Healing Illinois Supports Organizations Doing Racial Healing Work
Healing Illinois Supports Organizations Doing Racial Healing Work
By Tia Carol Jones
Healing Illinois recently announced it would distribute $4.3 million in grant funding for 193 subgrantees that work to promote racial healing in more than 30 counties across the state of Illinois. The announcement was made during a celebration of the National Day of Racial Healing at an event at Malcolm X College, titled, “We Carry the Light.”
Healing Illinois is an initiative of the Illinois Department of Human Services, in partnership with the Field Foundation. It was founded in 2020, with the mission to support organizations that do racial healing work. Some of the subgrantees include Kuumba Lynx, on the city’s North side, Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, Inc. and the Chicago Urban League.
Maritza Bandera, Project Manager of Healing Illinois, said that although each year, Healing Illinois seeks to provide grants to organizations doing racial healing work, it feels different each year. She said the work continues to evolve and there continues to be a need for financial support for organizations that want to continue to do racial healing work.
This year, Healing Illinois received the largest number of applications for the grant than it has since it began. Healing Illinois received 600 applications in comparison to 400 applications that were received last year.
She said that while there were several organizations that had great proposals, there just wasn’t enough grant funding to fund all the applicants. She said they were very intentional to ensure that the subgrantees represented all the parts of the state of Illinois, not just a focus on Chicago, Cook County or Northern Illinois.
Bandera said what she found the most interesting was how healing looked in different parts of the state of Illinois. She said in some Southern parts of the state, that work includes storytelling, with a focus on diversity and how people build better connections with people in an attempt to better understand people with different backgrounds.
She said in Chicago, the healing looks more like racial healing circles, where people are getting interpersonal healing with an aim toward relating to the surrounding community. She said this year, there was an intentionality toward looking at placemaking and the places people call home.
“As we look into the 250th anniversary of the United States, we wanted to have a pathway for people to think about their local communities, the stories and histories that have not been told,” she said. She added that Healing Illinois wanted to look at how placemaking and interracial healing fits into the history of the United States.
Bandera said there were a lot of intergenerational projects that brought the elders and the younger generation together to share stories with each other. She said in looking at the storytelling projects from a historical context, Healing Illinois wanted to look at how to bring the stories that might have been lost back and how to elevate those stories. She said it was important for Healing Illinois to partner with the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) initiative of Greater Chicago because racial healing work was started by TRHT in earnest.
Bandera said that it is important to present the stories of people from communities who are often overlooked. She said that for Healing Illinois, their end goal is to elevate the experiences and stories of people from different communities who might be silenced because of their racial background. She said that when people hear stories from people from different backgrounds it can help them begin to relate to those people in a different way. She said that racial healing work is a lifelong work that should be nurtured.
For more information about Healing Illinois and the complete list of subgrantees, visit healing.illinois.gov.
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