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

Filters

Showing 5901–5908 of 4732 results

  • Grant Recipient

    The Chicago Community Foundation/Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance

    Awarded: Awarded Amount: $50,000

    This is a funding application for the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance. Bridges to Brighter Futures is a Leadership Funder of the Funder Alliance, and this application maintains that role in FY25 and FY26. Being a Leadership Funder means that this funding (at least in part) pools with the other Leadership Funders, and that Bridges to Brighter Futures representative(s) sit on the CWFA Management Committee to direct the funder collaborative's strategies, staff and grant-making. The application itself, as agreed to by Leadership Funders, is mainly cut and pasted from the latest version of the CWFA Leadership Funder Generic Proposal.

  • Grant Recipient

    Male Mogul Initiative Inc. NFP

    Awarded: Awarded Amount: $200,000

    Male Mogul Enterprises L3C is a subsidiary company of Male Mogul Initiative Inc. NFP.  MME seeks to positively transform the way people live and lead in their communities through community wealth building.  Our Community Wealth Building Ecosystem consists of Business Incubation & Acquisition, Finance, Direct Services, Indirect Services and Community Reinvestment.  The catalyst to this ecosystem is our Mogul Fund. The Mogul Fund is a hybrid Venture/Private Equity fund that specializes in community development.  We help turn perceived liabilities into assets in under-resourced communities in Chicago. We help to Reimagine, Repurpose, and Revitalize community assets. MME seeks to cultivate asset managers with an entrepreneurial mindset, equipping them to manage, create, and acquire ventures for sustained impact in their community.

  • Grant Recipient

    Better Future Forward

    Awarded: Awarded Amount: $300,000

    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.

  • Grant Recipient

    DEPAUL UNIVERSITY

    Awarded: Awarded Amount: $300,000

    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.

  • Grant Recipient

    Governors State University Foundation

    Awarded: Awarded Amount: $300,000

    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.

  • Grant Recipient

    NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING SERVICES OF CHICAGO INC

    Awarded: Awarded Amount: $270,000

    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.

  • Grant Recipient

    Fresh Taste

    Awarded: Awarded Amount: $250,000

    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.

  • Grant Recipient

    Fresh Taste

    Awarded: Awarded Amount: $180,000

    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.