to serve our diverse audience and increase revenue from that audience by hiring a part-time Spanish engagement reporter and a part-time development associate. Our new Spanish Engagement Reporter will help decrease the turnaround time of our translations, making our work even more accessible, and will develop and produce our first Spanish-exclusive news product, an SMS service. Our new Development Associate will increase the capacity of our staff by taking over the development and production of donation drives, donor recruitment and engagement events and corporate sponsorships in our newsletter and for events. Press Forward’s support would catalyze Borderless’ growth and sustainability for years. By making our community connections more sustainable, we can better serve our city’s diverse and underserved populations and scale the strategies that have made our work impactful over the last five years.
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Grant Recipient
South Side Weekly NFP
As South Side Weekly prepares to significantly expand our community engagement efforts in FY25, we are applying to enhance our physical distribution infrastructure and serve as a multidimensional locus for resource and information exchange. Our model has always imagined the newsroom as a community resource, and we want to make a firm stride in that direction–in partnership with community stakeholders.
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Grant Recipient
Jardincito Nature Play Community Garden
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Grant Recipient
Art of Noyz Ministries, Incorporated