The Chicago Foundation for Women (CFW) has announced more than 230 grants totaling $3.4 million in support of women, girls, and trans and gender nonbinary individuals across the Chicago area.

Operational and program-specific grants to nonprofit organizations align with the priorities outlined in CFW’s SHEcovery, a commitment from the foundation to fund, support, and build a more equitable system to ensure that women emerge from the pandemic stronger than before. SHEcovery investments are focused on four key strategies: getting women back to work, addressing the eviction crisis, providing care for caregivers, and demanding an anti-racist healthcare system. As part of the care for caregivers pillar, CFW’s new Black Women-led Organization Capacity Building Program (BLOC) provides more than $295,000 in capacity-building grants to build and implement systematic care structures, including comprehensive benefits packages for organizations and their staff. In addition, CFW aims to create a data-driven capacity-building program that supports Black women-led organizations, measures impact, and begins making the case to other funders (regional and national) to strategically fund targeted capacity-building efforts. Specifically, CFW will build an advocacy and information campaign with a call to action to center Black women and women of color in this work.

As part of the foundation’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, limiting nationwide access to various reproductive healthcare services for women and persons who can become pregnant, the grants include an additional $200,000 awarded to organizations and efforts to strengthen the reproductive justice movement.

“Chicago Foundation for Women fiercely advocates for reproductive justice, which is grounded in, among other pillars, the right to have a child or not have a child; and the right to parent the children they have with the social and economic support needed to thrive,” said CFW president and CEO Felicia Davis Blakley. “CFW remains committed to creating a world in which all women are not only able to access health care, but are also safe—free from violence, supported, and financially secure.”

For a complete list of grantees, see the CFW website.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/FG Trade)