Initiatives

The Woods Fund of Chicago actively seeks opportunities to support participatory policy-making by encouraging collaborations, forging new partnerships and building the capacity of nascent and emerging community organizations. From 1999 to 2007, Woods and twelve other foundations joined together to provide grants and technical assistance to build the capacity of fifteen local community organizing groups through the Chicago Community Organizing Capacity Building Initiative.

As a result of our foundation's concern that our community organizing grant dollars might not be reaching those neighborhoods with the highest concentration of poverty we launched the South Side Community Organizing Capacity Building Initiative  in 2003. The aim of this Initiative was quite simply to both gain a fuller understanding of non-traditional organizing models (successes) and increase funding investments for South Side organizing.

In addition to our investment in capacity building, we recently became an active member of a three-year funder collaborative, Communities for Public Education Reform, which is a partnership of local and national foundations working to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for students in low-income communities.