Building a Network of Diverse Developers
City environments are made up of buildings, transit stations, streets, parks, and other man-made structures. Also called the “built environment,” these systems shape our lives…
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. Today, that means confronting the racial and ethnic wealth gap.
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Grant Recipient
Fresh Taste
Austin Fresh is a collaborative grantmaking five-year 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 have committed to a minimum $1M for each of five years to support the neighborhood. This renewal request is for the third year of this successful 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
Grow Greater Englewood
The Englewood Village Farms focuses on activating the farms near the Englewood Nature Trail also utilizing organizing, advocacy, business planning, and implementation strategies. By focusing on acquiring more land, for farmers, and technical support and supplies for farmers in the Englewood Village Farms
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Grant Recipient
ALL CHICAGO MAKING HOMELESSNESS HISTORY
All Chicago promotes systems-change and policy innovations in Chicago’s homelessness system. We seek to advance our capacity to help achieve racial equity in the housing space. We lead the Chicago Continuum of Care and maintain strong relationships with government entities, sector thought leaders, community-based organizations and partnerships, universities, and others. All Chicago monitors the Homeless Management Information System database to track people who touch the homeless system each year. We use comprehensive data to drive decision making. We promote system-wide improvements through public convenings, sector wide trainings and by incorporating the voices of adults and youth with the lived experience of homelessness.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Cityscape
With generous support from the Chicago Community Trust CNI grant in 2021, Chicago Cityscape began a long transition. Before CCT’s support we were a real estate data platform focused primarily on private sector clients. The CNI funds helped us evolve into a more inclusive community information platform that serves mission minded and emerging real estate practitioners as well as nonprofit organizations working on economic, real estate, and community development. We refer to these folks as “Focus Organizations and Individuals” or (FOIs) many times throughout the course of this application. Through the CCT-funded Data Equity Cohort (DEC) we learned about the data sources and tech solutions FOIs need to meet their missions. We prototyped many solutions and rolled new features they now use regularly. Details of these developments are shared later in the application. To summarize what we’re requesting renewal funds for – Through DEC Chicago Cityscape uncovered FOIs need many more data sources and tech solutions than we had time and money to deliver on in the first year. Here’s an overview of their three requests we’d use renewal funds to work on: (1) Co-fund a Cityscape Sponsorship account, (2) Test the viability of and build new features requested by DEC that could not be built during year one, (3) Continue expanding relationships with DEC members and FOIs.
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Grant Recipient
Shriver Center on Poverty Law
The Shriver Center on Poverty Law (Shriver Center) requests a renewal $150,000 general operating grant from the Chicago Community Trust to support its leadership and meaningful work across multiple coalitions, including the Transit Table, Cost of Living Refund Coalition, Housing Policy Roundtable, Illinois Domestic Workers Coalition, and Responsible Budget Coalition. We will leverage these networks throughout the grant period as they strive to promote economic and racial justice, strengthen families and communities, and advance policies and reforms that address the racial wealth gap. Our advocates generally serve as the primary legal and policy experts of these tables, increasing the strength and ultimate success of each coalition.
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Grant Recipient
MAPSCORPS - Northwestern School of Education and Social Policy (SESP)
Building on 13 years of a successful implementation of evidence-based positive youth development, and robust training in STEM and data collection, MAPSCorps proposes to partner with the We Rise Together (WRT) partners. The MAPSCorps team will add meaning to quantitative data analysis to engage identified community members, listen and reflect community voice and to describe community perceptions of the WRT economic well-being impacts. MAPSCorps field staff will facilitate community conversations and surveys (tailored with community input) including questions re: economic well-being metrics, local program/service participation and satisfaction, entrepreneurial interest and attitudes, and contextual/support questions; and support Participatory Action Research (PAR), implementing surveys with a broad range of community constituents; and co-constructing and interpreting the findings.
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Grant Recipient
Center for Neighborhood Technology
This proposal supports the involvement of seven organizations, led by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), to participate in coalitions regarding transportation equity and mobility justice. These organizations - CNT, Active Transportation Alliance, Equiticity, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Logan Square Neighborhood Association, Metropolitan Planning Council, and one additional organization to be identified - make up the leadership of the Transportation Equity Network (TEN), a coalition formed in 2020 that includes over 40 community groups, civic organizations, equitable transportation advocates, academics, and other stakeholders. This grant will be used in large part to support the continued involvement and leadership of our organizations in this coalition, and will also support our involvement in other related coalitions.
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Grant Recipient
Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights
We seek renewed support for our Impact Division, which leads our policy work to close the racial and ethnic wealth divide in Illinois, such as work on economic security, income supports, asset building, ending wealth stripping, consumer protections, and fines/fees reform. This has included retirement and Children’s Savings Account programs, earned income credit and child tax credit expansion, lending/debt reforms, and driver's license suspensions. Our priorities are developed in coalition and with an equity lens. We use data to understand racial disparities, and center and engage impacted people in our work. We seek support for leading the coalition Financial Inclusion for All Illinois, and providing advocacy and subject matter leadership in other coalitions connected to these issues.