Our Grantees

For the past five years, GHF has made a conscious decision to fund organizations that directly provide and/or facilitate mental health services within the Chicago Public Schools.  The Office of Social Emotional Learning (OSEL) is the main conduit to students who need behavioral health services at CPS as well as funding for these services.  However, in order to cover their costs, community behavioral health organizations are forced to weave different funding streams together, such as CPS contract fees, philanthropy, state/city grants and if you are fortunate to know and leverage the system, sometimes, Medicaid.  In addition to the funding hurdles, providers encounter contract delays, bureaucratic paperwork, delayed payments and a short-staffed system within CPS.  In 2022, one of our grantees, the School Health Access Collaborative, formed a subcommittee of behavior health organizations and representatives from the OSEL with the goal of opening up lines of communication and directly addressing some of these issues.  As a funder, this is one of the ways that we can provide assistance to grantees and the sector outside of direct grant funds.  We are fortunate to have a unique perspective of the landscape and the bandwidth to create spaces where issues can be discussed and resolved.  

We continue to learn from our grantees on better ways in which to work with CPS, provide services to children/youth within and outside of the school building and how they access funding for their work.  This has led GHF to make a longer-term commitment to a group of community mental health providers who provide services to youth in CPS through a Youth Mental Cohort.  Organizations who were chosen for the Youth Mental Health receive 3 years of general operating support.  As well, organizations within the cohort mirror and support GHF’s values of: 

• centering health and racial equity within its scope of work, operations and mission.

• demonstrating flexibility and striving to be nimble and adaptive to changing environments and new information.

• willing to work in collaboration with their cohort of fellow grantees, GHF and the communities they serve knowing that we will be more successful and impactful when we work shoulder to shoulder with each other toward similar end goals.

• a commitment to the community that is being served and belief in the wisdom and strength of its residents.

• building strong, trusting relationships with GHF, fellow cohort members and the communities being served.

As far as geographic focus is concerned, we will continue to concentrate our support to organizations serving (and ideally residing in) the south and west sides of Chicago.  Furthermore, we pay particular attention to those neighborhoods where historical disinvestment and systemic racism have exacerbated persistently poor youth mental health outcomes based on data.  As our organizational vision states, GHF envisions a future in which health outcomes for Chicagoans are no longer determined by race or zip code.