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.
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Grant Recipient
NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING SERVICES OF CHICAGO INC
Led by Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, the Housing Policy Task Force is advancing systemic change to promote equity in homeownership and wealth-building for communities of color. Comprised of more than thirty influential stakeholders, the Task Force brings together leaders from Chicago’s nonprofit, for-profit, academic, regulatory, and public sectors. Together, we integrate research, advocacy, strategic planning, and coalition-building to drive policy and programmatic reforms that make owner-occupied housing more accessible, affordable, and sustainable. In the coming year, our focus areas will include expanding equitable access to mortgage credit, supporting inclusive pathways to homeownership, addressing disparities in property appraisals, and advancing fair solutions for property tax repayment.
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Grant Recipient
Fresh Taste
Austin Fresh is a collaborative grantmaking program started in 2020 to increase access to healthy affordable food, support community gardens and local food production, grow food enterprises, and protect and strengthen food assistance programs in the Austin neighborhood. The vision is an equitable Chicagoland region where all people have knowledge of and access to healthy food. The funders involved with Austin Fresh initially committed to a minimum $1M for each of five years to support the neighborhood. This renewal request is for the sixth year of this neighborhood focused funder collaborative. This project aligns with the building supply-side skills and attracting capital strategies of Food:Land:Opportunity while also reducing fragmentation.
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Grant Recipient
Fresh Taste
Fresh Taste, a collaborative funder initiative, was conceived as a catalytic process that systemically changes the way food is produced and consumed in the Chicago region to promote healthy land, healthy people, and healthy communities. Fresh Taste also manages the Chicago Region Food System Fund, Austin Fresh, North Lawndale Fresh and Midwest Regenerative Agriculture Fund.
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Grant Recipient
Illinois Black Advocacy Initiative
The Illinois Black Advocacy Initiative (IBAI)is a Black-led and Black-focused, statewide, advocacy organization focused on the resilience and self-determination of Black Illinoisans. Recognizing the roles that anti-Blackness and systemic oppression has on Black lives, IBAI applies a bold, progressive, race forward focus to its advocacy, with the belief that Illinois will be a socially and economically stronger state when policies and practices are established so that Black people can thrive. Anti-Black racism in both practice and policy continues to be a threat to Black Illinoisans, it serves as a barrier to our well-being, and interrupts our ability to fully be the architects of our lives and communities. Black people have been instrumental in making Illinois the vibrant state that it is today. However, despite our contributions, state and local policies and practices serve to disenfranchise us and serve as barriers to our ability to live full and abundant lives. In order to disrupt anti-Blackness and systemic oppression, we must center Black-led and Black centered power building groups and individuals, who are organizing and advocating for Black lives and liberation. History has taught us that race-neutral advocacy and policymaking will not end systemic oppression and injustice experienced by Black people. Black-led and explicitly Black-centered organizations are the core influencers and architects of IBAI’s advocacy.
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Grant Recipient
Illinois Community Power Fund
The Illinois Community Power Fund requests funding to support its work to strategically expand funding for organizing in Illinois, to ensure that a racially and geographically diverse set of communities are building and wielding statewide power together. Specifically, the requested grant would support the three components of our work: grantmaking, capacity building, and funder/donor organizing.
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Grant Recipient
Fresh Taste
Fresh Taste funders are creating a collaborative response fund to help food system organizations and leaders navigate a volatile funding landscape through intentional adaptation.
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Grant Recipient
Logan Square Neighborhood Association
Our proposal will implement an innovative housing policy that will give many of our long-term Black and Latine community members a fighting chance to remain. We are part of a movement that is upending a harmful cycle of real estate development that has left Chicago as a segregated city of extremes; neighborhoods are either wealthy and exclusive, or they are disinvested and left behind. We rarely see diverse and mixed income communities, because developers earn the highest profits by honing in on one disinvested neighborhood at a time, flooding it with cash to flip it to the other extreme. So, whether in disinvested neighborhoods or communities with severe displacement pressure, Black and Latine households are missing out on the opportunity to build wealth and enjoy thriving, stable communities. Last fall, our housing stability pilot for the Latine neighborhoods of Logan Square, Avondale, Hermosa, and Humboldt Park (the Northwest Side Preservation Ordinance, NWHPO) was passed and took effect in February 2025. There are two key provisions within the ordinance; first, a demolition impact fee to discourage deconversions of multifamily Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) into single family homes, and second, the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA). Our goal in the first year is to launch an implementation working group with three subcommittees, each with different stakeholders and devoted to different aspects of making the NWHPO a success: monitoring, education, and ecosystem development. The monitoring committee will be tasked with tracking the demolition permits within the ordinance zone and ensuring that the appropriate fees are enforced: we aim to show a reduction of deconversions of multi-family homes by at least 50% in the first year, while also leveraging any fees collected for construction of more affordable housing. This committee will be represented by Palenque LSNA in partnership with the Department of Housing, the Department of Buildings, and the seven Aldermen whose wards are within the preservation zone. The subsequent two committees will be dedicated to making TOPA a success. The education committee will be responsible for outreach to both tenants and landlords to inform them of the rights, responsibilities, and opportunities afforded to them by the ordinance. This will be done through regular canvassing by the Palenque LSNA Housing Justice Club as well as quarterly webinars in partnership with aldermen represented by the preservation zone as well as the Department of Housing. To that end, the education subcommittee will be represented by the alders as well as the Department of Housing. The final subcommittee, ecosystem development, will develop the necessary infrastructure to activate TOPA as a pathway for affordable homeownership and renting. We envision an alternative pathway for the housing ecosystem in our communities, but it will take more than the piece of legislation we passed last fall. To do it, we must coordinate the financial, legal, and logistical infrastructure to enable tenants to exercise their right to purchase their buildings and allow us to find partners to preserve them as affordable. In the last couple months we have had many meetings with partners with expertise in the financial, legal, and technical assistance needed to partner with tenants in TOPA acquisitions, and plan to invite the following organizations to join our ecosystem development subcommittee: Here to Stay Community Land Trust, Chicago Community Loan Fund, The Resurrection Project, The Community WEB, and the Department of Housing. We are excited to pilot a new and exciting path toward the preservation of affordability in our community, which we believe can be a model for the entire city. We have seen time and time again in Logan Square how buildings are sold, tenants evicted, and rents hiked up. But with your support, we can prove there is another way and continue to build out the alternative housing ecosystem our communities deserve. In summary, funding will allow us to kickstart implementation of our ordinance, providing the resources for tenant education, systems coordination, and advocacy to key decision makers: the Department of Housing, state, county, and local representatives, and key nonprofits that can assist in supporting tenants. While this work is all part of our comprehensive plan to implement the Northwest Side Preservation Ordinance, a $100,000 grant from the Chicago Community Trust would specifically support the tenant organizing aspect of this work–providing education and resources for tenants and organizing them to engage in and activate TOPA. We will also partner with Southside Together, a Black-led community-based organization facing severe displacement pressure in a community that also has the TOPA provision, scaling our efforts and laying the groundwork for long-term systemic change.