Overview

The Community and Economic Development program area helps to create vibrant, economically-integrated neighborhoods and to increase opportunity for low-income residents. The main goal is to produce measurable improvements in such quality of life indicators as income diversity, employment, property values, crime, and commercial investment.

MacArthur funds efforts to strengthen neighborhoods for the benefit of individuals and families and for the positive contribution that healthy communities make to their cities and regions. The Foundation hopes that this support also will generate new knowledge about community dynamics and the economic interdependence of neighborhoods, cities, and regions, and that the knowledge generated will lead to improved public policies.

In 2011, the grant budget for this program area is $14.1 million.

What MacArthur Funds

With Foundation funding and other resources, the Chicago office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) implements the centerpiece of MacArthur’s grantmaking strategy — a comprehensive initiative called the New Communities Program — in 16 Chicago communities:

• Auburn Gresham
• Chicago Lawn
• Douglas
• East Garfield Park
• Englewood
• Grand Boulevard
• West Humboldt Park
• South Lawndale (Little Village)
• Logan Square
• Near West Side
• North Kenwood-Oakland
• North Lawndale
• Lower West Side (Pilsen)
• South Chicago
• Washington Park
• Woodlawn

LISC/Chicago uses MacArthur and other funds to provide long-term, general operating, and project support to local organizations to plan and carry out projects to improve the quality of life in these neighborhoods. Foundation resources also support a small number of organizations to work across the 16 neighborhoods to reduce violence and to promote economic development — and to document and evaluate New Communities Program activities. Additional funding is provided to innovative responses to the impact of the economic recession on New Communities Program neighborhoods.

The Foundation also contributes to the Building Sustainable Communities Program, an effort by LISC National to adapt the New Communities Program approach to ten other sites around the country, including Indianapolis, the San Francisco Bay Area, Detroit, Duluth, Kansas City, Milwaukee, rural Pennsylvania, the Twin Cities, Providence, and Washington, DC. In addition, MacArthur is a member of Living Cities, a collaborative of 22 of the nation's largest foundations and financial institutions that works to improve the lives of low-income people and the urban areas in which they live.

In response to the ongoing mortgage crisis, the Foundation designed a Foreclosure Prevention and Mitigation Project. Through grants and program-related investments, MacArthur funds outreach and counseling for at-risk homeowners, legal assistance for renters who face eviction because of foreclosure, and new mortgage financing products, all of which include in their focus New Communities Program neighborhoods in Chicago. The Foundation also is supporting the City of Chicago and its partner, Mercy Portfolio Services, Inc., in their efforts to acquire vacant and foreclosed properties for resale, rental, rent-to-own or redevelopment.

See Recent Grants for examples of grants awarded.