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
NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING SERVICES OF CHICAGO INC
The 3C Non-Conventional Secondary Market Loan Fund is essentially a revolving loan fund that supports the liquidity of entities that lend to underserved communities in their region. The loan fund leverages no-to-low interest rate philanthropic dollars and funding from municipal and the private market to either originate below market interest rate loans or provide the capital into which this funding mechanism will securitize and sell tranches of performing loans to provide capital that recycles back to the lending entity. The 3C loan product will be made available to mortgage-ready buyers counseled by 3C housing counseling agencies who purchase newly constructed homes by BIPOC and mission-focused developers participating in the 3C Developer Alliance. While this loan fund will be piloted in two neighborhoods in Chicago – East Garfield Park and Humboldt Park – as a countermeasure to displacement of long-term residents, we are building the infrastructure and partnerships based on scalability nationally. The Chicago Community Trust (CCT) grant will help fund an estimated 25 loan originations and support fund start-up costs.
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Grant Recipient
The Chicago Community Foundation/The Fund for Equitable Business Growth
Over the past three years, the Fund for Equitable Business Growth has focused on strengthening the small business ecosystem through funding individual business serving organization (BSO) partnerships, building those individual partnerships into a networked coalition of service provides, piloting approaches to enhancing data infrastructure, and addressing barriers to capital access. The BSO Collective is the foundation of the work of FEBG driving the other work of the fund. To date, FEBG funding – over $10 million since 2019 – has provided resources for BSOs to develop the capacity provide more robust services to entrepreneurs. For the first 3 years, FEBG has supported partnerships of BSOs on the theory that collectives of BSOs can provide better, more cohesive service to business owners than individual BSOs. In the current year, FEBG is focusing on the cross-collaboration of BSO partnerships to further build the social and knowledge capital, thus strengthening the broader network of entrepreneurial support. This grant will allow FEBG to advance the collaboration of BSO partnerships, particularly in the areas of capital access and educational resources sharing.
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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.