Pre-Development Fund: Helping Communities Realize Their Visions for Thriving Neighborhoods

When I first arrived at The Chicago Community Trust, I was really focused on understanding the place-based factors driving the region’s wealth gap. Recognizing how the Chicago area’s history and geography contribute to today’s disparities, I prioritized meeting with neighborhood development organizations on the South and West sides to gain firsthand insights from the communities most affected by increased disinvestment and higher rates of poverty. I knew these groups engage deeply with residents, so hearing directly from them was key to helping me identify the best approaches the Trust could support to increase neighborhood investment and build community wealth.

During my neighborhood tours, a clear theme emerged: some residents were growing frustrated with the limited meaningful development progress in their neighborhood. While residents of underinvested neighborhoods are often engaged in shaping community plans, inconsistent implementation has eroded their trust in the broader neighborhood development process. As a result, residents are less inclined to pursue or support new projects, constricting the development pipeline that fuels long-term neighborhood investment.

Understanding this challenge, we saw an opportunity for the Pre-Development Fund, a competitive program supporting early-stage, brick-and-mortar projects, to help bridge the gap. Between 2022 and 2024, the program awarded over 70 grants across Chicago, helping developments gain traction in pursuit of larger forms of capital. To build on this foundation and explore how the program could have an even greater, more targeted impact, we paused grantmaking in June 2024 to engage past recipients and development experts. Our goal was to determine ways to sustain momentum in community-driven development while ensuring community-defined visions for economic growth come to life.

The review revealed that a project’s geographic context — its proximity to neighborhood assets like small businesses, transit, and housing — is crucial to meeting community needs. Projects without deep community ties to residents or the built environment frequently face difficulty securing investment and driving economic growth. To address this, we refined the program’s eligibility criteria to focus on projects with the greatest potential to catalyze development and address community priorities, considering key factors such as:

• Is the project within a half mile of a neighborhood asset or other development? That could be a transit station, a major economic corridor, or another physical space that promotes economic activity and pedestrian traffic.
• Is the project aligned with community-driven visions for economic growth? As we learned, residents want their plans implemented, so we want to know if and how the project aligns with these plans, strategies, and resident needs.
• Is the project a neighborhood-scale development? While underinvested neighborhoods face a variety of needs, we found that smaller and mid-scale projects often have the least support but make an outsized impact.

With these refinements in place, the program officially re-launched at the beginning of 2025. In April, the Trust awarded 12 new grants to early-stage projects across Chicago’s South and West sides. By meeting our criteria, these developments not only reflect resident visions for their neighborhoods but also have the potential to promote broader economic activity.

Each grant recipient received $100,000 in pre-development funding and will have access to technical assistance focused on capital readiness, as well as opportunities to build connections that will help bring their project into reality.

The next Pre-Development Fund round will launch on June 2, 2025. The program will run twice a year, with project scope submissions being accepted in December and June for funding in April and October, respectively. For more information, please review our grant opportunity here.