Communities United, an organization promoting racial justice in Chicago since 2000, received a $2 million grant last week to continue developing youth leadership and advancing issues like affordable housing, immigrant rights, police accountability and restorative justice.
The organization, based at 4600 West Palmer Street in Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood, works throughout Albany Park, Austin, Belmont Cragin, Roseland and West Ridge — all through its Healing Through Justice model.
The model is “how we organize our community. It’s how we provide solutions to the different issues that our leaders face,” said Maria Degillo, Communities United’s youth director since 2006. The organization is survivor-led, meaning that those who are impacted by an issue are a part of the effort to find and implement a solution to it.
“We had found that folks who do this work, the community organizing work, and the justice-centered work, in turn, actually get a lot of healing,” Degillo said. This work often includes organizing conversations about narrative change, heading community-led research and building coalitions to educate policymakers.
Communities United is one of 361 organizations that MacKenzie Scott, co-founder of Amazon, donated $640 million to last week through Yield Giving, a fund that has gifted more than $16 billion to nearly 2,000 nonprofits that prioritize community efforts to improve local lives.
Yield Giving’s open call received more than 6,000 applications, but only 82 nonprofits are receiving $1 million, and $2 million will go to 279 nonprofits, of which Communities United is one.
“We are thrilled about the investment in the leadership of our young people in Chicago,” Degillo said in a statement. “We are thankful to MacKenzie Scott for supporting the efforts to create new leadership opportunities for young people of color, who, in their turn, are creating healing-centered communities.”
Communities United plans to use the grant money to broaden and strengthen its work with schools and community organizations, all led by young people.
“This money is really about spending it and investing it in the leadership of our young folks, the way that the organization had invested in me when I was a young person,” Degillo said. Along with Degillo, several other staff members started with Communities United as leaders, searching for justice for the issues that impact them.
Degillo’s family is from the Philippines and waited 13 years to come to the United States. By the time they were approved, her brother was 21 and had to apply for his own visa.
“When we left, my brother had developed a drinking problem and depression because of the family separation,” Degillo said. Her brother got liver cancer and, when she was in middle school, passed away two days before his U.S. visa was delivered.
“I was incredibly hopeless and didn’t really know how to navigate my own healing,” Degillo said. But what helped her in the process was talking about the impact of family separation in immigration. “When I was doing this work with Communities United, I was put in a lot of positions where it gave me a lot of hope,” she added. “I was able to internalize a lot of the healing that I needed.”
Derrianna Ford, now 20 and Communities United’s office associate, started working with the organization as a sophomore at Mather High School on the North Side of Chicago. She wanted to help create safe schools and promote students’ mental health. After becoming a leader, she worked to eliminate School Resource Officers from Chicago Public Schools, a success when they were removed from Chicago Public Schools last month.
“Being able to work with other youth to bring health-centered approaches to safety in schools, having a platform to share my story, and being able to be at the decision-making table, allowed me to grow as a leader and have real impact on the lives of others,” Ford said in a statement.
Along with various other schools, Communities United hosts a few yearly meetings with students from schools in Austin to discuss which resources in their schools and communities would make them feel safer and more invested in.
The $2 million grant will continue opportunities for the empowering work that Degillo and Ford did as young Communities United leaders.
“When we talk about investing in leadership development, it’s about helping to fund our efforts into making sure that those who are impacted by different injustices are actually a part of these collective actions and community building efforts,” Degillo said.
She added, “How do we make sure that young people who are involved, who are part of their neighborhoods, are actually part of the conversations about what their neighborhood should look like and what their neighborhood deserves?”
