HISTORY & PROCESS | VISION | CIRCLE MEMBERS | GRANTEES
2010 - 2009 - 2008 - 2007 - 2006

Connect Force

Connect Force is an after-school and summer HipHop program of Alternatives, Inc. in Uptown, Chicago that has been providing academic support, life-skills workshops, community service projects, and HipHop elemental mentorship towards social justice activism since 2003. Funds will be used to pay three youth stipends to help plan the year-end talent show, which will showcase Uptown Youth's HipHop skills as well as provide a space for youth to voice their own socio-political feelings and opinions.
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From Admiration to Xenophobia: Memoirs of Chicago’s Arab Women

From Admiration to Xenophobia: Memoirs of Chicago's Arab Women is a project of thirty Arab American and immigrant women participants of The Arab Women's Committee at the Arab American Action Network. They will use writing and drawing exercises to help bring the women out of themselves and tell their stories, provide tools for expression and a safe space to talk. A multimedia zine will be created to distribute the stories, which will be translated into English, around the city.
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Blueprint for Bronzeville

Blueprint for Bronzeville follows an ordinary group of people who are demanding a voice in the future of their historic African American neighborhood, marked by thousands of empty lots. This short documentary film explores personal stories and struggles and the work of the citizen-activist group Housing Bronzeville, as it fights to create opportunities for affordable home ownership and revitalize the community.
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Proyecto Arte Jornalero

Proyecto Arte Jornalero creates and exhibits art centered on immigration, labor, identity, and the work of day laborers by using art as a medium for transforming oppression into liberation, lifting the creative voices of low-income immigrant workers, and celebrating the distinct artistic, cultural, and personal backgrounds of Chicago's day laborer community.
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Piñata Factory

Piñata Factory is an ongoing collaboration between Mike Bancroft, Bert Stabler ,and the young people with whom they work. "Brownfield Towers" is a single-site installation of fourteen translucent shapes cast in packing tape from 55-gallon drums, arranged in a pyramid and adorned with stuffed fabric innards, ceramic bones, and plaster hands, and lit from within by solar-powered LEDs. The piece is to be placed on a site in southeast Chicago as a monument to the deindustrialization of that area that left behind acres of toxic earth known as "brownfields."
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Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois (TJLP)

The Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois (TJLP) provides free, holistic, life and gender-affirming criminal legal services to low income and street-based transgender and gender non-conforming people in Illinois. TJLP is facilitating the creation, printing, and distribution of a 'zine publication consisting of the art, poetry, survival tips, and creative writing of trans and gender non-conforming people who have been or are currently incarcerated.
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El Stitch y Bitch

El Stitch y Bitch is a lively community of knitters, crocheters and crafters that get together in Chicago's Pilsen, Bridgeport and Little Village neighborhoods. By providing new members with beginner's tool kits, which FTTF has funded, these women are teaching each other how to knit or crochet and empowering each other with a new skill that they can use to sell at a craft fair or simply make as gifts for friends and family members.
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New School Poetics Press

New School Poetics Press is a publishing project of local, emerging youth writers who are creating a new hip hop literary genre in Chicago. Most of the books will be individual collections from emerging writers, many of whom are associated with Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival.
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Chicago, Transplanted

Chicago, Transplanted (tentative title) is a collective video effort to tell the stories of Chicago transplants living on the southeast side of Iowa City, Iowa, and in exploring the effect of affordable housing on the lives it touches in these communities. Chicago,Transplanted will gather personal accounts through interviews and generate new works to be shown at collaborative, multimedia presentations in Chicago as well as Iowa City.

Roots and Rays Community Garden

Roots and Rays Community Garden in the Pilsen neighborhood will host a series of workshops led by the Help Increase the Peace Program (HIPP) integrating organic gardening philosophy with HIPP's conviction that nonviolence and participation in our communities can better each of us and our world. The workshops will wrap up with the students designing and painting a mural on-site highlighting the importance of growing healthy, non-violent communities.
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Radio Populares

Radio Populares, a Chicago-based collective that collaborates with communities struggling for social justice, will offer a series of four Making Waves Workshops around Chicago where participants will learn the basics of low power radio setup, production and transmitting. On the heels of legislation that expands low power radio options, these workshops will aim to demystify the media making process and utilize hands on, grassroots tools to jump start social change.
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Anansi’s Web Youth Media Action Project

Anansi's Web Youth Media Action Project / Central District Organizing Project utilizes arts, history and technology to help raise freshman and sophomores political consciousness and understanding of social justice movements at Roosevelt High School in Gary, IN.. Through "Mate Masie: What's Real, Through Film ," youth will use documentary film to chronicle their everyday lives, conduct video interviews of their peers, and lead a youth web/media action program and social justice education workshops in Gary, IN.
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I Met A Man in Jenin

"I Met a Man in Jenin" is one Jewish-American man's solo show of stories told of working in Palestine with non-violent peace activists in 2005. The message Noah Lepawsky got from Palestinians: "Tell people back home what you saw in the West Bank" encouraged him to partner with local Palestinian solidarity groups to create a cultural space - one that he hopes will ensue honest dialogue with people who might not normally listen to what Palestinians are saying or doing about the occupation.