Foundation Partners

The Chicago Community Trust is a community foundation dedicated to improving our region through strategic grant making, civic engagement and inspiring philanthropy. We are here to serve the nonprofit organizations, the generous donors and the thoughtful residents who strive to make a difference, helping their bold vision create lasting community change. We work with a number of partnerships and initiatives to accomplish this work.

As businesses, local governments and organizations strive to solve pressing challenges, the Trust brings these key actors together. Working together, we leverage collective knowledge, creativity and resources for a greater impact than any of us can make alone.

Chicago Foundation for Women envisions a world in which all women and girls have the opportunity to thrive in safe, just and healthy communities. We connect need, money and solutions.

Need
We evaluate the needs of women and girls who are living at the margins of success in our society.

Money
We seek out and bring together women who have the power to make a difference and organizations that offer proven or innovative solutions.

Solutions
We raise money to fund those solutions, and we develop women’s capacity to drive change at every level, both within those organizations and beyond them. The Chicago Foundation for Women invests in women and girls as catalysts, building strong communities for all. We value – in ourselves and in every organization we support – the core principles of equality, empowerment, diversity, collaboration, and integrity.

Crossroads Fund supports community organizations working on issues of racial, social and economic justice in the Chicago area. Crossroads Fund leads in the philanthropic sector by supporting innovative organizing models that build strong movements for racial, social and economic justice. By creating relationships between donors, grantees, grassroots groups and community members, we strengthen leadership, build sustainable communities and transform unjust conditions, institutions and policies to create greater equality and opportunity for all. At Crossroads Fund we believe that big change can come from small beginnings. Some of the biggest victories we’ve seen in this city, from accessible public transit for people with disabilities, to the successful campaign to abolish the death penalty in Illinois, started out as small grassroots movements that were considered too radical for most funders. That’s where Crossroads Fund comes in. We give small grants to new and emerging groups, providing critical support from the beginning. We are often the first foundation grant that our grantees have applied for or received.

Woods Fund Chicago seeks to help create a society where people of all racial and ethnic groups across all levels of social and economic status are empowered and have a voice to influence policies that impact their lives and where all communities are free of poverty and racism. Woods Fund Chicago is a grantmaking foundation committed to the promotion of social, economic, and racial justice through the support of community organizing and public policy advocacy that engages people that are most impacted.

Meet Our Advisors