Paving the Path to Homeownership for Housing Choice Voucher Holders
Since the mid-20th century, homeownership has been one of the most important vehicles for building wealth in the United States. According to research from the…
Grants
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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 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.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago City Council Latino Caucus Foundation
The U.S. Latino population will surpass 130 million by the year 2050. The Chicago City Council Latino Caucus Foundation is challenging the Chicago workforce to invest in a forward-thinking generation of Latino leaders in order to serve an audience projected to account for close to 33% of the entire U.S. population. In Chicago, nearly half of CPS students are Latino, nearly 1 in 3 babies born in Chicago is Latino. Despite this, we’re disproportionately impacted by the broken structures that surround us. Latinos have made up nearly half of the COVID positivity rates in Chicago, Latino representation is far too low across the board: only 20% of CPS teachers are Latino, while more than half of the students are Latino. That is why in 2013, the Chicago City Council Latino Caucus founded the Chicago City Council Latino Caucus Foundation (“CLCF”) as an entity to empower and prepare the next generation of Latino leaders. CLCF was created to empower entry-level to C-Suite Latino talent to refuse to be overlooked as they offer their expertise, cultural competency, and powerful experience to the fabric of Chicago’s workforce. CLCF achieves this mission through a distinct and impactful program: the CLCF Leadership Academy.
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Grant Recipient
NORTHWEST SIDE CDC
Northwest Side CDC (NWSCDC) will work with partner agencies, Foundation of Little Village and Onward House, to support newly established and emerging businesses through a series of workshops, trainings, professional service support, and one-on-one advising sessions. Program participants will take part in a several-month cohort. NWSCDC, Foundation of Little Village, and Onward House will use internal and external resources to provide technical expertise to businesses in several subjects, including technology, capital access, and social media support. The goal of this collective work is to increase access to capital for BIPOC business owners while supporting resiliency building and increasing income.
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Grant Recipient
Small Business Advocacy Council
During the current grant term, the SBAC engaged in lobbying activities focused on revitalizing commercial corridors and reducing vacancies in disinvested communities by reducing red tape and streamlining processes for small and local businesses. The SBAC has also engaged in lobbying activities, which have resulted in the enactment of legislation that significantly increases incentives for businesses that hire formerly incarcerated individuals. The SBAC's lobbying activities involving the reduction of red tape and transiting vacant properties into small businesses have included direct engagement with Mayor Johnson’s office, alders, policymakers, and other elected officials. These activities include securing the endorsement of over 30 chambers and place-based organizations on a robust package of reforms that will reduce significant red tape for small and local businesses. These efforts have also procured the endorsement of a growing number of alders on the package. The SBAC has led a grassroots campaign focused on galvanizing stakeholders through coalition meetings, email communications, attendance at live events and a robust social media engagement. As stated above, during the current grant term, the SBAC lobbied to increase incentives for small businesses that hire formerly incarcerated individuals. The SBAC engaged policymakers on this issue in Springfield and made this one of the cornerstones of its legislative agenda. This effort led to tangible results and a victory in Springfield, as the General Assembly passed, and Governor Pritzker signed, legislation significantly increasing the tax credits that businesses can receive for hiring formerly incarcerated individuals. These tax credits will help formerly incarcerated individuals transition into the workforce and help with the costs of on-the-job training. Efforts will now include working with stakeholders and policymakers in Black and Latine communities to amplify this win so small and local businesses are aware of these increased tax credits and can utilize them to hire formerly incarcerated individuals in their neighborhoods. The present application continues to request funds for lobbying activities to enact the reforms set forth in the package to reduce red tape and streamline processes. The SBAC has worked closely with local chambers and place-based organizations, and other thought leaders, to develop this package. This package of reforms has evolved based on stakeholder input, and in this current grant cycle, the SBAC will continue lobbying to streamline the process and reduce the costs of obtaining a special use permit. The SBAC will lobby to improve the city inspection process to increase consistency and timeliness. Lobbying activities will also focus on improving the process for the renewal of permits and ensuring that debt checks are timely and accurate and that far-removed debts do not stymie the efforts of entrepreneurs to obtain business licenses for an unreasonable period in disinvested communities. Costly and overly burdensome red tape has a profound impact on Black and Latine entrepreneurs and communities, and addressing these systemic barriers will foster economic development and revitalize disinvested communities. This application requests funds to lobby for better communication between city staff and small businesses, especially in Black and Latine communities, so entrepreneurs receive consistent messages that allow them to open and operate their businesses. These funds will also be used to monitor and remain current on laws and ordinances that will have detrimental or unintended consequences on small businesses in disinvested communities so advocates can be mobilized and empowered to engage on these issues. This application seeks funds to be used for direct lobbying and grassroots activities, such as hosting forums, meetings, roundtables, social media and PR campaigns, and action calls.
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Grant Recipient
Center for Community Self-Help
The Center for Community Self-Help (Self-Help), in partnership with The Resurrection Project (TRP), the Hope Center Foundation of Chicago (HCF), and Lawndale Christian Development Corporation (LCDC), requests $320,000 to support our proposal to Advance Sustainable Homeownership in the greater Chicago area. Our proposal seeks to directly complement and enhance the work of the Reclaiming Chicago Initiative (RCI), a campaign organized by United Power for Action and Justice to help families in the South and West Sides of Chicago build wealth through homeownership. While not new to RCI, for our second year, we have invited HCF to join our partnership, which will allow us to broaden our footprint into Roseland and expand access to our financial solutions. For this iteration, the collaborative will build on the learnings of our first year of funding and support the RCI vision by providing counseling services to individuals across the home purchase spectrum, utilizing referral channels to connect potential homebuyers to affordable financing solutions, forging new relationships to increase homebuyer DPA access, and piloting an expanded reserve program to protect new owners against unforeseen financial emergencies that may threaten their new ownership status. Through these efforts, we will work towards our long-term Reclaiming Chicago goal of increasing and sustaining the number of Black and Latino homeowners across the South and West Sides of Chicago.
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Grant Recipient
Gertie Enterprises, LLC
Gertie, a civic and cultural agency expanding the impact of Chicago's creative economy, will present Next Stop: Chicago, a series of public art activations by community-based organizations across the city addressing infrastructure inequity in Chicago, timed to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago from August 19-22. Gertie has awarded more than $400,000 in grants to seven community-led projects along the Chicago Transit Authority’s Green Line (which connects Chicago’s West and South Side to the convention locations and downtown) examining the nature of infrastructure and its importance for historically marginalized communities, especially post-pandemic. Next Stop: Chicago showcases the ways in which the arts, alongside the beautification of and investment in infrastructure, drives economic growth. The initiative’s public activations aim to call attention to organizations whose placemaking work is revitalizing gathering spaces outside of work and home (known as “third spaces”) post-pandemi, and represent the vital contributions creative small businesses make by employing artists that keep communities vibrant. Vic Mensa, rapper and actor on The Chi, will host a series of short videos on the project that will live on Gertie’s social channels and website. Gertie organized Next Stop: Chicago to amplify artist and community voices spanning Chicago’s vast network of neighborhoods at this historic political moment, when there is a global spotlight on the city. Next Stop: Chicago is designed to highlight the important intersection of infrastructure and the arts through installations and programs that address resource allocation and infrastructure inequity—an issue that has disproportionately impacted Black and brown people in this city. This problem won’t be solved with a one-size-fits-all approach, and requires collaboration and creativity across sectors to ensure our city thrives at its highest level.