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.
-
Grant Recipient
FAMILY SERVICE & MENTAL HEALTH CENTER OF CICERO
An established community-based mental health agency primarily serving western Cook County, we are known for programs and services prioritizing low-income Latinx communities. We strive to ensure access and reduce barriers, whether linguistic, cultural, financial, or other, that prevent already underresourced, overlooked, or marginalized people from receiving services. As we extend our reach and deepen our impact with recently arrived populations, we seek funding that will help us strengthen our workforce and avert internal crises related to staffing shortages. The $50,000 we request will be allocated entirely toward our agency’s investment in clinical staff.
-
Grant Recipient
LIBERTY PRAIRIE FOUNDATION
Funding will expand the Liberty Prairie Farm Store and share the stories of the farms, farmers, and food entrepreneurs that are strengthening our local food system.
-
Grant Recipient
University of Chicago Urban Labs
Our organization is applying for additional funding to launch (In)Sights: PhotoVoice in the Chicago Resilient Communities, a PhotoVoice exhibition that captures the impact of the Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot through participants’ own photography and captions. The exhibition launch at the Harold Washington Public Library will aim for 200 guests and target elected officials who are not yet supporters of guaranteed income in order to shift the narrative around unconditional cash assistance. After a monthlong residency, the PhotoVoice exhibit will travel to other Chicago Public Library branches on the North, South, and West sides of Chicago in the fall of 2024 and will be permanently displayed through a microsite on the Inclusive Economy Lab website
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.