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.
Explore Our Discretionary Grants
Showing 5891–5898 of 4722 results
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Grant Recipient
Better Future Forward
Better Future Forward (BFF) is a nonprofit social enterprise on a mission to provide accessible, protective, and sustainable financial support to hard-working students pursuing their postsecondary pathways. Specifically, this proposed project seeks to continue addressing the unmet financial needs of City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) students and alumni, in partnership with BFF’s college partner organizations. Our overarching project goals are twofold: 1) To continue innovating on and improving BFF’s program model to best serve community college students, building on our partnership learnings of the last year, which were supported by Bridges to Brighter Futures; and 2)To invest heavily in the infrastructure and process that undergird BFF’s servicing efforts (i.e. when students finish school and begin making payments into BFF’s community fund), in direct response to student feedback; our ultimate aims with this workstream are to both improve the student experience of BFF’s servicing and also significantly increase the financial sustainability of the BFF model to support future students who face financial need on their higher education pathways. By achieving both project objectives, BFF will unlock more sustained and larger-scale funding sources and be able to ensure a much larger number of CCC students and alumni to have access to protective financial support through BFF’s program. We will also develop a blueprint for how best to equitably, accessibly, and sustainably address the financial challenges facing students across Chicago.
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Grant Recipient
DEPAUL UNIVERSITY
As a fully collaborative partnership between DePaul University, Harold Washington College, and OneGoal, TIIM support will create opportunities to begin improving transfer student support services for Chicago students. Our three institutions have a common mission and long-standing communication channels upon which to build further collaboration. We hope to conduct regular meetings with HWC and OneGoal to discover additional support for students and initiate plans, both short and long-term. In addition, our team looks forward to joining a learning community of fifteen organizations, all focused on the same results. This is a key opportunity to not only improve outcomes for our shared HWC/DePaul students but also to share information that will improve Bachelor's degree completion more generally in Cook County.
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Grant Recipient
Governors State University Foundation
The project will create a program focused on increasing the number of students who transfer from Kennedy-King College to Governors State University after earning an associate’s degree at Kennedy-King. The program will be known as TransferPlus and will include a partnership with Governors State University (GovState), Kennedy-King College (KKC) of the City Colleges of Chicago, and One Million Degrees (OMD). All share the core values of providing educational access and degree attainment for underserved populations. As partners, we strive to improve and transform the lives of members of the Black, Latine, and low-income communities. This partnership will improve the completion rates of bachelor’s degrees for transfer students within the regions we serve. Both GovState and KKC are Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs) and emerging Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). As such, we also serve a predominantly first-generation student population that often requires more support as they navigate the transfer process to pursue a baccalaureate degree. OMD’s will serve as an integral partner with their evidence-based model that has proved successful since 2006. OMD will be providing partnership development, technical assistance in program design, and developing a framework for sustainability and program evaluation. In alignment with the goal of the TIIM initiative, this project will increase the partners’ ability to provide an innovative and scalable student support model for transfer students seeking to obtain a baccalaureate degree while providing additional detailed data and completion metrics insights for developing research-based programming for minority-serving institutions like ours to create greater impact to more transfer students.
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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.