New Fund Grants $5.5 Million to Develop Innovative Solutions for Food, Housing, Healthcare, and Safety Services

Grants will support testing new ways to help residents retain public benefits and safety-net services amid funding shortages and evolving federal rules.

CHICAGO (July 23, 2026) – As federal funding and policy changes add pressure to already strained safety-net systems, public benefits and essential services are facing new uncertainty. The Resilient Chicago Fund (RCF) today announced $5.5 million in grants to 17 nonprofit-led projects that will design, test and refine new models for delivering benefits and services. The projects will explore whether these models can improve residents’ access to basic human needs such as food, shelter, health care, and safety in Chicago and Cook County.

For residents who rely on Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and supportive housing programs, the changes could make it harder to keep the support they need. New and expanded work requirements, more frequent redetermination schedules, and proposed transitions away from permanent supportive housing may add new hurdles for people already navigating complex systems. Those challenges come as many are already facing rising costs for food, housing, and health care, making it more urgent to test simpler, more coordinated ways to help people stay connected to services.

With this first round of grants, RCF aims to help the region move beyond short-term crisis response by supporting efforts to redesign the delivery of essential services so residents can continue to meet basic needs. Grant recipients will test whether new models can simplify access, coordinate services across agencies and providers, improve the user experience, and build more sustainable operating and financing approaches. Each project will receive grants ranging from $100,000 to $500,000.

“The region’s safety net has long been strained, and recent changes have only heightened those pressures,” said Daniel Tollefson, Executive Director of the Resilient Chicago Fund. “We can do better for those who rely on benefits and those who deliver them. Through these grants, we hope to design new models for long-term solutions.”

RCF, a pooled fund housed at The Chicago Community Trust (the Trust), was created in 2025 as part of a collaborative philanthropic initiative co-chaired by the Trust and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The fund is supported by a Steering Committee that includes Crown Family Philanthropies, Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, Polk Bros. Foundation, Pritzker Traubert Foundation, RRF Foundation for Aging, Schreiber Philanthropy, Steans Family Foundation, and United Way of Metro Chicago.

“We created the Resilient Chicago Fund because philanthropy can move quickly, take smart risks, and stand alongside nonprofits and government to help good ideas take root,” said Andrea Sáenz, President and CEO of The Chicago Community Trust. “Together, we can test new approaches and help more residents stay connected to the essentials that make stability possible: food, shelter, health care, and safety.”

The grants will support nonprofit and government project teams as they test assumptions, gather insights from users and providers, address challenges, and evaluate how their concept works in practice. At the end of the grant phase, some ideas may be eligible for additional support to pilot, implement, and scale.

“Chicago’s nonprofit community has always been one of our city’s greatest strengths. In times of uncertainty, nonprofits have continued to show extraordinary resilience, creativity, and commitment to their neighbors in delivering vital services,” said John Palfrey, President of the MacArthur Foundation. “We are proud to join our philanthropic partners to invest in the organizations that communities rely on every day while seeding and supporting new ideas that can strengthen our region’s social safety net for years to come. I encourage others to join us in ensuring that every Chicagoan has an opportunity to thrive.”

The first cohort includes 17 grant-supported projects:

Benefits Navigation and Retention: Helping residents apply for, retain, and navigate public benefits amid HR1 changes

2-1-1: Transforming Access to Benefits and Essential Services in Cook County: Funding will support United Way to integrate a digital benefits eligibility screener into 2-1-1’s offerings, so that call center operators can assist callers in assessing their eligibility in real time for SNAP, Medicaid, and other programs, and connect them with resources to help them get and stay enrolled in public benefits. Cook County Health’s Medicaid Impact Working group will be leveraged to support efforts related to Medicaid and health care access.

Benefit Illinois: Coordinated Outreach and Public Narrative Strategy: Funding will enable Benefit Illinois to build statewide infrastructure to reach residents who have lost benefits, are at risk of losing them, or have never successfully enrolled, pairing coordinated outreach with data-informed messaging to drive an immediate, multi-channel response. A separate, parallel public narrative strategy will work to overcome program misperceptions, communicate what eligibility changes mean for families, and use the re-enrollment crisis as a moment to build broader public understanding of and support for the benefits system.

Job Ready IL: Funding will further hone Job Ready Illinois, an online workforce training platform created in response to HR 1’s new work requirements; and create infrastructure for work requirement compliance through user research, public data, and provider partnerships needed to reach the people who are at risk of losing or have already lost benefits.

Trusted Access: A Multilingual Conversational Benefits Navigator for Immigrant Families in Cook County: Funding will support Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights and Mirza to develop an accessible, multilingual AI benefits navigator that would help case managers guide immigrant and mixed-status families through benefits screening, application, and recertification to dramatically increase the speed and accuracy of benefits enrollment for immigrant families.

Benefits Stability Network: A Coordinated SNAP & Medicaid Retention System for Adults Ages 55–65: Funding will support Help.Guide.Thrive Operations Hub, Age Options and partners to develop and train a network of Community Health Workers to assist older adults in Cook County to retain benefits they’re eligible for, also generating data that can unlock Medicaid reimbursement for this work statewide.

Coordinated Response to HR1 For People with Behavioral Health Conditions: Funding will support Thresholds to build a coordinated response across Chicago’s behavioral health provider network to proactively reach the hardest-to-reach clients. It will include shared protocols for documenting medical frailty exemptions, trained navigators in high-need settings such as emergency departments, and a provider-facing technology tool that tracks clients’ eligibility status and flags deadlines.

Homelessness Continuum: Supporting the homelessness system through HUD changes by improving coordination

Eliminating Housing Barriers through Collaboration: Funding will support Corporation for Supportive Housing to consolidate Chicago’s housing system for people experiencing homelessness so that it operates as one coordinated pipeline. The effort will partner with six key government and nonprofit housing agencies to map inefficiencies across shared housing resources and collaboratively redesign and streamline processes to center on the tenant experience, simplifying the path from referral to move-in.

Flexible Housing Pool Sustainability Initiative: Funding will support the Flexible Housing Pool, with leadership from the Center for Housing & Health, to redesign a financial model that provides permanent supportive housing and case management for 742 households experiencing homelessness, positioning Flexible Housing Pool participants for support services to reduce per-household subsidy costs.

Keeping Chicagoans Housed: Reimagining Access to Homelessness Prevention Resources: Funding will enable state rental assistance to reach tenants before they lose their homes through a process led by Law Center for Better Housing and All Chicago to redesign the intake process into coordinated system infrastructure with standardized documentation collection and workflows and fewer steps between referral and assistance.

Suburban Cook CoC Access, Shelter, and Housing Connections Project: Funding will support the Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County to work with homeless service providers to reduce the time it takes between a person seeking and receiving shelter. This includes standardizing housing problem-solving conversations, developing real-time coordination between shelter providers about available beds, and intentionally connecting people to non-HUD funded housing resources.

Home for Good: Funding will support Illinois Justice Project to continue partnering with a state interagency working group toward new, permanent state-level infrastructure that would provide rental assistance and wraparound services for people leaving state prisons, and training and capacity building for community organizations.

Connecting People to Care: Closing fragmentation between clinical and social services through referral infrastructure

Integrating Digital Tools to Strengthen a Community Health Worker Care Coordination Collective: Funding will support Sinai Community Institute of Sinai Chicago and partners to create a coordinated, technology-enabled Community Health Worker system of care that can screen a resident, refer them to services, and confirm they connected, all through one workflow that allows the resident to own their data at every step, narrowing the life expectancy gap and providing critical access to preventive care.[RS9] 

CONNECT-ED: Coordinated Network for Navigation, Engagement, and Community  Transitions from Emergency Departments: Funding will support UI Health and partners to design and integrate a scalable, patient-facing social determinants of health platform that helps emergency department patients identify and prioritize their needs and get connected directly to community resources matched to those priorities.

Connecting Care Across Systems: A Sustainable Model for Chicago’s Community Information Exchange: Funding will allow the Illinois Public Health Institute to test and refine a sustainable model for expanding the Chicago Regionwide Community Information Exchange, a consent-based infrastructure that helps health and social service providers coordinate across systems, improve continuity of care, and better understand where people are connected, where gaps remain, and what interventions improve outcomes.

Replacing Harm with Help: Funding will support Chicago’s DFSS, The Network, Sarah’s Inn, the Michael Reese Health Trust, and Public Policy Lab to design a voluntary, non-court-mandated intervention system for persons who cause harm in domestic violence situations, including coordinated referral pathways to a new voluntary violence intervention program that connects participants to stabilizing supports, reducing repeat and escalated violence.

Food is Medicine: Linking food access and nutrition to healthcare financing, preparing for 1115 Waiver funding

From Referral to Reimbursement: Connecting Chicago’s West Side Food and Health Systems: Funding will support the West Side Food Access Collaborative, led by Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, to build referral infrastructure that prepares community food organizations serving Chicago’s West Side to participate in Medicaid reimbursement when it is permitted through the Illinois 1115 Medicaid Waiver. Medicaid reimbursement is designed to provide access to sustainable revenue stream that strengthens the local food economy amid cuts to federal nutrition assistance programs, like SNAP.

Redesigning the Food Safety Net: Funding will support Dion’s Chicago Dream to develop a shared platform for food providers providing prescription meals, food boxes and other “food is medicine” options, unifying intake, inventory and delivery tracking, route optimization, and outcome reporting to close the documentation gap and ensure that food organizations can deliver, document, and get paid for providing food services.

About Resilient Chicago Fund

Resilient Chicago Fund (RCF), housed at The Chicago Community Trust, is part of a collaborative philanthropic initiative to enable nonprofits and government partners to adapt, rethink, and redesign how essential benefits and services are delivered amid federal funding and policy changes. Established in 2025, RCF’s Steering Committee includes The Chicago Community Trust, Crown Family Philanthropies, the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Polk Bros. Foundation, Pritzker Traubert Foundation, RRF Foundation for Aging, Schreiber Philanthropy, Steans Family Foundation, and United Way of Metro Chicago. Additional support for the Resilient Chicago Fund has been provided by Ellie’s Foundation Fund, The Joseph Pedott Legacy Fund, The Joyce Foundation, Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust, and Sprague Foundation. Learn more at www.cct.org/rcf.