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
Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council NFP
The Metro Chicago Good Food Purchasing Initiative (GFPI) is seeking continued support to deepen our work with institutions to improve their procurement processes, provide support to growers to access these institutional opportunities, and ensure the consistent application of the good food goals of fair wages, sustainable practices, and equitable access.
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Grant Recipient
Greater Chatham Initiative Inc
The program will: 1) support Black-owned food-based businesses with access to capital via coaching and connections to service providers, and 2) support local South Side business incubators and entrepreneurial hubs and the businesses they serve by providing technical assistance to connect them to capital resources and to their surrounding ecosystem. Greater Chatham Initiative will also implement a technology platform to help local entrepreneurs access capital by creating a South Side small business resource online hub that improves upon and expands our existing funding webpage.
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Grant Recipient
The Experimental Station: 6100 Blackstone
Experimental Station is requesting $50,000 in general operating funds to support increased fundraising and administrative costs associated with the expansion of our 61st Street Farmers Market food education programming and increased government funding for our Link Up Illinois program.
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Grant Recipient
Northern Illinois Food Bank
Northern Illinois Food Bank is requesting funding to support their programs providing access to nutritious food for our neighbors facing food-insecurity in the collar counties of DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will and McHenry.
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Grant Recipient
Ecosystems of Care
Ecosystems of Care works to build stronger and more just systems of food, information, and resources, forge connections across neighbors, and generate community power. Our core project, Market Box, began as an emergency pandemic response in 2020, and takes a full-system approach to food insecurity. Our volunteer-led mutual aid project bulk-buys food from local farms and distributes it for free to Black, low-income neighbors across the South Side of Chicago. We seek to fill gaps left by existing food aid: because state benefits structures are often insufficient, we take a trust-based approach and do not require income verification. Because many in our network struggle with mobility, we deliver food directly. And because many existing pantries are best equipped to offer shelf-stable goods, we deliver fresh produce and protein. With every bag of food, we work toward three goals: to get fresh produce to our neighbors, to support small midwest farms, and to build a proven, replicable model of community-driven, locally sourced food-support.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Horticultural Society
The Chicago Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest (WCH) urban agriculture program requests support from the Chicago Community Trust Unity Fund for its food access and community health initiative, VeggieRx. During the grant period, VeggieRx will provide an estimated 120,000 pounds of fresh, primarily local produce to an estimated 2,000 direct participants, while benefiting an additional 4,000 family members. WCH will partner with medical staff at three Federally Qualified Health Centers—Lawndale Christian Health Center in North Lawndale and PCC Community Wellness Centers in Austin and Belmont-Cragin—to refer food insecure patients with diet-related illnesses into the program. Participants receive weekly boxes of fresh produce along with nutrition and cooking education, an intervention that is coordinated with their clinical care. Using this model, VeggieRx addresses immediate concerns of food access while advancing long term community health and resiliency and promoting health equity in Chicago. During the grant period, VeggieRx will also explore the potential for an additional choice-based nutrition incentive component through the indoor community market at WCH’s Farm on Ogden headquarters.
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Grant Recipient
Beyond Hunger
Beyond Hunger’s work aligns closely with the Chicago Community Trust’s commitment to close the racial wealth gap and ensure a thriving and equitable future for everyone. By increasing access to healthy food in our communities, we meet immediate needs for those disproportionally affected by community divestment, rising food costs, and extreme rent burden. But we also recognize the need for long term solutions that connect families to income and health benefits that will lessen the health equity divide. Taking the lead from participant input on how to build/enhance programs, we are intentionally collaborating with existing community partners and assets. Our comprehensive programs include providing nutritious, culturally appropriate food in a way that respects the wishes of the people we serve. We’ve tailored our food distribution to offset the racial inequities in a traditional food system, including using our purchasing power to support BIPOC vendors and local farmers. Beyond Hunger’s unique offering of nutrition education programming empowers participants to take control of their own health while making a lasting impact for future generations. Chicago Community Trust’s continued support will help us provide nutritious food to increasing numbers of people experiencing food insecurity. It will allow us to offer food choices based on community input accompanied by community-led nutrition education programming. Hunger may seem like an intractable issue, but we don’t agree. Hunger CAN be solved with resources, logistics, and political will. At Beyond Hunger, we deploy them all, helping solve food insecurity in the 13 ZIP codes we serve on the West side of Chicago and surrounding suburbs.
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Grant Recipient
Nehemiah Trinity Rising