Inspired by a trustee’s positive experience with sports as a youth, PCT provides general operating support grants to sports-based youth development (SBYD) organizations in Chicago. SBYD combines best practices from youth development, mentoring, athletics and physical fitness, and academic enrichment. It contributes to improved health and fitness, and just as importantly, helps youth become better at planning, coping with stress, and engaging in positive relationships with peers and adults. Such benefits may prove particularly crucial for youth who face risks and challenges like concentrated poverty, higher rates of obesity and other chronic health conditions, exposure to violence, and limited availability of afterschool and recreational activities.

In 2025, PCT will announce our giving plans for Sports-Based Youth Development with updated eligibility criteria and guidelines.

The people of Chicago need and deserve a thriving cultural life.  The arts reflect and demonstrate the richness and diversity of the city’s people and, by representing the basic human truths, help us to connect.  The Trusts support the core missions of outstanding arts organizations with general operating support and occasional project grants to enhance their creative artistic products.

In 2025, PCT will announce our plans for increased Arts and Culture giving, a new participatory grantmaking program, and updated eligibility criteria and guidelines.

Please note: PCT is not accepting new proposals in its Environmental Justice program in 2024. Only organizations that received funding in 2023 may apply. 

Prince Charitable Trusts Chicago Environmental Justice Program

Program Overview
Prince Charitable Trusts’ Chicago Environmental Justice*  Program acknowledges and supports Chicagoans’ right to healthy communities where the air, land, and water are clean and people have abundant access to open spaces and natural areas for growing food, healing, learning, health and well-being, gathering, and recreation. We recognize that this is not the reality for many ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Native American) residents in our highly segregated city where persistent racism leads to disproportionately poor air and water quality and unhealthy living conditions resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations and/or government laws, regulations, and policies.

We trust these residents’ knowledge about their neighborhoods, the issues they face, and the policies and resources they need to secure healthy and thriving communities. We understand achieving and sustaining environmental justice involves responsiveness to opportunities and a willingness to take risks coupled with long-term commitment and steady financial resources.

Eligibility
In order to apply for a grant in the program area your organization must:

• Have its offices and a majority of its programming within the Chicago city limits
• Have a mission dedicated to environmental justice, the environment or nature
• OR be a community-based organization with a strong environmental justice, environment, or nature-based program or project

Program Strategy
We seek proposals that correspond to at least one of these strategies:

1. Nurture, strengthen, or promote community control and stewardship of land and/or water resources in neighborhoods experiencing historic disinvestment
2. Draw attention to environmental racism and/or the disproportionate impact of climate change in ALAANA communities and advocate for community-led solutions
3. Support the next generation of environmental leaders, urban farmers and gardeners, and advocates

PCT welcomes innovative, cross-sector, and/or unique community-generated and community-led approaches to addressing one of our strategies.

Priorities
Prince Charitable Trusts’ Chicago Environmental Justice Program prioritizes addressing the mounting impact of historical and ongoing environmental racism through:

• Giving the majority of our funding to organizations that center people harmed by racial and environmental injustice and those that are led by and developing the leadership of people of color
• Support for Chicago-based organizations whose efforts focus on benefits to Chicago’s Black and Latine residents
• Support for community-based organizations with an environmental justice program or project that corresponds to one of PCT’s strategies
• Consistent, multi-year, general operating support in most cases

A recording of an information session on this program is posted below.

If you have additional questions about our Environmental Justice Program, please review the FAQ’s.

*Prince Charitable Trusts looked at many definitions of environmental justice and borrowed directly from Wikipedia and Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice in landing on our definition. We are also grateful to Chicago Frontlines Funding Initiative for informing our perspective. For Prince Charitable Trusts: environmental justice addresses the unfair exposure of poor and marginalized communities to harms associated with resource extraction, hazardous waste, and land and water use resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations and/or government laws, regulations, and policies.

https://detroitenvironmentaljustice.org/what-is-environmental-justice/ (Viewed April, 20, 2022)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_justice (Viewed April 20, 2022)
https://www.chicagofrontlines.org (Viewed April 20, 2022)