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
Annie B. Jones Civic Arts Center
Annie B. Jones Civic Arts Center (ABJ) requests funds to offer mental, physical, and emotional health, and wellness, as well as recreational activities through its Project LIFT↑ program. This unique and highly specialized Youth Development Program, which crosses three (3) Chicago Police Districts, addresses the unprecedented and extreme incidents of violence in Chicago that stem directly from unfair systems and oppressive policies. The Project LIFT↑ program is developed to provide love and care for community youth while de-programming and detoxing them from trauma and violent acts that they may have experienced or are at serious risk of experiencing. This program uses prevention and intervention measures to focus on peace, safety, healing, and wholeness. The program is designed to LIFT↑ these youth out of harmful conditions. It is a self-actualizing program that is rooted in love of self, love of others, and love of the community. The love of self, addresses biological or psychological behaviors; the love of peers/family focuses on the interactions between youth and two or more closely related people; and love of the community which addresses the health and safety of the greater community. The program is designed to help youth develop inner tranquility and replace emotional hurt and trauma leading to street and domestic violence with healing and self-acceptance which lead to paths of peace. This then, will enable them to project and express that same state of wholeness and peace through behavioral shifts. Through the proposed grant we will expand the program to include workshops in yoga, peace-breathing, healthy eating, psychology of music; a community music/dance ensemble; peace and healing circles, recreation, field trips; and social media challenges that promote positive/healthy attitudes toward one self, family/friends, and the community.
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Grant Recipient
Northern Illinois Food Bank
We are requesting $150,000 to support our vision that our neighbors will have the food they need to thrive. In FY20, we met the meal gap in 99% of our service area, yet recognized that we were not yet reaching all neighbors in need, particularly with the increased food insecurity due to COVID-19. In FY21 we responded to this increased need by distributing 100 million meals across our service area, a 25% increase over the previous year. We could not have done this without the support of federal programs that provided food and funds and the generosity of our many donors. For FY22 we are faced the challenge of continuing to meet the increased need for food assistance without the government support that we saw last year and with rising food and gas costs and supply chain disruptions. Although we saw a slight decline in numbers of neighbors facing food-insecurity in the summer of 2021, since November the numbers have been rising again and we are serving at least 20% more individuals than we were pre-COVID. For the first six months of FY22 we distributed 38 million meals; 24% was purchased, a big increase from the 10% we were purchasing before the pandemic. As we continue to pursue the goals of our strategic plan UNITE we are focused on providing a better experience for our neighbors, with more choice, better access and less stigma.
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Grant Recipient
NAMI Chicago
NAMI Chicago seeks continued funding to bring coordination and networking to Chicago’s fragmented mental health crisis system, diverting people with significant mental health needs away from arrest and hospitalization towards mental health recovery. We will organize and coordinate acute mental health care providers like hospitals, living rooms and triage centers, and build the necessary capacity, infrastructure and policy solutions to make them an effective alternative. Within this approach, we will use our Helpline as a tool to increase proactive recovery work and intensive case management within the mental health crisis and acute care system.
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Grant Recipient
FARM Illinois
To empower the Illinois Agri-Food Alliance, a consortium of leaders driving implementation of the Food & Agriculture RoadMap for Illinois, to pursue roadmap-related activities as they relate to climate, conservation, and land-use, and advance its role as a connector and convener across Illinois’ agri-food system and catalyst and champion for forward-looking and systemic dialogue, ideation, and action.
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Grant Recipient
Upwardly Global
Upwardly Global requests funding in the amount of $25,000 to support efforts to empower our community of unemployed and underemployed immigrant and refugee job seekers (82% of whom identify as BIPOC) with the skills, networks and credentials needed to rebuild their lives and careers in the U.S., contributing to a thriving and more inclusive Chicago workforce and economy. Those served will emerge from our program having secured gainful, "thriving-wage" professional employment in sustainable industries like tech and healthcare, earning an average starting salary of $55,000 and experiencing an income increase of $45,000 on average. As a result, we will put mobility within reach and contribute to a reduction in income inequality among Chicago's immigrant families.
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Grant Recipient
Kids Above All
Kids Above All (KAA) is requesting funding to expand our therapeutic counseling services for families enrolled in our Chicago Early Childhood programs. KAA will use a trauma-informed approach to heal children, families & the community through therapy, along with other modalities & supports, to address stressors exacerbated by the pandemic.
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Grant Recipient
Forefront
Forefront requests a $200,000/1 year general operating grant from the Chicago Community Trust (CCT) to support Forefront’s continued mission for a vibrant social impact sector that serves all of Illinois and our work and shared goals of an equitable recovery. This renewed and increased support from the CCT will fortify Forefront’s ability to offer deeper public policy supports for our sector's pressing needs and solutions informed by the voices and community leaders and the Trust and Forefront’s shared network of NPOs and philanthropy stakeholders. This support will increase Forefront’s capacity by fueling the necessary staffing and resources to: - Update of our free NPO sustainability and capacity building resources - Support Mission Sustainability Initiative (MSI) resources and grants - Advance and improve our public policy and advocacy efforts with added staff working on systemic issues and policies critical to the Chicago, Cook County, and Statewide social impact sector. -Build our internal/external capacity and staff to provide backbone support through a sectorwide Advancing Racial Equity (ARE) Collective; key work in the coming year will include the hiring of a full-time Advancing Racial Equity Director and landscape scan, maps of current racial equity/justice initiatives, policies at the local, state and federal levels, and the available and emerging resources, stakeholders at work. Forefront will compile and continue to share these resources through a digital center open for the sector. As part of this work, Forefront will apply a racial equity lens to all our work and teams. Our goal is to leverage our recent experience and insights as a collective action convener through efforts like Census 2020 and use our broad and far-reaching network to center and help reduce silos, fuel collaboration and accountability, and amplify longstanding racial equity leaders and experts and community- and BIPOC-informed solutions.
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Grant Recipient
Lawndale Christian Legal Center
LCLC believes that a community-based, co-located, interdisciplinary, and culturally competent legal-social team advocating for high-risk, justice involved youth while simultaneously connecting them to community-based services and assets within their community can avert the damaging effects of youth criminalization, mass incarceration, violence, and poverty. Our holistic representation is designed to prevent our youth from suffering unjust debilitating punishment while also helping them become young leaders in our community equipped to accomplish their educational and employment goals. Our goal is to meet their legal and social needs such that we not only provide them with the highest-quality legal representation, we also provide them with the highest-quality social support so they can move forward with their lives, accomplish their goals, and never return to the criminal justice system again. Our youth have suffered serious harm and learned to survive with basic physical, mental, and emotional needs unmet. Our programming targets individuals at the highest risk for violence, both as perpetrators and victims. In 2021, over one-third of the clients we represented had gun charges. Our holistic representation is designed to prevent further systemic harm while also addressing the underlying unmet needs that contributed to their criminal behavior to prevent further harm to them and our community. By addressing both, LCLC’s model of holistic representation provides us with a meaningful path forward to substantially reduce violence and improve public safety in Chicago.