Asian Giving Circle Awards Grants to Increase Community Wellbeing

The Asian Giving Circle (AGC), an initiative of The Chicago Community Trust, supports Asian and Pacific Islander-led nonprofits in the Chicago region through mutual aid and collective community giving. For over twenty years, AGC has pooled resources from its members to provide grant funding in support of the diverse and evolving needs of the region’s AAPI community.

Core Grant Making

AGC’s annual core grant making cycle typically begins in May, with grant awards distributed in the fall. AGC’s core grant making typically focuses on community organizing, civic engagement, collective healing, and mental health work. This year, AGC awarded a total of $80,000 in unrestricted general operating grants to 10 organizations focused on increasing community wellbeing.

Asian American Community Development Fund (AACDF) Grants

In February 2023, AGC received a three-year, $600,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for grassroots economic development in AAPI communities in the Chicago region. Through this funding, AGC established the Asian American Community Development Fund (AACDF), which supplements AGC’s core grant making by providing larger grants to fund innovative and collaborative projects that promote community engagement, intergenerational dialogue, allyship across other marginalized communities, social justice, and economic empowerment, with a special focus on youth, older adults, women, and transgender communities. AGC awarded its first Asian American Community Development Fund grants this fall, totaling $115,000.

Total Core Grant Making: $80,000

• AFIRE Chicago: For general operating support, including the Bayanihan Summit, a day-long conference to discuss and activate LGBTQ Filipinx/a/o organizing in Chicago.

• APIDA Arts: For general operating support, including two annual public arts events supporting APIDA artists and makers, with a major festival every May as well as developmental workshops supporting new works throughout the year.

• CIRCA Pintig: For general operating support, including “Arts for Humanity and Compassion,” an arts-for-healing arts creation-performance and community engagement programming that expands the discourse on Anti-Asian hate, mental health, and queer identity.

• Illinois Muslim Civic Coalition: For general operating support, including empowering Chicago’s API communities to participate in civic structures and ensure their needs are represented and addressed in policy.

• Justice Cream: For general operating support, including support for political and education programming around racial capitalism and systems of oppression AAPI and other BIPOC communities in the Chicago region.

• Muslims for Just Futures: For general operating support, including power building programming focused on Northside Chicago such as the Muslim Women’s Summer Powerbuilding Institute, networking mixers to connect organizers and community builders, and a year-long movement-building project to examine the ways the War on Terror impacts Chicago communities and affirmative visions for Chicago’s just futures.

• National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial: For general operating support to strengthen organizational capacity and provide holistic and integrated programs to the Cambodian community to facilitate healing through art, language, memory, and history.

• Nepalese Aid: For general operating support serving first generation immigrants from Nepal with services including outreach, translation, case management, and basic need assistance.

• Silk Road Rising: For general operating support work in growing storytelling capacities across AAPI communities in Chicago.

• Umuwi Ethnic Studies: For general operating support including protecting and sustaining ethnic studies in Chicago.

Total AACDF Grants: $115,000

• Chinese American Service League: To support building and leading a coalition of partner organizations focused on assisting hate crime survivors and educating and empowering the Chicago region’s AANHPI community on how to report hate crimes and hate incidents.

• Chinese Mutual Aid Association: To support community outreach and engagement in the envisioning and development of a Pan-Asian American Center.

• KANWIN: To support the Economic Empowerment Program (EEP) for survivors of gender-based violence.

• Vietnamese Association of Illinois: To support VAI’s youth program in the Uptown community.

• Filipino American Council: To empower the Filipino American elderly population to address isolation and trauma from the pandemic.

• Kalapriya: To support Arts for the Ages which brings South Asian performing arts to low-income Asian American senior citizens on North, West, and South Sides of Chicago.