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
Transform Capital
Transform Capital seeks to innovate within the community lending space. After substantial diligence and the evaluation of a gap-analysis related to lending access and support services offered by large financial institutions, traditional CDFIs/MDIs, and payday loan and other informal predatory lenders, Transform Capital was formed in 2020 to deliver a fully recyclable pool of capital that minimizes regulation, operating cost and complexity, while maximizing structuring flexibility in serving deeply deserving families in disinvested Illinois communities. These are families often caught between the historic (and continuing) discrimination of large institutions, and the ravages of payday lending. We seek to have the heart of a CDFI while eliminating 90%+ of the operating complexity of a traditional CDFI model (made possible by philanthropic funding and mission innovation), allowing profits to fully recycle for the benefit of communities served. In this way, our clients become an integral part of a pay-it-forward ecosystem to make ownership possible for a neighbor. Our work began in the great community of North Chicago, IL, a community beset by decades of discrimination and the apathy of surrounding wealth. Our model is working, and we are now scaling and extending our dialogue to other communities across the nation, including our work with the CCT's 3C initiative, where we were invited to add our lens of innovation to the Lending advisory team--dreaming about how to better serve families in both Humboldt and Garfield Park. As an all-volunteer organization with almost no operating cost, we were fully sustained by recurring loan revenue in Year 1, and therefore now recycle 100% of all new donated capital in an innovative mission model that creates a ~10x wealth impact over 20 years in communities served. We see enormous potential to continue to prove out our model in North Chicago, in the Chicago region and beyond, and seek to "give away" our model to other communities who may desire to replicate our approach. A funding partnership with CCT would further solidify our progress toward a $4 million local funding goal, while continuing to extend the reach of our influence as we seek to drive meaningful innovation in community lending. On behalf of the growing TC Community, thank you for the invitation to apply. We would be honored to partner with you as we deliver "Capital and Catalyst to Lift up (and Learn from) our Neighbors." (www.tccommunity.org, and a fully updated Organizational Profile certified on 9/7.)
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Grant Recipient
Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project
FLAP will provide twelve consecutive months of in-person and virtual, bilingual, and culturally-sensitive community outreach and education for low-income Latinx workers in the food industries in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, and Will Counties. The goal of FLAP’s work, and of this grant, is the sustainability of the local food worker population that is critical to the area’s food supply. Economic and social sustainability can be achieved when workers understand their rights, have access to information and resources whenever they need it, and trust the team of individuals providing information.
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Grant Recipient
Metropolitan Planning Council
To unpack the legacy of structural racism and causes and consequences of segregation and its impact on the homeownership gap, it is essential to start with shared understanding of the issues. MPC proposes Change Lab, which will explore ways to create innovative solutions and transformational impacts based on emergent research from Inequity for Sale and Urban Institute. MPC will facilitate three ‘conversations’ associated with this effort. MPC will work closely with CCT Program Staff to invite thirty (30) housing leaders representing developers, CBOs, residents, philanthropists, policy makers and banks to participate in the forum. Conversations include: Conversation #1 - Homeownership Gap, Conversation #2 - Solutions in Development, and Conversation #3 - Call to Action.
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Grant Recipient
Carole Robertson Center for Learning
The Carole Robertson Center’s Grow Your Own, GYO, apprenticeship model allows us to recruit, train, and provide educational and credentialing opportunities to individuals from the communities we serve, addressing both a need for qualified employees within the early childhood sector, and a need for employment and education opportunities for Chicago residents. By addressing the needs of families and the workforce in tandem, the Carole Robertson Center promotes socioeconomic mobility across multiple generations within our communities, while also providing our youngest learners with high-quality, culturally responsive teachers and support staff.
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Grant Recipient
Fresh Taste
This application is a request for $135,000 to support the Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative [IRAI], a collaborative project to build a sustained research, education, and outreach effort in regenerative agriculture at the University of Illinois, with goals of developing and promoting regenerative agriculture to attract talent in the field and build a culture of collaboration both between departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and between the University and regional stakeholders.
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Grant Recipient
JANE ADDAMS RESOURCE CORPORATION
The Jane Addams Resource Corporation (JARC) humbly requests $150,000 from Bridges to Brighter Futures to fund our Careers in Manufacturing programs and wrap-around services. JARC provides free job training in manufacturing careers that provide sustainable wages, such as welding, CNC machine operation, and more. JARC also provides wrap-around services for a holistic approach to combating poverty.
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Grant Recipient
League of Black Women
The League of Black Women (LBW) has founded an Entrepreneurship Accelerator and Incubator Institute (EAII) as a program to close the funding gap for Black women-owned companies in the manufacturing space with a specific focus on acquiring and/or expanding existing firms. Studies have shown that the success rate of entrepreneurs that acquire companies is much higher than those that pursue the startup route. Moreover, the skill sets honed in the corporate sector are more compatible and applicable to acquiring and expanding existing operating companies. Therefore, EAII will design and study the feasibility of expanding the size and accelerating the growth curve of existing businesses and future businesses started and owned by Black women. We will also create the metrics to measure the improved outcomes of businesses owned by Black women as evidenced by growth, hiring, and increased wealth of ownership. The focus of the EAII is growth of businesses started by Black women. The EAII should provide both new and existing compatible businesses with an environment that supports their growth from small to mid-sized business, increase their likelihood of success, and increase their likelihood to grow employment with workers from the surrounding community.
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Grant Recipient
Economic Awareness Council
The EAC has worked with the City Colleges of Chicago, CCC, as well as the Illinois Students Assistance Commission, ISAC, to develop a proposal for a pilot program to provide targeted opportunities for financial capability support to City Colleges of Chicago students generally and CCC’s MAP grant recipients specifically. The EAC, ISAC and the City Colleges of Chicago propose that a pilot financial capability initiative be offered for students receiving financial aid in Illinois, specifically MAP recipients and City Colleges of Chicago students. This pilot would ask students to take simple, quick, and effective measures to begin to build their own financial security. Specifically, student borrowers would be asked/strongly encouraged to make a budget to demonstrate how they will use the financial aid funds that they receive and otherwise manage their college costs. An online budget tool would be offered to support this objective. This budget tool is customized to include college specific items and average costs to help students’ estimate both semester and monthly expenses. The budget tool would be completed online allowing for simple tracking of completion as well as simple referrals of students who need additional assistance to resources at the college specific level in Illinois via ISAC and its extensive statewide resources. The EAC has already developed an online budgeting tool that has been used by other large IL universities, and this tool is now freely available online for all IL youth. Additionally, youth would also be strongly encouraged to consider banking and direct deposit of financial aid funds through brief online financial capability resources. Students would be referred to Bank On Illinois and Bank On Chicago for safe affordable banking products that would be available to them as needed. Finally, more intensive financial mentoring and referrals to appropriate financial aid officers, external financial services partners, etc. would be shared through the peer financial mentors trained by the EAC. The EAC, in partnership with CCC and ISAC, has initiated a mini-pilot for in-person mentoring services at one City of Chicago college, Olive Harvey. This initial stage offering, lasted 6 weeks this spring including training. The pilot went well with one financial mentor who offered support to over 65 youth through financial literacy events, 1-1 meetings, etc. There is an option for a limited number of mentors to serve others at a variety of colleges within the City Colleges of Chicago system through online mentoring services as well. The EAC’s peer financial mentoring program has a strong track record as the organization’s mentoring programs with the City of Chicago and the One Summer Chicago youth employment system provide over 150 events with attendance reach to over 10,000 youth each year achieving outstanding financial capability results for youth in this program.