Critical Needs

Chicago thrives when people can meet their basic needs and live with safety, stability and dignity. Strong communities depend on reliable access to food, housing, healthcare, and essential services — especially during periods of hardship or crisis.

The Chicago Community Trust helps people and families across the region meet urgent needs and move toward greater stability. Working with community partners, the Trust supports programs that reduce hardship, protect health and safety, and help residents get through difficult moments with the resources they need.

Our Vision

We envision a Chicago region with a strong, coordinated safety net that ensures individuals and families can access housing, food, healthcare, and other essential services needed to achieve stability, economic security, and long-term well-being.

Achieving this vision requires sustained investment, strong partnerships, and learning alongside communities. The Trust draws on insights from grant recipients, service providers, partners, research, and residents to strengthen its response to immediate needs and changing conditions.

Critical Needs: State of the Space

Access to safe and stable housing, nutritious food, healthcare, and other essential services is foundational to individual well-being, family stability, and economic security. When households cannot meet these needs, they face greater stress, delayed healthcare, housing instability, food insecurity, and other hardships that can make it more difficult to recover from financial setbacks.

The Financial Health Pulse® 2025 Chicago Trends Report shows modest improvement in financial health among Cook County’s most vulnerable residents, but significant disparities persist. The share of financially vulnerable households declined from 19% in 2022 to 18% in 2025, with vulnerability falling from 39% to 33% among Black residents and from 30% to 26% among Latine residents. Yet approximately one-third of residents on Chicago’s South and West sides remain financially vulnerable, compared with 11% on the North Side. Housing pressures also continue across the region: only 29% of Cook County households rated the affordability of housing in their neighborhoods favorably.

Financial instability and the shortage of affordable housing are significant drivers of homelessness. According to the City of Chicago’s 2025 Point-in-Time Count, the number of longtime Chicago residents without stable housing jumped by 38 percent in just one year. In Suburban Cook County, homelessness rose by 15 percent, with chronic homelessness — people stuck in long-term housing instability — up by 16 percent. These conditions underscore the need for both immediate assistance and coordinated, sustainable pathways to housing stability.

Community violence is another urgent challenge affecting the health, safety, and well-being of individuals, families, and neighborhoods. Its effects extend across the region, shaping how residents experience their communities and placing substantial demands on healthcare, victim services, public safety, and other public systems. Supporting community-led prevention and intervention strengthens safety while helping reduce the human and public costs of violence.

Where We Focus

As the region’s community foundation, the Trust will remain committed to helping address Chicagoans’ critical needs. While many interventions contribute to a strong regional safety net, the Trust focuses on three areas where it can make a meaningful difference: housing stability, community safety, and responsive grantmaking during unexpected or emerging crises.

The Critical Needs strategy supports charitable programs and services that help individuals and families access housing, food and nutrition, healthcare, emergency assistance, and other essential resources. The Trust also strengthens community-based organizations, improves coordination among service providers, and mobilizes partners in philanthropy, government, business, and the civic sector to respond effectively when crises place residents at increased risk.

Critical Needs Funding

Specifically, the Trust’s funding to address critical needs prioritizes:

  • Housing Stability: Help people who are unhoused or unstably housed access safe, stable housing and the services needed to obtain and maintain it.

  • Support community-led strategies that address the root causes of violence, strengthen prevention and intervention, and promote safer neighborhoods.

  • Responsive Grantmaking: Provide flexible support when unexpected or emerging crises threaten residents’ well-being or strain the organizations that serve them.

Collaboration is Needed

Meeting basic and emergency needs requires collaboration across sectors. The Trust works alongside community organizations, service providers, residents, government, philanthropy, businesses, and civic partners to coordinate resources, strengthen the regional safety net, and help communities respond to both persistent challenges and emerging crises.

Opportunities to Engage

  • Illinois Immigration Funder Collaborative: Prioritizes individual legal assistance, community defense and strengthening, and capacity-building to help organizations serve Illinois immigrants and work together in coalitions to mobilize for change. You can make a contribution to the collaborative on the Trust’s website.
  • Illinois Justice Project: Engages in criminal justice reform efforts to make our communities safer and reduce recidivism among youths and adults.
  • Partnership for Safe & Peaceful Communities: Identifies and supports community-led, evidence-based solutions that the public sector can scale as part of a comprehensive approach to addressing gun violence. The Chicago Fund for Safe and Peaceful Communities provides grants of $1,000 to $10,000 to neighborhood-based nonprofit groups that create events, programs and activities to unite and strengthen communities. To support this work, visit Ways to Give – United Way of Metro Chicago and input “The Chicago Fund” in the internal campaigns section.
  • Resilient Chicago Fund: A collaborative philanthropic initiative co-chaired by the Trust and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that helps nonprofits and government agencies design, test and refine innovative approaches to meeting basic needs — including food, shelter, safety, and healthcare. Through grants and design support, the fund seeks to simplify access to essential services, strengthen service delivery, and build a more sustainable, people-centered social safety net across Chicago and Cook County. Learn more about the Resilient Chicago Fund.
  • Unity Fund: A collaborative effort that gathers contributions from generous donors to support nonprofit organizations addressing the Chicago region’s most urgent needs. You can contribute to Unity Fund on the Trust’s website.

Our Critical Needs Team