Communities United

Mission

Racial Equity 20230 Awardee

Communities United (CU) is a survivor-led, intergenerational racial justice organization in Chicago. At the heart of CU’s organizing is the development of grassroots leadership to build collective power to achieve racial justice and transformative social change. With this approach, CU focuses on advancing affordable housing, health equity, education justice, youth investment, immigrant rights, and shifting resources from the criminal justice and juvenile justice systems into restorative justice alternatives.

CU develops community leadership to build a shared root cause analysis of problems impacting their communities, to develop and advance innovative power-building strategies, and to engage in creating transformative systems change. CU takes a healing through justice approach to our work, acknowledging and addressing present day and historical trauma in communities of color, and working to promote personal and collective healing through the process of creating social change

Lever for Change Project Description
Black youth in Chicago are sharing their lived experiences, creating new narratives that call for more investment towards mental health & wellness in communities. The Healing Through Justice project advances youth-led community healing, transforming health systems for young people across the city.

Launched in October 2020 and sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Racial Equity 2030 was a $90 million challenge to help build and scale actionable ideas around the world for transformative change in the social, economic, political, and institutional systems that uphold racial inequities. Fourteen hundred proposals were submitted to the competition and were evaluated using four criteria: Whether the proposals were game-changing, equitable, bold, and achievable. Ten Finalists were announced in September 2021. Five Awardees were announced in October 2022: ActionAid, Communities United, Indian Law Resource Center, Namati, and Partners in Development Foundation.

Organization Information