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
Illinois Public Interest Research Group Education Fund
With the support of the Chicago Community Trust, Illinois PIRG Education Fund and allies made progress in strengthening consumer and wealth-building coalitions this year, and through that, winning results. As we will detail further, this past year brought a shift in priorities, as our EITC coalition deprioritized unpaid caregiving and the state debated a massive energy bill. The coming year presents exciting opportunities to defend and build upon our progress. We plan to continue to add value to shared efforts, launch new initiatives, and strengthen partnerships for longer term success. Partnerships ground our work in the lived experience of those most impacted and are crucial to winning and defending reforms. Our current priorities include fighting for affordable utilities, defending consumers in the insurance and financial marketplaces, and building long term support for supporting valuable non-wage work.
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Grant Recipient
The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
UIC School of Public Health is grateful for the opportunity to apply for support from The Chicago Community Trust to strengthen the capacity of the Population Health Analytics, Metrics, and Evaluation (PHAME) Center to address the lack of access to health data across Cook County. Specifically, we are requesting support to continue data collection for a Healthy Cook County Survey; expand, improve, and maintain the Cook County Health Atlas; and assess accuracy and biases associated with different approaches to estimating the prevalence of chronic health conditions throughout Cook County. Continuation of the survey would provide municipal-level data for the 100 plus indicators within the Atlas, including income, access to care, quality of care, chronic diseases, health behaviors, and diet and exercise. These indicators and measures would be available at various geospatial levels, for example, census tract, Suburban Cook County (SCC), the CCDPH district, and Commissioner districts. The data would be weighted so it could be combined with data for the City of Chicago as well. Through this effort, we will have comprehensive local level data for all six million Cook County residents. As part of our request to The Trust, we are asking for support to help sustain the work of the Cook County Health Atlas beyond the first year, as well as expand its functionality and identify and incorporate additional data. With these funds, the Cook County Health Atlas will include data from two years. This project is led by the PHAME Center, in partnership with the Cook County Department of Public Health; Metopio, a Chicago-based analytics and visualization software platform; and CAPriCORN, a patient-centered outcomes research network in Chicago. The core mission of the PHAME Center is to democratize data for population health through its four pillars of technology, data outreach, community engagement, and education & policy. One of the ways this mission is accomplished is through the PHAME Center’s management of the Chicago Health Atlas, a free community health data resource that residents, community organizations and public health stakeholders can use to easily search, analyze, and download neighborhood-level health data for Chicago’s 77 community areas. The PHAME Center is located within the UIC School of Public Health and is led by Dr. Sanjib Basu and Dr. Sage Kim, faculty members who have been leaders in democratizing data for public health, meaningful critical public health indicators, data analytics, and data visualization projects.
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Grant Recipient
Illinois Collaboration On Youth
For more than 45 years, the Illinois Collaboration on Youth has advocated on behalf of children, youth, and families, and the community-based organizations that serve them. Our mission is to promote the safety, health, and success of Illinois’ children, youth, and families by acting as a collective voice for policy and practice, and by connecting and strengthening the organizations that serve them. Over the past three fiscal years, we have worked intentionally to make our coalition and advocacy agenda more inclusive of the communities that our members serve by establishing the Equity and Access Fund, in which our members subsidize memberships for BIPOC-led CBOs that otherwise would not have the resources to join a membership association.
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Grant Recipient
South Shore Chamber Community Development Corporation
The South Shore Chamber CDC NDI development project that includes the acquisition and renovation of a commercial property on 71st Street.
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Grant Recipient
NeighborSpace
The project, a partnership between NeighborSpace (NBSP) and Chicago Food Policy Action Council (CFPAC), will provide support to implement actionable land access strategies for growing local food on underutilized land in Chicago and Cook County using a community-based framework rooted in values of equity, sustainability, and collaboration.
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Grant Recipient
ALL CHICAGO MAKING HOMELESSNESS HISTORY
All Chicago promotes systems-change and policy innovations in Chicago’s homelessness system. We seek to advance our capacity to help achieve racial equity in the housing space. We lead the Chicago Continuum of Care and maintain strong relationships with government entities, sector thought leaders, community-based organizations and partnerships, universities, and others. All Chicago monitors the Homeless Management Information System database to track people who touch the homeless system each year. We use comprehensive data to drive decision making. We promote system-wide improvements through public convenings, sector wide trainings and by incorporating the voices of adults and youth with the lived experience of homelessness.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Urban League
The Chicago Urban League (the League) seeks $95,000 in renewal funding to support its ongoing policy/advocacy work. The League is an active member of the Transit Table, the Housing Policy Roundtable and CRA Coalition, and has joined new coalitions to further advance our wealth gap work. Grant funds will be used to (1) develop education and outreach messages and strategies relating to predatory lending, household wealth and asset-building, and community reparations; (2) build the capacity of housing, income, and wealth coalitions to include impacted voices; (3) elevate the power of collective action among impacted persons by supporting their advocacy efforts. Funds will pay salaries, subscriptions, supplies and participant stipends.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Cityscape
With generous support from the Chicago Community Trust CNI grant in 2021, Chicago Cityscape began a long transition. Before CCT’s support we were a real estate data platform focused primarily on private sector clients. The CNI funds helped us evolve into a more inclusive community information platform that serves mission minded and emerging real estate practitioners as well as nonprofit organizations working on economic, real estate, and community development. We refer to these folks as “Focus Organizations and Individuals” or (FOIs) many times throughout the course of this application. Through the CCT-funded Data Equity Cohort (DEC) we learned about the data sources and tech solutions FOIs need to meet their missions. We prototyped many solutions and rolled new features they now use regularly. Details of these developments are shared later in the application. To summarize what we’re requesting renewal funds for – Through DEC Chicago Cityscape uncovered FOIs need many more data sources and tech solutions than we had time and money to deliver on in the first year. Here’s an overview of their three requests we’d use renewal funds to work on: (1) Co-fund a Cityscape Sponsorship account, (2) Test the viability of and build new features requested by DEC that could not be built during year one, (3) Continue expanding relationships with DEC members and FOIs.