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 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
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Grant Recipient
SomerCor 504, Inc.
Applying to access funds meant to assist projects in NOF's escrow ecosystem toward completion.
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Grant Recipient
The Chicago Community Trust
This is a funding application for the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance. Bridges to Brighter Futures is a Leadership Funder of the Funder Alliance, and this application maintains that role in FY24 and FY25. Being a Leadership Funder means that this funding (at least in part) pools with the other Leadership Funders, and that a Bridges to Brighter Futures representative sits on the CWFA Management Committee to direct the funder collaborative's strategies, staff and grant-making. The application itself, as agreed to by Leadership Funders, is mainly cut and pasted from the latest version of the CWFA Leadership Funder Generic Proposal.
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Grant Recipient
OPEN Center for the Arts
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Grant Recipient
HOUSING ACTION ILLINOIS
Our work plan continues key work in 5 areas that reflect the Chicago Community Trust’s focus on preserving and expanding access to affordable homeownership in communities of color. Housing Action will: - Use public education, organizing, and other strategies to support strong implementation of the federal Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and the Illinois CRA, now that the respective rules have been finalized. Additionally, we will take action to support the completion of a state-mandated disparity study to strengthen future implementation of the IL CRA, including submitting recommendations for the scope of the study. - Support implementation and evaluation of the State of Illinois Property Tax Payment Plan Task Force recommendations to establish pre-tax sale payment plan resources for Cook County homeowners with delinquent property taxes. These include launching a payment plan calculator and sending email/text reminders to help people avoid the annual tax sale and potential loss of their homes. - Advocate for a new state law that ensures counties comply with the Tyler v. Hennepin US Supreme Court decision to protect the equity of homeowners and other property owners–and do so in a way that enables more affordable payoff of delinquent property taxes than under the current system, which is based on the annual tax sale. To support this work, we will collaborate with NHS of Chicago to update our 2021 analysis of tax sale evictions, incorporating newer data we have secured from the Cook County Sheriff and the Cook County Treasurer. - Address appraisal issues, including systemic bias, through participation in NHS of Chicago’s appraisal task force and the National Appraisal Foundation’s Council to Advance Residential Equity (CARES). As part of our work with CARES, we will provide a community perspective to its deliberations, including increasing focus on consumer education and engaging with state regulatory officials to collect demographic data to make the appraisal industry more reflective of the population. - Advocate to make housing counseling an eligible use for Illinois Affordable Housing Trust Fund funding. If successful, we will urge the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) to commit $5 million in annual funding for housing counseling agencies. Illinois Community Reinvestment Act We have continued to coordinate the IL CRA Coalition to ensure that the administrative rules for the federal CRA and the new IL CRA law meet the community investment needs of low-income communities and that communities of color are the focal point of the IL CRA. We organized community-based organizations to testify at public hearings and submit public comments supporting these goals. On October 24, 2023, the three federal regulators released final updates to the federal CRA rules. The new rules make several improvements for making evaluating CRA performance in lending clearer and more transparent to the public. Another good change is that Special Purpose Credit Programs, which facilitate access to credit for persons who would otherwise not receive it, are explicitly encouraged. The new rules also evaluate banks based on their online banking services. Unfortunately, in March 2024, a preliminary injunction to block implementation of the rules was granted by federal court based on a banking industry lawsuit. However, we will move forward on education on the new federal rules so that it's understood what is at stake if the lawsuit successfully blocks the rule. For the IL CRA, groups representing regulated entities under the state law – banks, credit unions, and mortgage companies – actively opposed the initial proposed rules, released in mid-December 2022, dragging out the approval process for over 16 months. Much of the opposition was based on the examination fees, but other issues included alleged regulatory burdens, especially for smaller entities. On May 1, 2024, the final IL CRA rules were published and adopted. Through Illinois Senate Bill 3235, we are advocating for a disparity study to be conducted to identify and define places in Illinois exhibiting significant disparities concerning access to financial products, services, lending, and investments by covered financial institutions. The proposed study will analyze disparities related to protected characteristics under the Illinois Human Rights Act, including, but not limited to, race, national origin, sex, disability, marital status, and military status. The goal is for the information, findings, and other results from the study to be used as part of the IL CRA examination process of covered financial institutions. However, exactly how this may happen will be subject to subsequent rulemaking, which we will monitor to ensure that the disparity study serves its intended purpose of providing an equity lens in the IL CRA exam process. We expect this bill to pass before the end of the 2024 General Assembly session and that the fiscal year 2025 state budget will include appropriations to conduct the study. Now that the regulatory work is complete, we will undertake public education activities, including webinars and roundtables, to ensure that community-based stakeholders know about federal CRA changes and how the IL CRA will be implemented. We especially want community-based organizations to understand how they can participate in the public input components of the federal and IL CRA examinations for individual financial institutions and how to engage local financial institutions to increase their levels of community investment. Cook County Property Tax Payment Plan Task Force The task force finalized its report on March 18, 2024. Since then, we and our partners, primarily the NHS of Chicago, have been working with the Cook County Treasurer’s office to implement the recommendations. There are tentative plans for the Treasurer’s office to do soft launches of the online Payment Plan Calculator in June, after a feedback session with HUD-approved housing counselors we are organizing, and an email/text payment reminder system later in the summer. We are also working with the Treasurer’s office on marketing plans and evaluation metrics. Protect the Equity of Homeowners The Cook County Property Tax Payment Plan Task Force’s work created interest in advocating for a new state law to make sure counties comply with the Tyler v. Hennepin US Supreme Court decision to protect the equity of homeowners and other property owners – and do so in a way that enables more affordable payoff of delinquent property taxes than under the current system, based on the annual tax sale. During the first half of 2024, we have monitored state legislation introduced on this issue, including troubling legislation developed by the Illinois Tax Purchasers Association, and helped organize testimony at subject matter hearings in both the House and Senate. The Chicago Community Trust has been a key ally in this work, including by testifying at both hearings. Appraisal Bias The role of appraisal bias in contributing to reduced values in majority-minority neighborhoods, which results in a loss of wealth-building potential for Black and Latinx households, continues to gain attention on the local, state, and national levels. With this grant support, we will make linkages across these levels and identify and advocate for reforms to the appraisal process by participating in the National Appraisal Foundation’s CARES Council and NHS of Chicago’s appraisal task force. In our participation on the council, we will work with state regulatory officials to collect demographic data, such as gender, ethnicity, and education, and use this information to develop unique approaches to address appraisal issues. Housing Counseling Sector Support Community-based housing counseling agencies provide critical support for those looking to purchase a home, especially for first-time home buyers, as well as those looking to preserve this asset. We are supporting Illinois’ housing counseling sector in several ways, including working to increase funding for these agencies and ensuring that nonprofit shared equity programs can continue while still regulating predatory practices. In terms of funding, during the second half of 2023, we engaged IHDA in discussions about updating the administrative rules for the Illinois Affordable Housing Trust Fund to make housing counseling an eligible use of the funds. However, IHDA declined to move forward, citing limited staff resources. Therefore, we have decided to pursue this policy change through legislation in 2025. We were successful, however, in advocating for the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago (FHLBank) to continue its Community First Housing Counseling Resource Program, which started with $1 million for 2022, to fund HUD-approved housing counseling agencies in Illinois and to even increase that funding (by an additional $1 million, for a total of $2 million) for this current program year. During the first half of 2024, we also worked with Habitat for Humanity affiliates across Illinois, Community Partners for Affordable Housing, Here to Stay Community Land Trust, and the Chicago Housing Trust to understand and advocate for changes to proposed state legislation, SB 3551. This bill regulates potentially predatory “shared appreciation agreements,” aka “cash for equity” products, that are often predatory in nature; they provide homeowners with immediate funds in exchange for an ownership interest in the home. The regulatory requirements include mandatory housing counseling for homeowners considering these products. Because of some common features, the drafted legislation also necessarily regulates homeowner programs that create permanent affordability through shared equity agreements; agreed-upon changes limit predatory products without unduly restricting nonprofit shared equity programs.
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Grant Recipient
Reparations Media NFP
There is a persistent need in Chicago to enhance the stability and reach of hyperlocal, ethnic, and community-centered news platforms. Change Agents Journalism Lab is committed to addressing this gap by providing robust training and resources to emerging journalists passionate about reporting on critical issues for Chicago’s communities. Our journalism lab will immerse and mentor emerging journalists in the models not frequently taught in institutions: solutions, community and solidarity journalism. In doing so, we hope to provide a pathway for diverse young people into Chicago’s journalism community and create a more diverse media ecosystem. Emerging reporters walk away from our program — and into newsrooms across the country — with the skills to produce high-quality and inclusive reporting about marginalized communities. Alumni produce Black- and Latino-centered broadcasts, coordinate citizen-led journalism projects and now work for The Trace, PBS- and NPR-affiliates across the country, including WBEZ/Vocalo; Illinois Answers Project; City Bureau; Crain’s Chicago Business; Agence France-Presse (AFP); WBAY-TV; and Cicero Independiente. Approaching our fifth year of Change Agents, we are building upon our refined curriculum to expand the capacity and impact of the most innovative part of our journalism lab, our community engagement events that democratize access to information by bringing the Change Agents work to the public. These events are collaborations between our series creators and the community organizations they work with, they expand our reach beyond podcast listeners and extend invitations to community members to listen to the complete Change Agents audio series. For instance, after our presentation with Chicago’s People Matter and Change Agents journalist Wendy Wei at the Illinois Arts Council’s One State Conference downloads for Wei’s episode How to Tackle AntiBlackness increased by more than 1,200 downloads. This year, we are hiring a new team member to focus fully on audience and community engagement. This role will primarily provide support for the co-hosted listening events and increase the capacity to engage news consumers through the use of our newsletter and social media. We identify and collaborate with community organizations who are focused on improving their communities, providing community solutions, and are in need of more materials for raising awareness for their mission and impact in disinvested communities who suffer from persistent patterns of inequity in areas central to daily living such as housing, health, employment, education, economic investment, transportation, and public safety. A successful collaboration for the journalism lab with the journalist and community leader results in a poignant episode in our Change Agents audio series that the community organization can use to build their constituency, raise awareness, and refine their messaging about the community organization’s impact. We are seeking funds match committed funds to this position to drive sustained growth in Chicago’s disinvested communities. This grant will enable us to significantly expand our journalism training program and produce an impactful audio series that elevates the voices of Chicago residents. By democratizing news content and enhancing digital engagement, we aim to foster a more inclusive and trusted local media ecosystem.