Funding search · EIN 362167000 · Chicago, IL
The Chicago Community Trust
A grantmaking public charity (files IRS Form 990, Schedule I). Charities like this often run real grant programs with application cycles.
- 14,939
- grants reported
- $5.82B
- total given
- 2021–2023
- filing years
- $25,000
- median grant
Based on grants this organization reported to the IRS for tax years 2021–2023. This is what they filed, not a complete record of their giving, and recent years may be incomplete because filings lag.
What they fund
chicagocommunitybenefitsticketsthroughtangiblecommunitiesbuild
Funder website ↗Full IRS filings ↗How this is builtReport an error
Funding pattern
What this funder pays for, at what size, and how to position adjacent work. Read from their filings, with every number checked against the record.
Where the money goes
- CDFI and community lending capital nationwide
- Federally qualified community health centers, rural and urban
- Chicago-area human services, violence reduction, housing stability
- Affordable housing, homelessness and community action agencies
- Civil legal aid and democracy/civic participation groups
- Climate and clean energy intermediaries
Typical grant
The median grant is $25,000 and half of all grants fall between $10,000 and $100,000, which is the donor-advised and discretionary layer of a community foundation. A separate tier of very large checks, $4 million to $50 million, went almost entirely to national intermediaries, CDFIs, and health center networks in 2023, and those are pass-through or partnership deployments rather than responses to unsolicited requests. Chicago nonprofits appear repeatedly across years, so repeat funding at the five- and six-figure level is normal.
Their words
Phrases from their own grant descriptions, worth speaking back to them.
- “General support for programs, operations and other charitable purposes”
- “general support”
- “operations”
- “charitable purposes”
Positioning adjacent work
- Anchor to a named Chicago-area grantee's theme: violence reduction, housing stability, immigrant legal services, family services.
- Ask in the $25,000 to $100,000 band for a first request; six figures needs an existing relationship.
- Frame the request as general operating support, not a restricted research project, matching their own wording.
- If work is national, connect it to CDFI capital access or community health center capacity, their two biggest large-check lanes.
Worth knowing: Illinois recipients outnumber the next state four to one, so a Cook County footprint matters far more than subject fit. The giant 2023 grants to Save the Children, Capital Impact Partners, Breakthrough Energy Catalyst and dozens of health centers reflect large donor-advised or intermediary flows, and treating them as evidence of an open national program would be a mistake.
0 grants matching “ADHD and learning differences”
No grants to show here.
Top recipients
Repeat recipients are the strongest signal of whether a funder has an open door or quietly re-funds the same organizations.
- Breakthrough Energy Catalyst Foundation4 grants · $120.0M
- Climate Imperative Foundation4 grants · $80.0M
- Save the Children Federation4 grants · $53.5M
- Habitat for Humanity International4 grants · $50.0M
- National Council of Ymcas of the USA3 grants · $50.0M
- Youth Guidance4 grants · $45.6M
- Capital Impact Partners1 grant · $45.0M
- National Philanthropic Trust2 grants · $42.0M
- Arab Community Center for Economic & Social Services Access3 grants · $40.0M
- Communities in Schools2 grants · $40.0M
Giving over time
Grant history
The 100 largest of 14,939 grants.
No grants to show here.
Grants already paid are the record; PaperOrbit reads your paper and finds the funders whose record matches it — then explains why.
Search funders like this oneSource: IRS Form 990, Schedule I, as filed by this organization. These are grants already paid. Grants paid directly to individuals are reported to the IRS only as totals, so they do not appear as named lines here.