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
Juneteenth Productions
Juneteenth Productions requests funding support for Season 3 of Change Agents. This season’s primary programmatic goals include the following: 1. To cultivate the skills of our emerging journalists that enable them to tell unbiased stories, that give voice to the unheard and that can be used as a vital tool to help build a more just society. 2. To establish a pipeline of journalistic leaders who will direct the industry toward a more just and equitable brand of news gathering. 3. To tell compelling stories of community activists who are creating grassroots change. To accomplish this, we’re adding two new elements to the program: media anti-stereotyping & anti-bias training and inclusion of emerging white journalists. The training will run for 12 weeks and will continue to pair emerging journalists with community activists to tell stories of grassroots change in an authentic voice.
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Grant Recipient
SPANISH COALITION FOR HOUSING
Spanish Coalition for Housing (SCH) aims to provide bilingual (English and Spanish) HUD certified housing counseling to support affordable and sustainable homeownership for low to moderate income households (Latinx and Black) across Chicago and Cook County Illinois through its Comprehensive Housing Counseling Program, (includes Homebuyer Education/Pre-purchase Counseling, Post Purchase/Foreclosure Prevention to existing and new homeowners and owner occupied two to four unit small landlords, supported by ongoing Financial Education and Coaching). SCH serves as a regional market conduit preparing households on their path to affordable and sustainable homeownership and wealth creation that includes increased access to affordable capital.
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Grant Recipient
The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
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Grant Recipient
EVANSTON REBUILDING WAREHOUSE
The Rebuilding Exchange seeks to launch an Alumni Services Education Program, aimed at engaging and supporting graduates of our transitional employment and pre-apprenticeship programs as they advance their careers in the building trades. Trainees within our programs earn a range of middle-skills credentials that support placement and retention into living wage jobs. This includes the OSHA-10 Construction Certification; First Aid/CPR; the EPA’s Lead Renovation, Repair, and Painting credential (Transitional); Forklift (Transitional); and the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) Core (Pre-Apprenticeship). Graduates are then placed into full-time employment in the building trades with average starting hourly wages ranging from $15 - $18.75 for our Transitional Employment program and $15 - $20 for our Pre-Apprenticeship. We currently provide retention-focused coaching for up to two years. Funding from Bridges to Brighter Futures we will pilot a broader range of alumni services, including continuing education, professional networking and development, supportive services, and more.
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Grant Recipient
Annie B. Jones Civic Arts Center
Over the 3-year grant period, ABJ will provide civic leadership development and training to 120 emerging adults and leaders between the ages of 19-35 years old from Chicago's South Side. The ABJ Civic Arts Circle is an intensive practice-based program that engages members in understanding the tenets of leadership and the power of the collective voice. The program promotes experiential learning and the use of creative processes to help members self-reflect, translate inner thoughts to external action while building a strong sense of community connectedness. The program will be expanded to provide current alumni of the Circle Training the opportunity to shadow ABJ's President/CEO and gain hands-on skills in community organizing, grant writing, and cross-community collaboration. Also, current graduates that started their businesses will assist with organizational marketing and civic education.
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Grant Recipient
Urban Juncture Foundation
The lack of locally-owned restaurants in Black communities is a key barrier to the revitalization in Black Chicago. Good food builds good community: the absence of quality restaurants results in an absence of jobs and social and financial capital creation opportunities. By bringing together key industry, community, and resource partners in a proven model to facilitate the launch and growth of Black culinary businesses in Chicago, our project is addressing this problem head on. We are creating an enterprise - the Bronzeville Culinary Connection - that identifies and nurtures Black culinary professionals and entrepreneurs and, by delivering targeted and coordinated support to them, helps them create lasting culinary enterprises. We’ve made great progress in our first FEBG project year, establishing the BCC, engaging key BSO partners, and advancing a substantial number of Black culinary enterprises. If we are chosen to proceed in this second year, we will double down on building relationships with a small set of key partners and on focusing our collective effort on establishing a powerful culinary hub at 51st Street and the El. By substantially expanding culinary spaces at Boxville and creating a restaurant incubator in our building next door, while continuing to invest in deepening the pipeline of Black culinary entrepreneurs, we will create the foundation necessary to catalyze the creation of Black culinary enterprises in Bronzeville and beyond.
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Grant Recipient
Court Theatre Fund
Court is committed to becoming an anti-racist organization by identifying its structures and policies that are remnants of systemic white supremacy. Court is working to create pipelines of access to education and career opportunities in theatre for the South Side community. Integral to this are mechanisms for accountability to stakeholders and the reporting of progress. Key strategies to enable this transformation include: Establishing equitable hiring practices, workday structures, and training; Expanding community engagement programs to more South Side communities; Engaging local educational institutions to build theatre industry pipelines. The unique location of Court, part of a university and on the South Side, both requires and enables it to shift from being a predominantly white institution to a truly equitable organization that reflects its multiple constituents and creates a model for other theaters.
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Grant Recipient
Lonely Entrepreneur Inc
The Lonely Entrepreneur is honored to partner with the Chicago Community Trust to empower 300 Black men and women with the skills to start or grow a business. Working together this partnership will lead to unprecedented cooperation among corporations, philanthropies and governments to fight against social and economic injustice.