| Securing Funding for Chicago's Residents |
In March 2023, Historia Research LLC started a monthly digest of grant opportunities and news for Illinois. One of the main objectives for the news digest is to support an equitable distribution of funding from grants of significant size (award ceiling) and competitiveness (multiple awards) to broadly benefit non-profit and social enterprise organizations around the state and, in particular, Chicago. Of course, no implication of funding bias is presumed — on a grant-by-grant basis, a public record of the number and quality of applications from Chicago or Illinois to federal, state or private sources does not exist.*
Thus, funding equity for Illinois and Chicago depends foremost on the agency of nonprofits, social activists, community organizers, grant writers, and elected officials. One first step is to disseminate far and wide the competitive grant opportunities available from federal, state, and philanthropic sources. A second step is to foster a collaborative culture to forge partnerships and maximize funding to support multi-faceted, efficacious project design proposals with sustainable outcomes. A third step is for grant writers and professionals to elevate the quality of applications to ensure that Chicago and Illinois have a fair chance to be awarded competitive grant funding.
Our monthly grant opportunity and news digests endeavor to contribute in a small way to these three goals: building grant awareness; fostering grant partnerships; and, improving grant applications from Chicago and Illinois.
Statement of Need | A Case Study in Reentry Program Funding
Beginning in 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has funded the Pathway Homes program annually: PH1 (2020), PH2 (2021), PH3 (2022), and PH4 (2023). DOL’s Pathway Homes program provides “the resources needed to improve employability outcomes for adults during the reentry process from incarceration.” Based on a pilot program that ended in 2018, Pathway Home grants fund evidence based practices with the “potential for breaking the cycle of recidivism by linking participants to an employment case manager while still in jail—and then continuing with the same case manager post-release.” The federal grant program is a highly structured request for applications with numerous required activities that circumscribe project design proposals based on the Linking Employment Activities Pre-Release (LEAP) pilot study from 2018.
While grants applications are inherently competitive, DOL more or less seeks grantees from across the nation that have the financial, professional, humane, and aspirational resources to execute new programs that adhere to the 2018 pilot study. The organizational capacity to execute a new program based on the pilot program likely outweighs novel and experimental project designs to address obdurate social and economic challenges for the reentry population. If a critical mass of Chicago and Illinois applicants stepped forward for funding from the Pathway Home grant, one reasonably may expect that Illinois would receive an equitable share of the federal allocations for DOL’s Pathway Home reentry programs.
Table 1 | DOL Pathway Home Grant Awards by Year and State
In the past four years, the DOL has awarded $225 million in grant funds for Pathway Home programs in 33 states plus the District of Columbia. Notably, not one organization in seventeen states received funding during the past four years ($0). Most notably, no organizations in Texas, the state with the nation’s largest prison population (over 133,000), received Pathway Home funding in the past four years. In contrast, New York organizations received nearly $20 million (30,000+ prisoners),** Florida organizations received $17.5 million (80,000+ prisoners), Ohio organizations took in just shy of $16 million (45,000+ prisoners), and Wisconsin organizations were awarded nearly $13 million (20,000+ prisoners). In addition, Wyoming organizations, serving only 2,000+ prisoners in total, received nearly $4 million in funding — almost $2,000 per prisoner in the state (U.S. DOJ, 2022). While none of these figures indicate inequity in the allocation of Pathway Home grant funds, the allocations do suggest that competitive grant funds for programs to serve incarcerated and reentry populations do not necessarily flow proportionately to the states with the largest prison populations or greatest need.
Illinois has the eleventh largest prison population (28,475) in the nation (U.S. DOJ, 2022). One Illinois organization has received Pathway Home funding, albeit the second lowest award ever announced by the DOL ($849,999) and in the fourth year of the program (PH4). In addition — as one of the nuances for tracking the organizations and citizens who benefit from Pathway Home grant funding — New York University won a $4 million award in year 2 (PH2) to collaborate with the Illinois Department of Corrections on a project for 28 counties in the southern most tip of Illinois.** Although credited to the State of New York, the reentry population in southern Illinois is the direct beneficiary of the grant program. As a result, Illinois has nearly $5 million of grant funding from the DOL Pathway Home program. A more generous allotment for the reentry population than one single award to an Illinois organization suggests, but nonetheless only one-third the grant funding allocated to New York’s reentry population following the interstate adjustment.
The City of Chicago and other major diverse cities in Illinois are nonetheless grossly underfunded. As of June 30, 2022, the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) reported a snapshot headcount of 29,245 inmates. Cook County, home to the City of Chicago, represented an estimated 12,474 of the state prisoners (42.7%). Moreover, Cook County inmates in state prisons are primarily Black (73.5%) or Hispanic (17.9%). By comparison, inmates in state prisons from other Illinois counties are 50.7% white. In addition, as of the same snapshot date, Cook County is home to 8,377 (43%) of the state’s 19,466 parolee population. Similarly, the Cook County parolees are 72.1% Black and 16.7% Hispanic, while state parolees in Illinois counties aside from Cook County are 48.1% white (IDOC, 2022). None of the funding flowing through New York University favors the reentry population in Chicago — nor the reentry populations in any of the ten largest cities in Illinois such as Aurora, Rockford, Peoria or Joliet.
Whereas the City of Chicago may now benefit from a Pathway Home 4 grant from 2023, the impact will be nominal for the overall reentry population. The Pathway Home grants anticipate $10,000 of services per prisoner/parolee — $1 million is expected to serve 100 former inmates and $4 million is expected to serve 400 former inmates (minimum requirements, NOFO, page 5). The NYU consortium explicitly states its plan to benefit 400 individuals from the 2,787 incarcerated persons (62% white) from the 28 counties in southern Illinois (PH2). The recent PH4 grant to a Chicago-based organization may benefit 100 of the 12,474 current inmates and 8,377 parolees (90% Black or Hispanic) from Cook County (IDOC, 2022)***. The Chicago-based organization could elect to serve more former inmates than required by the grant (minimum 100 participants for $850,000), but Chicago’s reentry population will then receive on average a lower investment in reentry services per participant than the reentry population in southern Illinois or entire states like Wyoming.
Generally, $225 million in federal funding for reentry populations has been allocated inequitably to Illinois and within Illinois. DOL’s Pathway Home program has underfunded the largest reentry populations from the major counties and cities in Illinois, including Cook County and Chicago. Again, this is not to impugn the competitive grant process managed by the federal government. In short, our intent is to suggest that some federal grants are of size and significance for the City of Chicago and for the State of Illinois to warrant strategic and coordinated efforts to win an equitable share of the federal grant awards.
What Is To Be Done?
The DOL’s Pathway Home grant notice states:
- “The purpose of this program is to provide eligible incarcerated individuals in men’s and women’s state correctional facilities or local or county jails with workforce services prior to release and to continue services after release by transitioning the participants into reentry programs in the communities to which they will return. These grants are job-driven and build connections to local employers that will enable returning citizens to secure employment, while advancing equity for individuals facing significant barriers to labor market reentry, including incarcerated women and communities of color.”
The Diversity and Disparity Project at Brown University, a study of residential segregation across the nation, finds that Chicago is America’s fifth most segregated city for Black residents and the sixth most segregated city for Hispanic and Latinx residents (Logan and Stults, 2021). Most incarcerated individuals from Chicago originate from historically redlined, disinvested, and overpoliced communities of color. The concepts of “transitioning” and “reentry programs” expect former inmates and parolees returning to Chicago to rejoin the structural inequities of racism that limited access to jobs, connections to local employers, and labor markets prior to their incarcerations. Paradoxically, a major federal program to support reentry populations across the nation perpetuates the historical disinvestment from communities of color in Chicago and Illinois, undermining the grant’s priority to mitigate recidivism among former prisoners. In effect, the DOL Pathway Home program fails the vast majority of Chicago’s reentry population from predominantly Black and Hispanic communities, forcing formerly incarcerated individuals to confront social determinants of recidivism and to figure out release, secure employment, and significant barriers to reintegration on their own.
According to the most recent DOL Pathway Home notice of funding opportunity, the organizations eligible to apply include:
- Private or public non-profit organizations…
- Public institutions of higher education…
- Nonprofit post-secondary education institutions with or without 501(c)(3) status…
- State or local governments…
- State and local workforce boards…
- Unions, labor, or labor management organizations; and…
- Non-profit industry organizations.
According to DOL records for Pathway Home funding, only one Illinois public institution or nonprofit organization — from this comprehensive list of eligible applicants — submitted a funding-worthy proposal in the past four years. This fact alone suggests that Chicago and urban centers in Illinois have missed opportunities to reduce recidivism in major urban centers due to a lack of applications, a surfeit of partnerships to support reentry populations, or a deficiency in the quality of applications submitted to support formerly incarcerated individuals.
To wit, first, the Office of the Mayor for the City of Chicago and the Cook County Government apparently did not submit one winning application during the past four years despite being eligible as a state or local government.**** Second, the one Chicago-based organization that won a Pathway Home award requested the minimal amount to serve 100 inmates — perhaps reflecting a lack of partnerships to maximize funding at $4 million in order to serve at least 400 inmates from Cook County and Chicago. Third, aside from the one Chicago awardee, the project narratives submitted by grant writers and professionals presumably did not demonstrate in the statements of need or project designs that their clients have the expertise and capacity to reduce recidivism in Chicago. Lastly, Chicago’s Congressional representatives and its U.S. senators seemingly have neglected to conduct oversight to ensure that Chicago and Cook County are equitably funded by the DOL’s reentry programs to serve former inmates.
It is hard to believe that there are no Illinois-based government institutions or nonprofit organizations — as lead applicants — worthy of maximal funding and capable of reducing recidivism with a DOL Pathway Home grant to support former inmates from the ten largest cities in Illinois. And, preeminently, Chicago. Thus, we hope the monthly grant opportunity and news digests build awareness, foster partnerships, and in the long run improve applications for federal grants designed to benefit underserved communities in Chicago and Illinois. Given these three outcomes under our control, grant professionals from Illinois then may expect that elected officials in Chicago and Illinois do more to ensure that Chicago’s residents receive an equitable share of federal funding from competitive programs designed to support local reentry populations and reduce recidivism.
Notes:
* Historia Research LLC has served as a grant writer for several DOL applications, including Pathway Home.
** As discussed below, PH2 awarded $4 million dollars to New York University to support a program serving southern Illinois.
*** The abstracts for the Pathway Home 4 programs are not available as of this post. The Chicago-based organization may have won an award to serve reentry populations outside of Chicago and Cook County.
**** Cook County and the City of Chicago have dedicated other funds to support reentry populations. In 2021, the City of Chicago organized an Interagency Reentry Council and subsequently published “A Roadmap for a Second Chance City” report to recommend the creation of a “one-stop shop connecting individuals with housing, workforce resources, healthcare, and other tools upon release” (City of Chicago, 2021). In 2023, Cook County announced funding from the American Rescue Plan for “a reentry initiative that will provide rental assistance and wraparound support services to residents returning to Cook County from periods of incarceration” (Cook County, 2023). At $10,000 per returning resident according to the Pathway Home grant funding minimum formulas, Cook County and Chicago require about $80,000,000 to $100,000,000 of funding annually to serve 8,000+ parolees.