Growing Home aims to provide jobs and training for hard to employ individuals, create more access to food in Chicago and advocate for healthy and sustainably food systems locally and nationally. Since its creation in 2002, Growing Homes has trained and employed over 400 Chicagoans with employment barriers in a socially-responsible and meaningful business.

Rick Guzman and his wife founded Emmanuel House in Aurora in 2002, initially helping refugees resettle and build wealth. Since then Emmanuel House has expanded, trying to break the trap of working-class poverty by helping working-class people in Chicagoland secure a home. The organization accomplishes this through its Networked Savings program, which puts rent payments… Read more »

Since 2009, Gates has been a recognized name in artist communities all over the world. The Wall Street Journal named him their Innovator of the Year in 2012. In 2012, he acquired an old bank building in Chicago’s South Shore community that had been abandoned and vacant for the last 30 years. He envisioned the… Read more »

CCLF provided a $540,000 equipment/working capital loan for The Plant, an abandoned meatpacking plant in Chicago’s Back of the Yard’s neighborhood being converted into a net-zero energy vertical farm and food business operation. CCLF’s loan helped The Plant purchase an anaerobic digester and combined heat and power turbines to achieve its net-zero goal.