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
ILA Creative Studio
ILA is a Chicago-based and Chicago-serving nonprofit. Our mission is to connect Black artists to resources that educate and elevate their individual purpose. We do so by constantly increasing the access and possibilities for generations of Black artists to grow and have sustainable lives in the arts. We have seen the impact our programs have on the community we serve and want to be in a position to consistently provide these resources to our city’s artists and community at large.
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Grant Recipient
Association House of Chicago
Association House's Workforce Training programs provide participants with opportunities to gain the hard and soft skills needed to build life-long careers. Participants who complete training are connected with potential employers and placed in jobs that earn a competitive wage and benefits with opportunities for growth. During and after training, participants are connected with other agency programs to mitigate barriers to training and employment - such as the agency's food pantry, assistance with public benefits applications, or substance use counseling. Current industry-specific workforce training programs include Financial Careers Training, which prepares participants for careers in banking, and Kitchen Training, which prepares justice-involved participants for careers in restaurants/hospitality.
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Grant Recipient
REVOLUTION WORKSHOP
Revolution Workshop (RW) builds skills, hope, and resilience in Chicago’s underserved communities through job training, financial capabilities services, and career advancement support. Our vision is to advance social and economic equity and peaceful communities for all people—and a core part of this work is focused on strategies to close the wealth gap for our communities of color. We believe workforce development is one of the greatest levers in society to break cycles of poverty, and we have developed two Construction Pre-Apprenticeship Programs to do just that. Our programs combine technical skills training with holistic skills-building opportunities in employability, executive functioning, and financial capabilities—all designed to help our participants chart their paths to prosperity. Upon completion of our program, we place graduates into living-wage career pathways in the construction sector and provide ongoing career advancement and financial counseling support via our Career Growth Services. With this proposal, we are seeking support for our entire program and, zooming in, for three aspects of our multi-faceted approach to building wealth: ---New career pathway: we launched a new career pathway in fall of 2023, called our Construction Professional Pre-Apprenticeship, providing yet another way for individuals to pursue living-wage careers. ---Continued growth of our Financial Capabilities Work: we grew our financial services team last year, and this year, with the team capacity at its greatest level to date, we are ready to launch new credit products. ---Transitional Employment via our Social Enterprise: our second social enterprise—RContracting—is up and running, giving graduates a chance to hone their skills through worksite experience, earn a living wage to support their families, and improve their community. All programming and expansion elements outlined in this proposal are in alignment with the “Quality Employment Opportunities” and “Quality Financial Health Opportunities” priority strategies of the Income Growth Solutions RFP.
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Grant Recipient
Englewood Arts Collective
Arts for Arts Sake—We Deserve *More* Beautiful Things: Continuation of current work to support catalytic co-creations of public art throughout Greater Englewood. Leveraging the Collective's art practices and recent collaborations and partnerships, we seek support to assist in our stewardship and production of more “Beautiful Things” in Englewood. Specifically: we are seeking funding to support additional labor toward an EAC sculptures initiative: Pieces created by EAC cofounders and commissioned works by affiliate artists, informed by community-input-backed qualitative findings, realized and fabricated by vetted skilled artists with ties to the community and our org, supported by our elected officials.
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Grant Recipient
Bottom Line Inc
Bottom Line’s mission is to support first-generation, degree aspiring students from low-income backgrounds get into college, graduate, and go far in life. Our vision is to create a far-reaching ripple effect, launched by the transformative power of a college degree and a mobilizing first career that will uplift individuals, families, and entire communities. It is a pillar of our common social ethics that all people – regardless of their background or identities – deserve equal access to the basic goods of life. Equally evident is the fact that a college degree is a necessary precondition for accessing many of these goods. Unfortunately, an interlocking set of factors – chief among which are racism, poverty, and under-resourced educational systems – raise deeply entrenched barriers to graduating career-ready for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) Americans. This, in turn, leads our society to fall dramatically short of the promise made by our commonly held values. By failing to provide sufficient access to educational opportunity to BIPOC communities, our higher education system deepens and perpetuates the damaging inequalities under which these communities already labor. On average, college graduates earn about $1 million more over their lifetimes than high school graduates, a fact which implies disproportionally negative effects for people of color with regards to their overall quality of life as well as the capacity to pass on benefits to others.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Mahogany LLC
Chicago Mahogany Tours is devoted to preserving and promoting Chicago's rich history and culture. We seek funding to enhance our bus tours for underserved communities and providing deeper insights into the city's unique neighborhoods. Grant funds will cover bus lease payments, administrative support, and operational costs, divided equally between hiring docents, marketing the program, and covering operational expenses and overhead. By empowering local residents as tour guides, we aim to foster community pride, education, and economic opportunities while showcasing "The Chicago Way" to a wider audience.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc.
Chicago Lawyers’ Committee seeks continued general operating support to help us build strong communities through the provision of legal and policy advocacy support of community groups and coalitions working and living in historically disinvested communities of color. With support from Chicago Community Trust, we will continue to provide legal and policy advocacy in three of our core civil rights program areas: Equitable Community Development and Housing, Education Equity, and Economic Justice. Community Need and Our Vision of Lawyering: The law too often has been a central tool in the disenfranchisement of and disinvestment from communities of color. For generations, city, state, and federal laws and policies created systemic barriers that prevent Black and Brown community members from enjoying strong, safe, economically thriving neighborhoods with strong, safe schools for children. In the first half of the 20th Century, the Chicago Real Estate Board established a system of legal covenants that prohibited the sale or rental of residential property to African Americans and thereby forced Black migrants from the South to crowd into narrow strips of land. Similarly, the Federal Housing Authority, which guaranteed millions of residential mortgages starting in the 1930s, redlined African American neighborhoods, refusing to insure mortgages in these areas, and thereby preventing the issuance of mortgages and ensuring race-based housing segregation. In the latter part of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century, the national War on Drugs, and an intractable school-to-prison pipeline led to mass incarceration of Black and Brown community members. Disparate access to legal representation and policy expertise dramatically exacerbated these problems. Many communities of color have seen decades of disinvestment resulting in failing infrastructure, deteriorating buildings, vacant land, general lack of public and private investment, the underfunding of education and the defunding of vital community services. Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights works (1) to break unjust structures and systems to create racial and economic equity, and (2) to center the priorities of communities of color as a driving force for our work. We bring our staff’s legal guidance and expertise to provide our constituents with various options to advance racial justice and community-identified priorities. The tools we use include impact litigation; policy analysis, formation, and development; communications; and substantive expertise in the areas of education, land use, housing, and small business law. Summary of work. In our Equitable Community Development and Housing work, we provide legal and policy supports to community-based organizations and coalitions fighting against the negative consequences of historic disinvestment and, in some cases, current gentrification, with a focus on Chicago’s South and West Sides. We help communities shape and effectuate advocacy and practices that build opportunity. We do this through popular education that builds advocacy power, crafting and advancing legislation, negotiating with public and private entities, and filing litigation on their behalf, when necessary. With our education equity work, we work closely with students of color, primarily in Chicago and Cook County, who are vulnerable to losing access to educational opportunities because of punitive and exclusionary discipline. We help students who experience harassment and bullying in school because of their race/ethnicity and their families. We also conduct systemic advocacy work, with groups such as Raise Your Hand, to advocate for a more equitable school funding and to fulfill the promise of Illinois's Evidence-Based Funding Law. At the current rate of funding, EBF will not reach its goal until 2054. Over 83% of Illinois’s districts are now underfunded—making the state 45th out of 50 for equitable school funding. In our Economic Justice work, we focus corporate, transactional, and small business legal services in Chicago’s South and West Side communities, the neighborhoods that have been deeply impacted by systemic racism and economic disinvestment. We prioritize relationship building to advance racially equitable business development in historically under-resourced communities of color. Free legal services provide appreciable benefits to individual small business owners by mitigating risk and lowering startup and operating costs for entrepreneurs. We endeavor to complement this direct work with small businesses with systemic policy work aimed at removing structural barriers to their success.
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Grant Recipient
ILLINOIS COALITION FOR IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE RIGHTS
1.4 million people live in poverty in Illinois, according to the Illinois Commission on Poverty Elimination and Economic Security. Last year, ICIRR began a journey to explicitly tackle and reverse poverty in Illinois. We built a cross-movement coalition whose long-term goal was to significantly reduce poverty across the state for all of its residents. During our very successful inaugural year, we helped win new support for low-income residents and revenue fixes to generate hundreds of millions of dollars to fund these supports. While much work remains, our efforts demonstrated what is possible when we continue to build upon our efforts to unapologetically reverse poverty throughout Illinois. Living in poverty is both costly and hazardous to one's health. Families with low incomes have reduced access to healthcare, are more likely to reside in unhealthy environments, and generally have shorter life expectancies than wealthier families. They often face financial ruin from a single medical emergency. The everyday costs of raising a family place these households in a precarious financial situation, making it difficult to break free from poverty. Poverty is also racialized, with these challenges being more pronounced in communities of color. Undocumented residents face even greater hurdles, as they are more prone to exploitative labor conditions and have limited access to job opportunities that offer upward mobility. Despite paying taxes, millions of immigrants are excluded from government safety net programs due to their immigration status. To mitigate these burdens on working families across Illinois, ICIRR has been educating legislators and other stakeholders about the importance of state investments designed to transition all people, regardless of immigration status, out of the cycle of poverty. With support from the Trust, ICIRR will build upon and expand its successes to organize its base to build support for state-level investments that strengthen our newly won state Child Tax Credit (CTC), continue to expand healthcare coverage to all, push for direct cash assistance through guaranteed income programs to low-income Illinois residents, and more. In addition, ICIRR will continue to partner with organizations across movements to strategize and advance the generation of new sources of revenue in the state budget. With federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars now fully exhausted in the state, we must expand new revenue solutions and community investments at the state-level that reduce poverty and ensure that everyone is able to thrive and not just survive in Illinois.