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Children's Home and Aid Society

Chicago, Illinois

Grants

2017 (1 year 5 months)
$180,000

Founded in 1883, Children’s Home and Aid Society (CHA) delivers over 70 social service programs throughout 40 Illinois counties to nearly 40,000 children and families each year. In Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, it offers early childhood care, family counseling, behavioral health services, youth mentoring, and foster care. With this award, CHA expands the training for its staff members in the areas of youth mentoring, parent child therapy, and workforce development. It also upgrades technology to better track data and client outcomes from its youth mentoring services. Finally, it makes improvements to its physical space for therapy and group coaching to Englewood youth. These activities will enhance CHA’s programming across multiple programs in Englewood and inform its work in other parts of Chicago and the state of Illinois.

2016 (1 year 8 months)
$365,000

One of Illinois’s oldest social service agencies, Children’s Home + Aid Society (CH+A) delivers over 70 social service programs throughout 40 counties to nearly 40,000 children and families each year. For the past year, CH+A has partnered with the Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), which is another well-respected youth service organization that is headquartered in Pennsylvania and has programs in Chicago. Together they been have operating an anti-violence program that is the winner of a Design Competition that was issued by the University of Chicago Crime Lab with Foundation funding. The program pairs CH+A’s trauma-informed, evidence-based group and individual cognitive behavioral therapy with YAP’s wraparound model, and is designed to strengthen the participants' connections to supportive, safe adults, school and/or work, and their communities. This award provides partial funding for the final year of program operations while Crime Lab completes a randomized-controlled trial to estimate the effectiveness of the intervention in reducing violence involvement and other at-risk behaviors among youths aged thirteen to eighteen.