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
FAMILY SERVICE & MENTAL HEALTH CENTER OF CICERO
For over a century, Family Service and Mental Health Center of Cicero (“Family Service”) has provided supportive, affordable, and accessible services, primarily to Spanish-speaking clients in Western Cook County, a large number of whom are immigrants. Journeying Together was created as our response to the alarming rates of unaddressed mental health problems experienced by Spanish-speaking migrants in the Chicago area. Using an efficient, cost-effective model that accesses migrants through area congregations already serving them (for food, housing, legal, and other needs), we address the trauma and related diagnoses they live with. The requested $20,000 will be allocated entirely to cover clinical staffing for the program.
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Grant Recipient
FOX VALLEY UNITED WAY
Requested funds will enable Fox Valley United Way to provide more Aurora children from marginalized populations with equal access to exemplary early childhood care and education. SPARK serves Aurora, Illinois’ second largest city. Children under 5 are 10% of the total population, which is higher than average. More than 44% (8,400) of these children live at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, and there are 12,000 young children with all available parents in the workforce. Although some affordable early childhood education/care programs are available, such as Early/Head Start, Preschool for All, and Prevention Initiative, the 2,400 slots in these programs falls far short of the need. Accessing such opportunities is also difficult for parents from marginalized groups. For example, Aurora has the state's second largest population of refugees, immigrants, and asylees; 42% of the population is Hispanic/Latine; and 6,214 children under five live in households isolated by language (primarily Spanish-speaking households). Requested funds will help SPARK fill these gaps and facilitate access to resources by • Ensuring families are aware of the importance of early learning and connecting them with programs and services; • Coordinating efforts among the school districts’ early childhood programs, Head Start, child care providers, and other early learning programs to maximize impact/efficiency; and • Supporting quality improvement in early childhood education/care programs and expansion of formal and informal early learning opportunities. Specific initiatives will include the following: • Gateway to Early Childhood Programs (Gateway): A single point of entry where Aurora families can go to help them navigate the complexities of learning about and enrolling in early childhood programs and resources; • Bright Beginnings: A prenatal to age 3 initiative in partnership with local hospitals; • Family Resource Center: Resources and hands-on support for early learning offered by SPARK staff to parents and children at the Northern Lights Youth and Community Center on the east side of Aurora. • Bright by Text: A text service for parents with information, resources, and opportunities to support healthy child development; • Playgroups: Parent-child activities offered at housing sites to support early learning/development for families served by the Aurora Housing Authority and World Relief. • Developmental Screenings: Free screening in overall development, speech/language, motor skills, hearing, and health and connection to resources, as needed. During FY25 (7/1/24-6/30/25), SPARK expects that it will increase the number of parents reached to 8,192 and the number of children reached to 4,193. This will include connecting at least 30 new families to early childhood resources through the Bright Beginnings program and adding 10 new playgroups. SPARK anticipates that 80% of survey respondents/focus group participants will report increased knowledge and confidence in supporting their child’s learning; engagement in developmentally appropriate learning activities with their child at home; and increased awareness of early childhood and family services and resources. In addition, 75% of families who complete a Gateway interview will be referred to early childhood programs/services and 80% of children will participate in their first developmental screening.
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Grant Recipient
Partners for Our Communities (POC)
POC provides culturally competent services for Immigration relief and wrap-around services for immigrant individuals and families, which is vital to the growth and success of our local economy in the wake of increased newcomers to the suburbs. More importantly, North Suburban Cook County has been home to thousands of immigrants over the last 20 years who still need legal services to become citizens, including DACA, U-VISA, Temporary Protected Status, guardianships, and more. With your general operating support, POC will pilot a legal clinic that provides pathways to self-sufficiency by adding this much-needed service that gets to the root cause of immigrants’ lives in poverty. POC will also provide community workshops and events to help newcomers acclimate to IL, know their rights, TPS, renter’s rights, etc. POC has provided these services for over 30 years and prides itself on giving a voice to this unique population through immigration relief, leadership development, skill building, mental health support, and providing access to basic needs. POC has built relationships with networks across Illinois that focus on immigrant rights, advocating for better laws and policies so clients and affected staff have equitable opportunities to live a healthy life, contributing positively to the greater community.
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Grant Recipient
Spanish Community Center
Spanish Community Center is seeking $20,000 to support our legal and immigration programming. Funding will be used to partially cover the salary of our Directing Attorney, and will enable us to offer a wide range of legal and immigration services to new arrivals, asylum-seekers, and individuals seeking citizenship in the United States.
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Grant Recipient
Latino Policy Forum
The Latino Policy Forum will continue to convene and lead the Welcome to Illinois Coalition of more than 100 organizations serving the new arrivals and leading advocacy for full opportunities for those immigrants, and all immigrants. Welcome to Illinois, which was co-founded by the Latino Policy Forum, provides services and leads advocacy for appropriate funding and effective administrative practices for new arrivals and other immigrants in areas that include mental health, housing, employment opportunity, financial and legal services, case management, and access to other services. One crucial aspect of this work that will receive close attention in the coming months is to support the long-term integration and inclusion of immigrants by collaborating with state and local legislators, business leaders, and community-based organizations to advocate that the federal government grant work permits to new migrants and long-term undocumented contributors.
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Grant Recipient
El Valor Corp.
El Valor seeks funding for our early childhood programs, providing vital services to over 3,000 children ages 0-5 and their families annually. Programming is provided in English and Spanish, inclusive of children of all abilities, and supports the social, emotional, and cognitive development of our children. Funding will also help us invest in our families to provide workshops and educational opportunities to become strong advocates for their children's development and overall wellness.
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Grant Recipient
Chapin Hall Center for Children
Chapin Hall is dedicated to the idea that evidence should drive decisions. Working with public system leaders, practitioners, and communities across the nation, Chapin Hall develops and implements innovative solutions to promote the well-being of children, youth, and families. Over four decades, our work has led to significant improvements in public system approaches, but centuries of racially biased laws, policies, and practices continue to create inequitable treatment and perpetuate ongoing trauma in communities of color. As one of just two Black leaders of the forty-seven nonprofit independent research and policy centers in the United States like Chapin Hall, Executive Director Bryan Samuels is committed to driving systems toward policy changes that protect and promote the interests of people of color. To strengthen our ability to transform systems, equity must be explicit in every action we take. To achieve these aims, Chapin Hall seeks to become the premier destination for scholars and policy experts of color, including those with a focus on program evaluation and translational skills, who bring experience and perspective on racial equity, child- and family well-being, system change, and elevating community leadership. We kindly request a $70,000 general operating grant from Chicago Community Trust to help us build our Equity First initiative. Specifically, the grant from the Trust will support the Equity First Summer Associates program The lens through which research and program evaluation are designed, conducted, and interpreted matters. Chapin Hall is committed to ensuring the people leading the research reflect the communities impacted by their work. We created the Equity First Summer Associates program to guide and support early-career scholars of color to pursue equity-centered applied research. The summer program launched in 2024 with an inaugural cohort of 8 Black and Latina/o scholars currently enrolled in graduate programs who have an interest in applied research, program evaluation, and other methods focused on system change. The 6-week hybrid program focuses the scholars on how to embed racial equity into the five stages of research; apply practical racial equity tools; and develop a personalized Racial Equity Action Plan. Our vision is that these Equity First Summer Associates will eventually make their way into real-world careers in government, philanthropy, and applied research centers to lead equity-centered research and fundamentally transform the lens through which evidence-based policy-practice-programs are developed and evaluated.
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Grant Recipient
Expanded Mental Health Services of Chicago NFP
EMHS, operating as The Kedzie Center and LOSAH Center of Hope, serves several diverse neighborhoods on the northwest side of Chicago with a high number of young children between the ages 0-6. Many of these families are low-income immigrant families who speak English at various levels as a second language. Many of the young children are not enrolled in early child education and many of their parents have had limited experience with the educational system in the United States. We view early intervention and prevention as opportunities to improve developmental, health and educational outcomes for children. As such, we provide a full range of services aimed at supporting the social and emotional development of young children and their caregivers. We offer workshops on positive parenting practices, an evidence-based program to foster school readiness (Abriendo Puertas), a parent-child developmentally focused playgroup (Lil' Explorers) aimed at promoting social emotional development while also strengthening parent-child attachment, and Child Parent Psychotherapy, a dyadic treatment for young children ages 0-6 and their caregivers who have experienced early or chronic trauma. All of these programs are offered to community members at no cost to them, in their community and in English and Spanish. In addition, we offer a full range of clinical services including individual/family/couple's therapy, case management, psychiatry, support circles and support for the providers who work in early childhood education. These services are offered by master’s level clinicians regardless of the client’s insurance or immigrant status. We believe early childhood to be a critical period during which we have a unique opportunity to support families in healing migration, socio-political, and relational trauma and developing their capacities to support their children's social-emotional and cognitive growth. Our programs recognize the critical need for trauma-informed and culturally responsive 1) parent education, 2) promotion of healthy parent-child relationships and 3) family preparation for school entry. Our groups nurture the growth of the parent-child relationship, enhance the parents’ ability to identify and support their child’s developmental needs, and teach, experientially, the benefits of play. We would expand these programs to the seven neighborhoods we serve.