The Chicago Community Trust Launches the Unity Challenge
December 15, 2008, Chicago
– The Chicago Community Trust, metropolitan Chicago’s community foundation, responds to rising unemployment, increased demand on food pantries and homeless shelters with the creation of The Unity Challenge, a $3 million initiative to expand capacity of not-for-profit agencies meeting such basic human needs as food and shelter. The Trust will provide a two-to-one match for up to $1 million in new donations.
The human toll resulting from the ongoing economic crisis continues to climb. From September 2007 to September 2008, the unemployment rate increased from 4.9% to 6.6% in metropolitan Chicago and foreclosure filings doubled from 7,814 in the third quarter of 2007 to 14,868 for the same period in 2008 in metropolitan Chicago. Community agencies saw the number of individuals using food pantries increase by 32% in one year in Cook County, while close to 6,000 calls for homelessness prevention assistance were received in the month of September 2008 versus 4,700 in September 2007 in Chicago.