A Profile of Our Successes

Three years ago, the Eleanor Foundation embarked on a reexamination of its fundamental mission. Historically providing safe housing alternatives for low-income working women in Chicago, the Foundation's leadership and Board of Directors recognized that innovative steps were needed to promote economic self-sufficiency and independence on the part of recipients of our support.

That led to the decision three years ago to embark on a focused program of grantmaking to organizations with programs designed specifically to help our targeted population: working women, with or without children, who needed assistance to survive and thrive economically.

Since 2003, the Eleanor Foundation has made a total of eleven grants to nine organization, with total disbursements of $685,000. These grants have helped well over a thousand of Chicago's low-income working women. Grant programs established by the Foundations will help:

• Provide housing assistance by providing homes or related assistance to up to 260 women.
• Grow businesses by establishing support to home-based childcare programs that directly helped 150 women and touch uncounted others who are helped in gaining access to affordable childcare.
• Establish homes in a model three-year program that houses ten women and their children and provides "wrap-around" services.
• Teach financial literacy and assist in credit cleanup for over 670 women who needed emergency housing funding to keep their homes. Training and intervention is aimed at avoiding future housing crises.
• Create homesharing solutions for up to fifty women, in a unique arrangement that partners seniors struggling to keep their homes with younger, wage-earning women who need cost-effective housing alternatives.
• Fund planning and research that identifies housing issues faced by women in pre-apprenticeship training programs.