Cook County awarded $3 million in starting block grants to support 31 smaller nonprofit organizations looking to expand and make infrastructure improvements, including five headquartered in the south suburbs, with many more serving Southland municipalities.
The funding is part of the Cook County Block Grant Initiative, which previously administered $5 million to 50 nonprofits in 2023. The initiative, administered by the Justice Advisory Council in partnership with the county board, was created to support the building efforts of grassroots organizations with operating budgets of below $1 million.
Unlike previous grant initiatives which are usually service-based, Avik Das, executive director for the council, said these grants aim to help nonprofits grow their “back office.” Das said this includes leadership development, strategic planning, management training and sustainability efforts.
“Those various things often get underserved while the nonprofit is just surviving from one direct service grant to the next,” Das said.
Susan Klumpner, executive director of the Active Children Excel Project, knows this struggle well.
The project, which started in 2013 to provide after school tennis lessons to children in Dolton and Riverdale, began with a $4,000 equipment grant, Klumpner said. The the project quickly expanded to service youth in five elementary schools in Elementary District 148, offering a range of services including tennis lessons, academic assistance and arts and crafts. Klumpner said project funding was not supporting ACE’s growing size.
After receiving the maximum $100,000 in funding from the block grant initiative, Klumpner said she was overjoyed.
“We were in this really critical juncture that if we do not prioritize our operations, we will not be sustainable,” said Klumpner. “And so literally, when we heard of the Cook County starting block grant and that we got it, it was like, you know, you could hear the cheers across the organization.”
Klumpner said the nonprofit’s only full-time employees are program directors while administrative positions are mostly part time. But because the organization focused heavily on services over sustainability for a number of years, Klumpner said the funding was crucial to building up the back end of their operations.
Most of the funding be used for administrative positions because, Klumpner said, about 95% of the nonprofit’s budget goes toward program expenses leaving most administrative tasks up to two part-time employees.
“We’ve been an organization now for 11 years, and the back of the house is the least fortified … because we’ve always put all the money that we’ve had into our programs, into serving kids,” Klumpner said.
Laura Grossman, a spokesperson for the council, said the ACE Project is one of many smaller organizations that have struggled for administrative and operational funding. Grossman said this task can be challenging for smaller nonprofits that are in competition with larger organizations, and the application process can be burdensome when understaffed.
“We’ve heard from the organizations that we’ve worked with … that fulfilling the reporting requirements is challenging. It’s a lot of work. It takes a lot of administrative staff time. So this initiative is part of thinking about that whole pie and trying to support organizations to build the capacity to be able to get more public funding,” Grossman said.
The grants came from a special purpose fund created by the county in November 2021 for equity and inclusion, which was designed to address historic disparities in marginalized communities in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.
Das said the Justice Advisory Council came across the need for more development grant funding after the pandemic when grassroot organizations started to run out of funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.
“We need those nonprofits to survive, and the starting block grant is meant to give all these up and coming smaller to medium-sized nonprofits in different sectors the chance to get past American rescue plan act dollars, to try to stabilize their organizations so that they could last a little longer,” Das said.
The grants were awarded to organizations across different sectors including education, violence prevention, community and economic development, arts and culture and human services. In this round of funding, Das said most of the grants were awarded to nonprofits on the South and West sides.
The grants are capped at $100,000 over a two-year contract, which Das said begins on Aug. 1.
