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.
Explore Our Discretionary Grants
Showing 5851–5858 of 4696 results
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Grant Recipient
Equity And Transformation
Equity and Transformation (EAT) requests funding to support our 2025 Public Education Campaign and grassroots organizing work. This initiative targets high-risk communities through a series of 6 teach-ins across Illinois to increase awareness of current employment protections, highlight the outcomes of our Chicago Future Fund (CFF) guaranteed income pilot, and disseminate findings from our Breaking the Chains report. The goal is to reach over 100,000 Illinois residents in Illinois, educate formerly incarcerated individuals (FIP) about their rights under the Illinois Human Rights Act, the possibilities of a permanent guaranteed income fund in the state, and to activate and empower them to take action.
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Grant Recipient
Family Focus, Inc.
Family Focus serves the needs of children and the adults in their lives, aiming to improve the long-term outcomes for the entire family by supporting them together. Through a holistic approach, the goals of our programs are to ensure children from underserved, under-resourced communities are life-long learners and their parents have the skills, resources and support they need to build social capital and achieve upward economic mobility. For 175 years, across multiple programs, Family Focus affirms the cultural, racial and linguistic identities of each family we serve; mobilizes formal and informal resources to support family development; and creates pathways for each family member to enhance their capacities and long-term well-being.
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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 responsible 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 on the West Side of Chicago and surrounding suburbs.
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Grant Recipient
FAMILY SERVICE & MENTAL HEALTH CENTER OF CICERO
Cicero Family Service is a community-based mental health organization that addresses the emotional, psychological, and practical needs of low-income and underserved individuals and families in the Cicero area. Our programs are designed to remove barriers to mental health care and connect clients with essential resources. We provide bilingual, trauma-informed psychotherapy for individuals, couples, families, and groups, beginning with a structured intake process that informs individualized treatment plans. Beyond clinical services, we offer community wellness programs that include emotional well-being workshops, gambling prevention efforts, Mental Health First Aid trainings and mental health consulting for early childhood educators and community organizations. All our efforts aim to promote emotional well-being, social equity, and lasting resilience in the communities we serve.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation
The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation's mission is to address the culture, institutions, and individuals that perpetrate, profit from, or support sexual harm. One of the cornerstones of our work is our Prevention Education program, a primary sexual harm prevention program that teaches youth to recognize, resist and deter sexually harmful practices that may otherwise be seen as normative. Pre- and post-testing shows that this program causes statistically significant changes in youth beliefs and intentions around sexual harm and consent.
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Grant Recipient
SGA Youth & Family Services
SGA is requesting a general operating grant of $100,000 to support enhanced training and professional development for the staff our early childhood programs, to increase their capacity to identify and address indicators of mental health issues and trauma in caregivers and children. SGA has provided early childhood services for more than twenty years. Currently we have three major programs: Prevention Initiative in Chicago, Cicero and Waukegan, Early Head Start in Chicago, and Early Head Start Child Care Partnership in Chicago. All of our programs are home-based, and serve communities that lack affordable center-based childcare slots. Our early childhood services provide the foundation for SGA’s Cycle of Opportunity, a continuum of care from the cradle to the workforce. SGA, like all early childhood service providers, is facing uncertain times. Suddenly, there seems to be no national consensus that all children, regardless of their background, should enter kindergarten ready to learn. SGA remains steadfast in the belief that the greatest investment we can make is in the first three years of a child’s life. Through culturally relevant, practical parenting education we teach parents to be their child’s first, and lifelong teacher and their strongest advocate. We ensure that children receive all developmental screenings and achieve developmental milestones. When delays are detected, we ensure that children are linked to appropriate resources. We provide opportunities for socially isolated parents and children to interact with their peers in groups that reflect their backgrounds and experiences. We make sure that all of our children are connected to pre-school when they reach the age of three. To deliver this essential work, SGA has a team of more than 60 individuals, most of whom are Home Visitors. It is important to note that several of our Home Visitors are former clients who went back to school with the support and encouragement of their own SGA Home Visitor. SGA has recently restructured the leadership of its early childhood programs under one Early Childhood Manager, Alma Galvan. Alma has been with SGA for more than 10 years and came to us with more than ten years of prior experience. Initially, she managed Prevention Initiative in Chicago, working alongside the managers of the other programs and gaining familiarity with the services. Last year, we brought both the Chicago and suburban Prevention Initiative programs under her management to increase efficiency and consistency. Under her leadership, all of our PI programs achieved Blue Ribbon Affiliate status, a highest quality designation given by the Parents as Teachers curriculum to indicate the programs have achieved fidelity with the model. Most recently, SGA promoted Alma to oversee our Early Head Start and Early Head Start Child Care Partnership childcare homes programs. Alma brings lived experience and a bicultural sensitivity to our largely Latinx staff and families. One of Alma’s challenges is that each of the programs has its own programmatic and funding requirements. At the same time, SGA has its own internal priorities and standards, particularly related to the delivery of trauma-informed care. With all of the programs under the management of one experienced leader, and with the support of SGA's experienced program evaluation team, she can compare training needs and requirements and create a comprehensive trauma and behavioral health training series that is consistent across programs and elevates the level of care our staff can provide. Funding from Chicago Community Trust will support this professional development series. We are proposing to offer Mental Health First Aid to all of our early childhood staff so they can identify warning signs in caregivers and make appropriate referrals. We will also offer a series on trauma-informed care, including identifying the effects of trauma on babies, children and caregivers, strategies to avoid re-traumatization, stress reduction for families and vicarious trauma. Lastly, we will provide workshops for our staff on self-care and stress management so that they can be at their best when working with their clients. Even as we navigate uncertain times, having this opportunity to bolster our staff training with Chicago Community Trust general operating funds underscores our belief in our staff and demonstrates our willingness as an agency to keep investing in them and in the children and families we serve.
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Grant Recipient
CHICAGO SURVIVORS INC
We are applying for the bridge grant opportunity regarding critical needs covered to support families and youth directly impacted by violent and traumatic death exposures.
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Grant Recipient
Chicago Commons
Chicago Commons respectfully requests a $95,000 general operations grant. Generous support from Chicago Community Trust will allow us to continue serving families across generations. For more than 130 years Chicago Commons (Commons) has been driven by our mission to empower communities to overcome poverty and systemic barriers, embrace opportunities, and thrive across generations. For our community’s youngest members, Commons provides high-quality, year-round early childhood education to children in underserved communities from 6 weeks to 5 years old. Our four directly-operated early childhood education centers empower children through the Reggio Emilia approach for self-directed, experiential learning. We also have 18 Head Start/Early Head Start subgrantee early childhood education sites across 15 other underserved areas. We provide services that help seniors and adults with disabilities maintain their independence and quality of life. Our Adult Day Service center provides individualized care in a community-based group setting, and our Home Care Aides assist seniors throughout Chicagoland with their daily needs. Finally, our Family Hub empowers the parents/caregivers of our children and seniors through financial empowerment, entrepreneurship, workforce and skill development, degree/accreditation attainment services, mental/physical wellness workshops, and self-advocacy. Commons serves approximately 3,500 individuals across all programs annually. Commons works with families from across the Chicagoland area, but our main service sites are the Lower West Side (Pilsen), New City (Back of the Yards), Grand Boulevard, and Humboldt Park. Research has repeatedly shown the importance of early childhood education (ECE) equity in closing the gap between low-income students and their wealthier peers, as well as building a foundation for success later in life. In the neighborhoods we serve, only 33% of children from birth to three are reached by Early Head Start services. Our diverse participants include homeless families, teen parents, immigrants, children with disabilities, and those involved in the child welfare system. 98% of our families are below 100% of the Federal Poverty guideline, making them Head Start eligible. Many face significant economic hardships, with an average household income of $15,050. About 60% of participants identify as Black/African American and 30% as Latino/a/x. 95% of primary caregivers of our ECE students are single mothers. Finally, studies have linked social isolation to a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia in older adults, as well as an increased vulnerability to abuse, neglect, and exploitation. 84% of Adult Day Services clients are over the age of 60; 85% live alone. Commons’ multigenerational approach exceeds what can be achieved through separate services for parents and children. Our approach combines high quality Early Childhood Education with holistic family services, leading to better long-term outcomes and the potential to interrupt intergenerational poverty.