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.
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Grant Recipient
Forefront
Forefront requests a $200,000/1 year general operating grant from the Chicago Community Trust (CCT) to support Forefront’s continued mission for a vibrant social impact sector that serves all of Illinois and our work and shared goals of an equitable recovery. This renewed and increased support from the CCT will fortify Forefront’s ability to offer deeper public policy supports for our sector's pressing needs and solutions informed by the voices and community leaders and the Trust and Forefront’s shared network of NPOs and philanthropy stakeholders. This support will increase Forefront’s capacity by fueling the necessary staffing and resources to: - Update of our free NPO sustainability and capacity building resources - Support Mission Sustainability Initiative (MSI) resources and grants - Advance and improve our public policy and advocacy efforts with added staff working on systemic issues and policies critical to the Chicago, Cook County, and Statewide social impact sector. -Build our internal/external capacity and staff to provide backbone support through a sectorwide Advancing Racial Equity (ARE) Collective; key work in the coming year will include the hiring of a full-time Advancing Racial Equity Director and landscape scan, maps of current racial equity/justice initiatives, policies at the local, state and federal levels, and the available and emerging resources, stakeholders at work. Forefront will compile and continue to share these resources through a digital center open for the sector. As part of this work, Forefront will apply a racial equity lens to all our work and teams. Our goal is to leverage our recent experience and insights as a collective action convener through efforts like Census 2020 and use our broad and far-reaching network to center and help reduce silos, fuel collaboration and accountability, and amplify longstanding racial equity leaders and experts and community- and BIPOC-informed solutions.
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Grant Recipient
Lawndale Christian Legal Center
LCLC believes that a community-based, co-located, interdisciplinary, and culturally competent legal-social team advocating for high-risk, justice involved youth while simultaneously connecting them to community-based services and assets within their community can avert the damaging effects of youth criminalization, mass incarceration, violence, and poverty. Our holistic representation is designed to prevent our youth from suffering unjust debilitating punishment while also helping them become young leaders in our community equipped to accomplish their educational and employment goals. Our goal is to meet their legal and social needs such that we not only provide them with the highest-quality legal representation, we also provide them with the highest-quality social support so they can move forward with their lives, accomplish their goals, and never return to the criminal justice system again. Our youth have suffered serious harm and learned to survive with basic physical, mental, and emotional needs unmet. Our programming targets individuals at the highest risk for violence, both as perpetrators and victims. In 2021, over one-third of the clients we represented had gun charges. Our holistic representation is designed to prevent further systemic harm while also addressing the underlying unmet needs that contributed to their criminal behavior to prevent further harm to them and our community. By addressing both, LCLC’s model of holistic representation provides us with a meaningful path forward to substantially reduce violence and improve public safety in Chicago.
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Grant Recipient
MIKVA CHALLENGE GRANT FOUNDATION INC
Mikva Challenge was established on the premise that youth voice and participation matter, and that our civic and political life will be stronger when youth help shape their own destinies. Mikva Challenge requests $125,000 in support from the Chicago Community Trust to deepen, scale, and connect our youth civic engagement programs to elevate the voices and priorities of young people in city institutions. With support from the Chicago Community Trust, Mikva Challenge will amplify youth leadership programming, specifically in regards to our Neighborhood Leadership Initiative and Citywide Youth Council programs, to build collective power and strengthen youth civic engagement in local decision and policy making.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance
CAFHA leads the Housing Choice Voucher Working Group, launched in 2016, and the only cross-sector coalition in the region advocating for equitable housing opportunities for voucher holders. CAFHA will promote recommendations, developed through CCT-funded research under its 2020 Advancing Equitable Homeownership grant, and honed through coalition work under our current Growing Household Wealth grant, regarding public housing authority homeownership program best practices, by advocating for policy and programmatic changes among housing authorities, HUD, and the lending and real estate industry. The aim of this effort is to scale up PHA homeownership programs to meet the desires of voucher holders and create a means to begin to repair the racial homeownership gap caused by public policy and actions of the real estate industry.
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Grant Recipient
FUTURE TIES NFP
Since 2010, Future Ties has served youth and families through after-school programming, teen workforce development, parenting skills and capacity building, parent mentoring, and the provision of direct resources including food and more recently, pandemic equipment. To date, we have served 800+ youth. Future Ties leverages the professional expertise and on-the-ground experience of Founder and Executive Director Jennifer Maddox, who is an active Chicago Police Officer for 26 years. As a patrol officer servicing the Parkway Gardens Apartments community, she observed and responded firsthand to the challenges facing residents and built a positive relationship with the community. She established Future Ties directly within this community, on a block labeled one of the most dangerous in the city of Chicago per The Sun-Times. When we have funding and are able to compete and become attractive to youth we have seen the rate of violence decrease. Alternatively, when funding has been limited, we have seen a spike in violence due to a lack of opportunity, hopelessness, and resources. Our model is based on trauma-informed and whole family approaches. Grant funds will be used to support Future Ties programming in Parkway Gardens and the surrounding community.
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Grant Recipient
WINDOW TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS INC
Window to the World Communications respectfully requests The Chicago Community Trust’s consideration of a renewed and generously increased grant of $200,000 to support WTTW News, our local affairs and journalism platform that has been serving the greater Chicago region for more than 35 years.
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Grant Recipient
Metropolitan Tenants Organization
The Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) and UChicago Medicine (UCM) system will collaborate to advance housing policies aimed at high utilizers of Emergency Health Service (EMS). Unstable housing is a key social determinant of health that causes homelessness and a reliance on EMS for health care. The project will uplift that community members' voices in making recommendations and creating policies that makes greater positive impact for the entire community. In particular, the project will pilot intervention models that promote housing stability for high users of EMS and advance policies aimed at mitigating sudden displacement of renters such as just cause eviction, right to counsel in evictions and proactive rental inspections.
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Grant Recipient
The Network - Advocating Against Domestic Violence
The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence (The Network) is a collaborative membership organization dedicated to improving the lives of those impacted by domestic violence (DV) through education, public policy and advocacy, & the connection of community members to direct service providers. We also operate the IL DV Hotline, which received 28,940 calls in FY20. We work in collaboration with over 40 community-based DV service providers to advance the collective power of those experiencing gender-based violence. The Network advocates at the local, State, & Federal level to ensure that survivors have sufficient services and responsive systems and is applying to Chicago Community Trust to expand and develop this critical systems advocacy.