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.
Explore Our Discretionary Grants
Showing 4701–4708 of 4395 results
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Grant Recipient
Firebird Community Arts
Firebird is requesting $50,000 to build back office support by building the capacity of its Administrative Assistant position; increasing Firebird’s capacity to both meet reporting requirements and apply for additional federal funds. Funding will also improve and streamline FCA’s program evaluation through training and small technology investments. Lastly FCA is requesting indirect funding support to meet gaps from current government grants.
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Grant Recipient
The Conservation Fund
This application seeks operational funding for the Farms Fund program in metro Chicago. The Farms Fund is a first-of-its-kind national conservation program established in the region by The Conservation Fund in 2022 to address a foundational element of a resilient regional food system: secure and affordable access to farmland. Specifically designed to enable talented and diverse growers to scale production to meet institutional demand for local food, the Farms Fund protects critical at-risk farmland and offers a path to farmland ownership as the basis for business resiliency and intergenerational wealth creation. The long-term vision is thousands of acres of permanently protected farmland around metro Chicago producing healthy food and contributing many quality-of-life co-benefits, including social equity, clean air, water and wildlife habitat, and climate resilience.
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Grant Recipient
Network for Young Adult Success
UtmostU empowers young adults from marginalized backgrounds to realize their professional aspirations by supporting them as they earn college degrees, certifications, and launch their careers. The Bridges to Brighter Futures 2024 initiative will utilize our post-secondary coaching model to support 125 students in the City Colleges of Chicago system as well as students who have transfered from City Colleges of Chicago to four year institutions. Our program will ensure that young adults from under-resourced Chicago neighborhoods have the tools and guidance to earn degrees and attain careers of their choosing. Through a combination of strong partnerships, structured student interactions, and the use of technology, Bridges to Brighter Futures will build upon our previous learnings to have even greater city-wide economic and social impact.
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Grant Recipient
The Chicago Community Foundation/Elevated Chicago
Elevated Chicago requests $300,000 to support the pre-development needs of three ETODs to advance projects towards completion.
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Grant Recipient
DEVCORP NORTH
DevCorp North dba Rogers Park Business Alliance (RPBA) continues to experience delayed State of Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity grant awards, contracts and payments. We have leveraged our organizational operating capital reserves to continue to provide services as planned. At risk of needing to make painful programming adjustments again in 2024, we respectfully request a renewal of the $50,000 in a bridge grant of working capital from Chicago Community Trust to fund our Business Accessibility Toolkit Program (BAT). Thanks to funding in 2023, BAT successfully served its target clients who are low-median income historically underserved people of color, especially Black, Latinx and other diverse business owners and entrepreneurs who own and operate existing businesses in our service area. Ongoing challenges with State of Illinois’ unreliable timelines, static funding levels, lack of clarity and minimal responsiveness to requests for guidance are resulting in our hesitation to apply for other government grants. For example, we received an intent to fund notification on 1/18/24 for the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) we host at RPBA for the same amount as we were granted in 2023. When we were awarded the designation in 2020, we were told that annual increases were the norm. Unfortunately, with COVID, things changed and last year was the first time that we were allowed to increase our funding request. Now, in 2024, we have again been informed that 2024 will be funded at the same level as 2023. In addition, we have an intent to fund but as of 4/1/24, we have not yet received a contract for 2024. This means that although our Q1 deliverables are complete, we cannot request reimbursement since we do not have a contract.
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Grant Recipient
CITY COLLEGES OF CHICAGO FOUNDATION
City Colleges of Chicago is requesting support for the third year of its math redesign project in the total amount of $150,000. This funding will support advancing CCC’s developmental education strategies intended to improve student momentum into and through college-level mathematics. CCC seeks to maintain project management support to continue progress made during Year 1 of the project , all of which builds upon the recommendations of the Developmental Education Planning Committees, the math discipline, and the pilot instructors of the program. Continued progress will require project management support and funding for program design, delivery, and improvement. The project manager convenes faculty, develops project plans, monitors deliverables, and ensures progress toward full implementation of the math redesign. Additionally, the project manager serves as the knowledge manager of all efforts focused on improving early momentum into and through math gateway coursework. The improvement of outcomes through curriculum and course redesign sits at the intersection of the work initially undertaken by the Developmental Education Planning Committee and the Equity Champions initiative. Our curriculum redesign will add co-requisite opportunities, create a single developmental level course that can prepare students for either STEM or non-STEM math pathways, and create short continuation courses to prevent students from needing to take a step backward in their progression. CCC will develop and deliver robust faculty development for the new curriculum to ensure improved student outcomes and continue to provide non-credit Level Up workshops so that students can maximize their initial placement. The result of this work will be a pilot of a sequence of math courses and supports designed with student success and progression in mind, leading to more students taking and passing college-level math in their first year.
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Grant Recipient
One Million Degrees
Since its founding in 2006, One Million Degrees has grown from a small opportunity scholarship initiative to an institutional partner pursuing an agenda for equitable systems change, while providing direct supportive services to 1919 scholars in the 2023-2024 school year. Scholars with access to OMD’s services are proven to succeed compared to their unserved peers. An ongoing evaluation by the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab’s found in a randomized control trial that accessing OMD increases a students’ likelihood of enrollment by 70%, increases their chances of persisting from fall to spring by 94%, and ultimately OMD students were 73% more likely to earn their degree. Under the current strategic plan, OMD is continuing to focus on community colleges as an open access institution capable of profoundly improving students’ economic mobility through in-demand middle-skills careers. OMD is pursuing this work through three primary channels: City Colleges Campuswide Expansion - In the City Colleges of Chicago system, OMD is working to eliminate equity barriers in persistence and completion (currently Black and Latinx students are 25-35% less likely than their white peers to complete) by removing barriers to program participation through the Campuswide Expansion’s inclusive recruitment model. Launched in Fall 2022, the City Colleges Campuswide Expansion notifies students eligible for services automatically, giving them the option to opt out of services rather than applying for a limited number of seats in the program. The long-term goal is to sustainably scale this partnership to extend OMD’s holistic, evidence-based support to every eligible new and re-enrolling City Colleges student. By 2026, OMD will serve an estimated 4,000+ students annually through this partnership, on a pathway to serving 5,000+ by 2028. Career Readiness & Connections to Jobs - Equally important, the Campuswide expansion embeds career exploration and exposure opportunities that will help students develop a sense of agency, integrating and collaborating with CCC at an institutional (through shared goal setting and partnership infrastructure) and individual level (student data sharing, OMD program coordinator-CCC advisor collaboration, embedded college success course), and continuing to provide scholars with OMD’s personalized holistic supportive service model (personal, financial, academic, and professional supports). This will work to address gaps in the local workforce by equipping students to transition into “middle skill” roles, identified by the bureau of labor and statistics as a particularly in-demand workforce segment for the next 10 years in the Chicagoland area. This will work to address some of the conditions and systemic inequities resulting from generations of academic gatekeeping and economic marginalization, particularly for the most marginalized communities to establish financial security and develop generational wealth. Furthermore, OMD will continue implementing Earn & Learn partnership programs as an equitable and accessible pathway to economic opportunity. This year, OMD will extend opportunities for smaller employers to implement work-based learning programs designed to prepare OMD scholars for success in future apprenticeships, full-time employment, or in their transfer to a four-year institution. This will further produce positive outcomes on both sides of the workforce intervention, serving as equitable talent pipelines and directly supporting advancement of equitable workforce practices and policies in the organization. This bi-directional flow works to deconstruct institutional biases, engage new voices, and build a more robust and equitable workforce for the city of Chicago. National Advisory & Capacity Building - OMD additionally plans to launch partnership programs outside of the Chicagoland area through the newly developed Advisory and Capacity Building practice, which will connect local partners (and their local knowledge) with OMD’s unique solutions to accelerate the pace of systems change in support of equitable outcomes for community college students in their pursuit of career pathways and economically mobile jobs. These three programmatic focuses all work to advance OMD toward its 2028 vision statement, to be a national model for scaling holistic student supports through sustainable partnerships in service of equitable education and career outcomes for community college students.
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Grant Recipient
NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING SERVICES OF CHICAGO INC
The 3C Non-Conventional Secondary Market Loan Fund is essentially a revolving loan fund that supports the liquidity of entities that lend to underserved communities in their region. The loan fund leverages no-to-low interest rate philanthropic dollars and funding from municipal and the private market to either originate below market interest rate loans or provide the capital into which this funding mechanism will securitize and sell tranches of performing loans to provide capital that recycles back to the lending entity. The 3C loan product will be made available to mortgage-ready buyers counseled by 3C housing counseling agencies who purchase newly constructed homes by BIPOC and mission-focused developers participating in the 3C Developer Alliance. While this loan fund will be piloted in two neighborhoods in Chicago – East Garfield Park and Humboldt Park – as a countermeasure to displacement of long-term residents, we are building the infrastructure and partnerships based on scalability nationally. The Chicago Community Trust (CCT) grant will help fund an estimated 25 loan originations and support fund start-up costs.