March 22, 2021

Our second round of increased FY21 grantmaking ($2.155MM) invests in how Chicagoans are shaping our city’s future

By Gillian Darlow, Polk Bros. Foundation CEO

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic just over a year ago, an inconceivable reality quickly came into focus. There was so very much we still didn’t know that week in March 2020, but it was immediately clear Chicagoans would be deeply affected by the virus and the extreme disruption it carried with it.

While navigating what the pandemic would mean for their own lives and families, community leaders and their nonprofit partners mobilized rapidly to transform their work and meet surging demand for food and services, often without a full picture of what additional resources might be needed or where they might come from. Within just weeks, it was clear that while the pandemic would affect us all, the inequities that far predated the virus would take an immeasurable toll on Black and Latinx families and communities.

A year later, 2020 lives in our thoughts and our bones as a lost year and a year of loss.

As 2021 unfolds, how do we move through this loss, honoring the unfathomable 530,000+ lives gone and rebuilding a better Chicago in their honor? Now, a year later, we have the chance to take stock of how far we’ve come since that first chaotic week, and how far is left to go. 2020 brought not only tremendous loss but also demonstrated the powerful threat to Black lives that racism continues to wield. And in recent days — just as I was finishing the draft of this post — we were too vividly reminded of the racialized, gendered and sexualized violence that can target and terrorize Asian Americans.

By following COVID-19 precautions, by reaching out to neighbors in need, by taking to the streets to stand up for Black lives, and by calling for a wholescale reimagining of discriminatory systems, Chicagoans are showing up to do the work needed to determine Chicago’s future. This resilience, this interconnection and organizing, this vision for an equitable future are the hope of our city.

In November, we announced the first round of grants from our increased FY21 grantmaking to help Chicago recover and rebuild from the pandemic in a way that addresses persistent and significant racial inequities.

Our latest round of grantmaking, approved at the Foundation’s February Board meeting, further illustrates how Chicagoans are caring for each other, and shaping our collective future. In addition to $4.07 million in ongoing grantmaking also approved in February, the Polk Bros. Foundation Board of Directors approved nine Equitable Recovery grants, totaling $2.155 million, to 19 organizations for work detailed below. These efforts are helping Chicagoans heal and strengthen communities from within, create jobs, improve housing stability, academic growth, and mental health, and support work that is fundamental for racial justice.

It is our hope that this collection of grants helps inch Chicago a bit closer to a time when everyone has an opportunity to thrive, and the distribution of resources, opportunities, and burdens is not determined or predictable by race.

Our second round of Equitable Recovery grants

Focus Area: Economic Growth and Community Wealth

$250,000 for Together We Rise: For an Equitable and Just Recovery (a multi-funder collaborative housed at Chicago Community Foundation) to accelerate equitable economic recovery for Black and Latinx communities by pooling and distributing philanthropic resources, and to reform and re-envision policies and business practices to ensure our region invests more equitably.

“Together We Rise stands to help usher in an equitable economic recovery in Chicago because it is intentionally developing its community outreach and input strategy. Ideas, issues and challenges surfaced by these community members and organizations can also serve as important input into our own approaches at Polk Bros. Foundation.”
Gillian Darlow, CEO, Polk Bros. Foundation

Focus Area: Community Safety & Systemic Reforms

$140,000 to Goldin Institute for Peace By Design, a collaboration with Studio Gang that will use the tools of design and planning to help reduce violence and build positive relationships that contribute to community safety in East and West Garfield Park. A key component of this work is the Youth Design Leadership Program for Community Safety, which will introduce teen participants to the fundamentals of design and an exploration of community safety by combining hands-on educational workshops and participation in community conversations that they will use to influence design and planning solutions to promote public safety.

“Place-based interventions that increase green space, improve deteriorated buildings, and create well-lit public spaces can create community-level change that promotes safety. The Youth Design Leadership Program will help uncover community aspirations and offer concrete design ideas that will guide City investment. Polk Bros. Foundation funding will enhance the community engagement process, enable meaningful youth participation, and support the dissemination of the learnings to communities across Chicago.”
Deborah Bennett, Senior Program Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation

Focus Area: Housing Stability

$105,000 to Enterprise Community Partners to work with the City of Chicago Department of Housing to advance racial equity by: 1) implementing the Assessment of Fair Housing; and 2) finalizing a Racial Equity Impact Assessment of the City of Chicago Department of Housing’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Qualified Allocation Program.

“Numerous studies have cited Chicago as one of the most racially- and economically-segregated cities in the country. Housing has been driving inequity for a long time. The racial equity initiatives proposed by Enterprise Chicago, in partnership with the Chicago Department of Housing, have the potential to make systemic changes that will begin to address housing inequity by monitoring the City’s progress on implementing fair housing goals and strategies to reduce segregation and model best practices for racially-equitable housing resource allocation.”
Deborah Bennett, Senior Program Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation

Focus Area: Equity in Education

$340,000 total to Chicago United for Equity and National Equity Project for anti-racist/anti-bias work in Chicago Public Schools

$130,000 to Chicago United for Equity (CUE) to engage 12 Chicago public school principals or assistant principals in a peer learning group focused on involving a broad group of school and community stakeholders in identifying racial equity challenges by undertaking a Racial Equity Impact Assessment and then making change where needed.
$210,000 to National Equity Project (NEP) to enable six CPS schools and one CPS Network Chief to join an existing peer learning group called the Midwest District Network, which is focused on helping participants identify and test approaches to address equity challenges in their schools using NEP’s Leading for Equity Framework.

“Both Chicago United for Equity – with the Racial Equity Impact Assessment, a widely-respected, best practice tool – and the National Equity Project – with its Leading for Equity Framework – help groups surface racial and ethnic disparities in outcomes and devise strategies for changing policies and practices. The collaborative nature of their processes helps CPS principals become more distributive leaders, build trust with teachers and community members, and create a culture and conditions in which students have their needs met.”
Suzanne Doornbos Kerbow, Program Director for Education, Polk Bros. Foundation

$320,000 total to Thrive, Alternatives, Chicago Youth Centers, Chinese American Service League and Global Girls for remote learning supports, specifically:

$200,000 to Thrive to manage and coordinate community-based organization-led remote learning hubs based in Chicago Public Schools sites in the second half of the 2020/21 school year and through the summer. Learning hubs provide safe places with stable internet and appropriate technology for students to engage in remote learning, including supervision by qualified, caring adults, along with nutritious meals and access to enrichment activities and other supports and services. During the school year the learning hubs will aim to improve attendance and participation and in the summer the hubs will help address lost learning time and prepare young people and their families for the start of the 2021/22 school year.
$120,000 total ($30,000 each) to Alternatives, Chicago Youth Centers, Chinese American Service League and Global Girls to continue their remote learning hubs through the end of the school year

“Remote learning will remain a reality for most CPS students for the rest of this school year whether they are in a hybrid or fully remote format, and it is critical to ensure every community has equitable access to the supports all students need. Community-based organizations are central to the strategy to meet this pressing need for CPS families.”
JC Aevaliotis, Program Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation
Divya Mohan Little, Program Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation

Focus Area: Access to Mental Health and Trauma Services

$600,000 total to Public Health Institute of Metropolitan Chicago, Healthy Schools Campaign, and four school-based mental health providers for a coordinated school mental health data transformation project to help increase access to and connectivity between both health and education data so CPS, individual school leaders, and health providers can understand what interventions are most successful in improving both school and wellness outcomes and connect students to critical behavioral health services appropriately and equitably. Specifically:

$350,000 to Public Health Institute of Metropolitan Chicago for program design, project management, evaluation, process mapping, and sub-contracting with a technical advisor
$50,000 to Healthy Schools Campaign for project support and policy alignment
$200,000 total ($50,000 each) to four school-based mental health providers which will participate as pilot sites in the demonstration project while also increasing service provision

“The pandemic has underscored CPS’ critical need for a coordinated system to ensure that students have access to the mental health services they need. Mapping school-health services and the subsequent development of a dynamic data collection and reporting system will identify strong programs and areas of need. Much as Polk Bros. Foundation grantee Ingenuity has transformed the provision of arts education in CPS through a distributed network of data sharing, a similar system for school-based mental health could improve the quality of programming, ensure equitable and appropriate care delivery, and contribute to an evidence base of best practices.”
Divya Mohan Little, Program Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation

Focus Area: A Nonprofit Sector Ready to Advance Racial Justice

$100,000 to AMPT (via fiscal sponsor Chicago Cares) to help strengthen the organizational health of nonprofits on Chicago’s west and south sides, particularly small- to mid-sized organizations led by and serving Black and Latinx communities.

“AMPT was formed to organize significant, sustained investment in the capacity of Black- and Brown-led organizations on the city’s West and South sides. It is connecting nonprofits with the quality support and services they need in order to fulfill their critical missions toward a more just and equitable city.”
Debbie Reznick, Senior Program Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation

$250,000 to IFF for America’s Cultural Treasures Chicago to assess the breadth and depth of challenges facing BIPOC arts organizations in the region; provide multi-year general operating support grants to local cultural treasures, as defined by a panel of arts and culture and community leaders in Chicago; and design and implement capacity-building and technical assistance services to support the long-term financial stability and resiliency of BIPOC arts organizations.

“BIPOC arts organizations have contributed so much to Chicago’s cultural richness for generations in spite of the long history of racism, systemic under-investment, and neglect faced by BIPOC communities. Artists and cultural workers, and funders, seek to build a more just and equitable arts and culture sector. As Chicago reckons with the impacts of generations of racism, exploitation, and neglect in its communities of color, we have an opportunity to recognize the arts and culture organizations that are already anchors in these communities and to invest more deeply in them.”
JC Aevaliotis, Program Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation

$50,000 to Chicago Community Foundation for the Pathways Initiative to strengthen the diversity of the evaluation field by increasing the recruitment, training and retention of equity-focused, culturally-responsive evaluators of color in the Chicago region.

“The Pathways Initiative is developing more culturally-responsive evaluators of color who bring a wider range of backgrounds and perspectives to their work and who can better understand the cultural context of BIPOC-led nonprofits. This, in turn, is expected to strengthen evaluative efforts from design, implementation, and analysis, to dissemination of findings so nonprofits can secure the resources needed to grow their programs.”
Evette Cardona, Vice President of Programs, Polk Bros. Foundation