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
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.
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Grant Recipient
SMALL BUSINESS MAJORITY FOUNDATION INC
Small Business Majority requests support of our ongoing partnership with Rogers Park Business Alliance and New Covenant Community Development Corporation (CDC), aimed at increasing entrepreneurs’ ability to access and manage capital—key proficiencies as they pivot their operations in Illinois’ pandemic recovery. We will use this planning grant to continue a limited set of project activities and test potential data collection systems to support collective information sharing among partners. We also will explore opportunities to adapt a toolkit that assesses critical soft skills for business service providers’ use with entrepreneurs, as well as share best practices and lessons learned widely with appropriate ecosystem stakeholders.
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Grant Recipient
Urban Juncture Foundation
By bringing together a dynamic and diverse collaborative of key community, hospitality industry, and philanthropic partners, the Bronzeville Culinary Incubator made significant progress in 2021 toward our goal of substantially increasing the number and vitality of Black-owned and -led culinary enterprises and using these enterprises as platforms for revitalizing Black Chicago. Informed by our year one learnings, our 2022 planning effort will address 4 key challenges regarding the development of talent, financial resources, spaces, and patrons that hamstring our ability to scale our effort. This work will clarify near-term opportunities to reduce the racial culinary gap, provide specific goals and a detailed plan to capture these opportunities, and deepen relationships with existing and new collaborators.
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Grant Recipient
New Covenant Community Development
New Covenant CDC requests ongoing support for our partnership with Sunshine Enterprises and the North Lawndale Chamber of Commerce. We will use this planning period to explore a myriad of ways to improve our Financial DashBoard Cohorts, including adding specific components that address the "behind the scenes" trauma our business owners have to deal with before they can fully function in their capacity as a the owner of a growing business. This will require we bring on the appropriate service provider that can provide the support that strengthens the mindset of entrepreneurs. As we continue to work in the environment including a pandemic, we will prepare for both a virtual platform and in person platform that allows us to serve business owners from all over the city. We have served students from both the south, west and north sides of the city as well as other parts of the Chicago land area.
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Grant Recipient
NORTHWEST SIDE CDC
In support of participating in a Flexible Funding Capacity Building pilot to assess and identify organizational development opportunities.
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Grant Recipient
Foundation of Little Village
Xquina Incubator is a commercial and cultural amenity that enhances quality of life through an open, accessible and inclusive learning environment. The ecosystem provides impact programming created specifically to service the Spanish language and bilingual entrepreneurs and small businesses in Little Village and surrounding areas. The 5 partners deliver a cohesive set of services to align a local entrepreneur with the tools and resources to go from ideation to growth/investment stage (access to capital.) The service model focuses on financial capital and knowledge capital. The entrepreneurial spirit is a part of the culture of Little Village but a lack of funding, programming and resources have led to under resourced businesses.
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Grant Recipient
Elevate Energy
The key objectives of this planning grant are to provide resources for our partnership to: • Refine our partnership model for FY22-FY23’s project (in congruence with the Fund’s outcomes approach) and in line with current market and environmental conditions. • Provide space for co-learning between the funders and the BSOs during the model adaptation workshops. • Refine the evaluative framework in order to aptly track impact. • Prepare partnerships to apply for the third year’s RFP opportunity in 2022.
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Grant Recipient
FINANCIAL HEALTH NETWORK INC
Leveraging the unique research methodology pioneered by the U.S. Financial Health Pulse, FHN will launch this “Chicago Financial Health Pulse” to understand how the financial lives of diverse communities in Chicago are changing over time. This project would be one pillar of the Trust’s broader strategy to close the racial wealth gap in Chicago over the next decade. By understanding how Chicago residents are spending, saving, borrowing, and planning, researchers could identify policy and industry solutions that would help close the racial wealth gap. Findings from the study could be used to galvanize conversations across an array of stakeholders committed to investing in solutions to close the racial wealth gap over the next ten years.
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Grant Recipient
Chicagos Sunshine Enterprises Inc
Sunshine Enterprises and the South Shore Chamber of Commerce will work together to expand services to at least 40 unique local entrepreneurs focusing on those living in, or doing business in, South Shore neighborhood. The partnership will provide locally available, culturally relevant training (knowledge capital) and mentoring services (social capital) with an emphasis on business development, marketing and preparedness for financial capital. While not exclusively designed for artist based businesses, a strong emphasis on serving the artist community will be present as we leverage existing organizational strengths and artist community needs. Specifically we will be running a Community Business Academy tailored for Artisans—a twelve week course in practical business administration skills. Additionally we will be facilitating a retail training program, which will be comprised of training business owners in entering the retail industry and accommodating a retail space within the Artisan's Collective Studio itself (in South Shore).