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
In Care of Black Women
The Art Center Co-op will be anchored on the ground floor of a two-story 5,625 square foot mixed-use building at 1201 W. 71st Street in the Englewood neighborhood. Proposed uses for the Center will generate community investment as a cooperatively owned and operated alternative art center featuring retail, studio, and gallery space. Our specialty retail store products include art supplies, contemporary streetwear apparel, books, vinyls, and home goods. We provide affordable shared and private studio spaces, custom artwork framing, art advising and consulting, and offer classes and workshops in woodworking, photography, ceramics, painting, drawing, and collage for corporate and non-profit organizations and individuals of all levels.
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Grant Recipient
CITY COLLEGES OF CHICAGO FOUNDATION
City Colleges of Chicago is requesting support for the second year of its math redesign project in the total amount of $145,000. 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 Committee. Continued progress will require project management support and funding for program design and delivery. 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 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
Puerto Rican Cultural Center
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Grant Recipient
Four Point Play
Our organization hosts AAU basketball teams, one to multi day basketball camps and clinics, mental health meet-ups and distribute Athletic Care Bags. Our AAU basketball teams provide a platform for the youth of the Chicagoland area to achieve excellence in and outside the sport of basketball. Our developmental teams focus on youth in 4th-8th grade during the Spring and Summer season. Our coed basketball skills camps and clinics are free to affordable to fourth - eighth grade athletes and geared towards athletes aspiring to learn the fundamentals of basketball. Our mental health meetups focus on equipping athletes with the tools and resources they need to achieve mental resilience, emotional stability and character building. Our distribution of athletic care bags contribute to educating families on the importance of physical activity and nutritional health to combat chronic health issues, improve brain health and eating patterns. All of our programming consists of us recognizing challenges and hardships they may be experiencing regarding skills development, social skills, family dynamics, academic challenges, community barriers and food disparities. In addressing these issues we incorporate communication circles, where we have our participants answer a series of questions focused on their mental and emotional state of mind and share their current state with the issue and offer to others how to overcome it if needed. We conduct a match-up buddy systems, where we match youth with someone in their program so they can learn about each other's similarities and differences. Our parental/sibling with athlete activities allow for our participants to show their parents or siblings the skills they have learned within our programming and lead activities to teach their relatives a new skill or talent. We also provide volunteer opportunities for participants to work with local organizations and provide assistance with different tasks and activities and hopefully learn new skills. For example, our participants packed our Athletic Care Bags for an organization that serves foster children within the Chicagoland area. Once the task was over they assisted us in distributing the bags to the owners of the organization and saw the pictures and video of the youth receiving the bags. This allowed our youth to gain a sense of purpose, build their social skills and self esteem and most importantly learn valuable skills. Our mental health check ins are filled with exercises that focus on character building, self awareness and leadership skills. While our check ins allow the youth to focus on their mental and emotional health we attempt to put them in position to execute those skills and tools in real life situations. For example, one of our character building exercises is to pick one strength of a fellow participant and one weakness they possess they could turn into a positive. Once our participants complete the exercise, they are asked to complete the exercise at home, school or a different environment and report back their results. The participants that complete the tasks recognize their ability to focus on the positive, provide encouragement and make something good out of a negative situation. Certain exercises that are smaller but crucial to developing our youth as leaders such as goal setting, which allows them to develop plans on how to achieve their goals at the beginning of our program and monitor their progress throughout the program. This creates resilience, discipline and focus which are key traits to build young leaders. Emotion check ins, where we have our youth inform us of their feelings on a number scale before they start the program and check back in after the end of the program. This allows each youth to identify their feelings and recognize what affects them in positive and negative ways. This encourages them to stay in tune with their emotions as well as others around them. Providing compliments to fellow participants is another small but crucial exercise due to it encourages recognition of others strengths within their environment. It’s not only a confidence booster but it allows our youth to find the positive in negative situations which in most of our youth environments it is a valuable technique to have to push through dire situations. Our goals within all of our programming is to allow our youth the opportunity to recognize they can be leaders in every environment they are in. We attempt to raise stellar athletes but most of all responsible, productive and positive human beings. Our objectives within our programming to build leaders are to teach collaborations, boost their self esteem and confidence, improve their communication and public speaking skills, develop organization and delegation skills and be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. In speaking with our youth and families they at lease are able to achieve one or more of those objectives after completing one or more of our programming. Our training & drill application allows us to fortify the athlete's mind, body, spirit & discipline with fun and exciting drills & games. We have 80% of athletes that participated in our program improve in social-emotional skills and 100% of athletes improve in athletic performance. We received our data through Google Forms and Hello Insights platforms. Our purpose is to make sure we are building leaders that can operate in their roles of leadership in several environments. We want to build leaders on the court, but also in the classroom, their families and within their communities. We want our youth to know that the skills that we are teaching them can be transferable in all walks of their life and will allow them to be examples to those that witness them in action. .
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Grant Recipient
Better Future Forward
We humbly request support for a project to invest in improvements to our program model focused on ensuring we are meeting the needs of our two-year college students pursuing a bachelor’s degree. These investments will be focused on enhancements that will give these students a strong chance of completing their degree in a timely manner and successfully transferring to a family-sustaining career.
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Grant Recipient
John Walt Foundation Inc
The John Walt Foundation is a non-profit organization named after a West side hero whose light was dimmed too soon to senseless violence. As a rapper and Chicago creative, John Walt’s only aim was to make people happy with his story and song. The John Walt Foundation upholds his luminous legacy by disbursing scholarships and creating financial opportunities for young creative entrepreneurs, providing platforms so they can share their truth, partnering them with professional artists for mentorship and creating pathways to leadership for young people directly impacted by the divestment of resources in the South and West sides of Chicago and the systemic and purposeful marginalization of Black and Brown youth. In collaboration with The Chicago Community Trust’s “Elevate Leaders” grant, we hope to continue collaborations with our creative communities, extend our outreach, and expand programming and the pipeline to leadership for Chicago youth interested in music, creative entrepreneurship and social impact.
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Grant Recipient
Fresh Taste
North Lawndale Fresh (NLF) is a collaborative grantmaking program 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 North Lawndale neighborhood. The vision is an equitable Chicagoland region where all people have knowledge of and access to healthy food. The funders involved with North Lawndale Fresh have committed to a minimum $1M for each of five years to support the neighborhood. 2023 is the second year of that five-year commitment to North Lawndale Fresh. 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
Teamwork Englewood