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
RESPOND NOW
Respond Now respectfully seeks the CCT's support for our ongoing Food Pantry and SNAP Outreach operations, both aimed at critical hunger relief in the 22 south suburban Chicago neighborhoods we serve and have served for over half a century. Open five days per week, Monday-Friday, Respond Now's Food Pantry offers the community a client-choice modeled pantry that allows them to choose how to best feed themselves and their families up to twice weekly. They are provided as many groceries as they can carry out (typically 2-3 full-sized paper bags). Our SNAP Outreach programming helps qualifying beneficiaries with navigating requirements to qualify for nutritional assistance. With the CCT's support, we can continue to strengthen and broaden the service reach of these two programs to meet community need wherever it may be. We consider this a priority effort because the socioeconomic conditions of our struggling communities is not poised to improve in the foreseeable future due to systemic socioeconomic disinvestment, including structuralized racism. While not included in the project budget, approximately $500,000 in food is received from the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Horticultural Society
The Chicago Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest (WCH) urban agriculture program requests support from the Chicago Community Trust Unity Fund for its food access and community health initiative, VeggieRx. During the grant period, VeggieRx will provide an estimated 120,000 pounds of fresh, primarily local produce to an estimated 2,000 direct participants, while benefiting an additional 4,000 family members. WCH will partner with medical staff at three Federally Qualified Health Centers—Lawndale Christian Health Center in North Lawndale and PCC Community Wellness Centers in Austin and Belmont-Cragin—to refer food insecure patients with diet-related illnesses into the program. Participants receive weekly boxes of fresh produce along with nutrition and cooking education, an intervention that is coordinated with their clinical care. Using this model, VeggieRx addresses immediate concerns of food access while advancing long term community health and resiliency and promoting health equity in Chicago. During the grant period, VeggieRx will also explore the potential for an additional choice-based nutrition incentive component through the indoor community market at WCH’s Farm on Ogden headquarters.
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Grant Recipient
Beyond Hunger
Beyond Hunger’s work aligns closely with the Chicago Community Trust’s commitment to close the racial wealth gap and ensure a thriving and equitable future for everyone. By increasing access to healthy food in our communities, we meet immediate needs for those disproportionally affected by community divestment, rising food costs, and extreme rent burden. But we also recognize the need for long term solutions that connect families to income and health benefits that will lessen the health equity divide. Taking the lead from participant input on how to build/enhance programs, we are intentionally collaborating with existing community partners and assets. Our comprehensive programs include providing nutritious, culturally appropriate food in a way that respects the wishes of the people we serve. We’ve tailored our food distribution to offset the racial inequities in a traditional food system, including using our purchasing power to support BIPOC vendors and local farmers. Beyond Hunger’s unique offering of nutrition education programming empowers participants to take control of their own health while making a lasting impact for future generations. Chicago Community Trust’s continued support will help us provide nutritious food to increasing numbers of people experiencing food insecurity. It will allow us to offer food choices based on community input accompanied by community-led nutrition education programming. Hunger may seem like an intractable issue, but we don’t agree. Hunger CAN be solved with resources, logistics, and political will. At Beyond Hunger, we deploy them all, helping solve food insecurity in the 13 ZIP codes we serve on the West side of Chicago and surrounding suburbs.
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Grant Recipient
TGiMovement
TGi Movement is thrilled to have the opportunity to apply again for a grant with The Chicago Community Trust. This application seeks to secure funding to further the efforts of our flagship Omega Chi Omega youth program, which was successfully initiated in 2021 through the support of this very grant. Over the past year, the program has witnessed remarkable growth, impacting numerous lives and strengthening our community ties. In this next phase, TGi Movement aims to emphasize sustainability, ensuring the longevity and continued success of Omega Chi Omega. Our focus is solidifying the foundation built over the last year, optimizing our resources, and enhancing our programs to serve our youth better. This grant will be instrumental in helping us achieve these goals, allowing us to make a lasting difference in the lives of the young individuals we are committed to supporting.
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Grant Recipient
CHI-RISE
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Grant Recipient
One Fair Wage Inc
One Fair Wage Chicago is led by Chicago-based women of color who are organizing service workers, ‘high road’ employers and coalition partners to raise wages and working conditions in the service sector and end the subminimum wage for tipped workers. With support from our national affiliate One Fair Wage, we engage in policy shift - organizing workers, employers and allies to fight for policy to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers; industry shift - supporting responsible restaurants in learning how to raise wages profitably; and narrative shift - producing research and obtaining press and social media on the stories of tipped workers in Chicago, and the history of the subminimum wage for tipped workers as a direct legacy of slavery and ongoing source of racial inequity and sexual harassment for a workforce that is in majority women, disproportionately women of color. In October 2023, thanks in part to support from the Chicago Community Trust,the Chicago City Council voted overwhelmingly to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers in America’s third-largest city and home to 7,000 restaurants. The City is now rolling out a minimum wage of $15.80 with tips on top, gradually phasing out the subminimum wage for tipped workers over the next five years. The impact of this win, led by primarily women of color in the service sector and ‘high road’ employers of color, benefits over 300,000 Chicago workers. But the impact extends beyond Chicago as the win influences the statewide and national conversation surrounding worker power and wage equity and adds tremendous momentum to our wage advocacy efforts. Building on momentum from the successful policy change to eliminate the subminimum wage in Chicago, we will focus on: 1) ensuring that Chicago workers experience the wage increase through both education and organizing; 2) organizing Chicagoland workers and ‘high road’ employers to fight for One Fair Wage policy statewide; and 3) expanding the High Road Kitchens program to support BIPOC restaurant owners in successfully incorporating these wage changes and increasing race and gender equity in their restaurants. First, we are currently underway in assisting the Chicago bill implementation with the City of Chicago. We plan to hold a series of events around the first wage increase, slated for July 1, 2024, and then educational fora with workers and social media through the year. Throughout this process we will document worker and restaurant owner testimonies to help advance the statewide fight against the subminimum wage in Illinois. Second, through this process and beyond, we intend to grow our base of service workers and responsible restaurant owners in the Chicagoland area and develop a regional cadre of tipped workers both in Chicago and the suburbs ready to share their stories illustrating the need for policy change with the press, policymakers, and the public. From our base, we will promote worker and ‘high road’ restaurant owner leaders’ stories and data on the impact of the Chicago win to help inform the statewide policy debate, uplifting the voices and experiences of restaurant workers. Third, we will grow our successful High Road Kitchens program in Chicago in partnership with Mayor Johnson, identify restaurant owners to support in raising wages inside Chicago as the law requires, and helping restaurant owners in the collar cities, where workers have been either traveling to Chicago in anticipation of higher wages and/or demanding that their cities the same - developing them as advocates for a statewide One Fair Wage Illinois bill. For example, the Mayor of Cicero has become a visible leader on the statewide policy fight because he has heard from so many workers in his City that they will leave to work in Chicago unless they too can access One Fair Wage.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Youth Boxing Club Inc
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Grant Recipient
Respair Production & Media
Continued development, implementation, infrastrucuture building, programming, and impact strategy of Respair Production & Media, an ecosystem hub that supports the media needed to reshape Chicago and beyond toward liberation.