People, Power and Policy: Building the Foundation of Our Work

When The Chicago Community Trust set its North Star goal to close the racial and ethnic wealth gap as the best way to strengthen the entire region, we recognized three things are essential to our role as a community foundation.  

1. We must not lose sight of people’s immediate needs to have a stable foundation from which to thrive. You cannot begin to think about building wealth if you’re struggling to make ends meet. 

2. The persistent racial inequities and economic insecurity we see in Chicago’s historically underinvested and segregated communities and on the pages of research reports are due in no small part to city, county, state, and federal policies. Policy-driven inequities require policy-driven solutions.  

3. The voices and stories of everyday people and those who most acutely experience the effects of these inequities are essential to developing those solutions and building the power and momentum to take collective action to achieve this goal.  

With these three core tenets in mind, the Trust is embarking on an integrated strategy to coordinate these approaches. The goal is to realize solutions shaped by the community and incorporate insights from pilot-tested programs to achieve the Trust’s strategic goals of increasing household wealth. In doing so, the Trust is centering the following values:  

• People who can meet their basic needs have dignity, and with dignity comes agency.  

• We can only change policy and practice by building trust and connection within and across communities and between grassroots and grasstops actors.  

• The voices of those who have faced structural barriers to wealth creation must be heard to change harmful narratives and participate in civic action to advance just solutions. 

• Research and practice–based insights are critical to driving effective systems changes. 

• Finally, equity—when we design programs or laws that benefit the most vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, we all benefit. 

In many ways, this is nothing new for the Trust. During COVID, for example, we swiftly raised and deployed funds to community-based organizations to provide cash to Chicagoans suffering economic hardship. By supporting community organizers, policy advocates, and others to work in coalition on these and other policy issues, enough momentum was built to secure city and county funding for guaranteed income pilots in Chicago and Cook County.  

To ensure that we can learn from this pilot and apply lessons to the broader social safety net, the Trust organized philanthropy to support an evaluation of these pilots, which included a photovoice project of participating Chicagoans. These activities, taken together, are necessary to scale the idea that giving people cash may be the key to increasing economic stability and mobility when facing hardship. 

There are many more areas where we can apply this approach of addressing immediate needs while elevating the experiences and voices of those most impacted and learning by doing to advance the policy solutions that will help more Chicagoans live self-determined lives.  

The Trust’s new People, Power and Policy team is eager to deepen its role in achieving these goals through this holistic and complementary approach so that the racial and economic inequities that have plagued Chicago for generations can one day soon become a thing of the past.