Chicago Resiliency Fund – Is/Was is for real???
I was trying to help a family in-need apply for the Chicago fund for undocumented residents that opened on 6/22. As you may have heard it was quite sad that people had to call for hours and days on end without ever getting through or sometimes getting hung up on. Now all of the organizations say “not taking applications”. Do you know if this was for real or a scam ala “the Chicago way”? It seemed so poorly organized and caused so much stress and hardship for people who are already dealing with such challenging situations. Thanks for any insight! BTW, I love listening to you on WGN and have been a long time reader of your columns.
https://resurrectionproject.org/chicagofund/
Terry Says
The Chicago Small Business Resiliency Fund was a joint project of the City Treasurer and the Mayor’s office.
They took applications until the end of April, then passed them on to various civic organizations to choose the ultimate recipients and administer the distribution of money. Maximum loan size was $50,000 each. And the business had to have annual revenues of less than $3 million in 2019, demonstrate a 235% decrease in revenue due to Covid, employ from 1-50 workers, and half the loan amount was to be used to hire or retain employees.
Treasurer Ervin’s portion of the project was known as the Catalyst Fund, which had $25 million to distribute. The money from this fund went to four organizations:
Accion $10M
Community Reinvestment Fund (CRF USA) $10M
Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives Microfinance Group (MFG) $1M
Illinois Facilities Fund $4M
It is expected that when all the $25 is disbursed, more than 1,000 loans will be made to the city’s low income and minority businesses.
These four groups have deployed some, but not all of the money at this time. For example, at latest count, Accion has deployed $6 million via 255 loans. They are focusing on low to moderate income areas.
It is expected that the actual loan recipients will be identified when the funding is finished at the end of the month. The Treasurer has promised a full report.
The Mayor’s office has been distributing the additional money in the Resiliency fund — some of which was contributed by Goldman Sachs and other private funders.
On June 10th the Mayor announced the Resurrection Project. It said that $5 million from the Resiliency fund would go to help individual citizens.
“CHICAGO – Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot, The Resurrection Project and Open Society Foundations today announced the “Chicago Resiliency Fund” – an up to $5 million cash assistance program to support the more than 300,000 Chicago residents who were excluded from federal stimulus aid in response to COVID-19. This fund will provide $1,000 per household for eligible Chicagoans, which includes, but is not limited to, undocumented individuals, mixed-status families, dependent adults and returning residents.
The money will be distributed through a “lottery” scheduled to be held on July 20. For information on this lottery here is the link.
