ACRE Supported by MacArthur Foundation's Culture, Equity, and the Arts Program

In our Chicago-based grantmaking, we strive to listen to and elevate the voices of community members, whether through the support of Press Forward Chicago and its grants to local media outlets or through the execution of community-designed economic development plans.

We also celebrate the extraordinary efforts of leaders in our city’s nonprofit sector and help them lift up the health, well-being, and professional development of their staffs—as they navigate in their day-to-day work preventing gun violence, supporting entrepreneurs, or shifting the narratives that are told about our neighborhoods.

In 2024, MacArthur reinforced our strong commitment to the city we call home. With 150 grants and impact investments totaling $69,031,500, we remain fully dedicated to seeing Chicago be a just, verdant, and peaceful home for all who live here.

Culture, Equity, and the Arts

In the years 2013 through 2015, arts funders only directed 22 percent of grants to arts organizations in Chicago to Black, Indigenous, or people of color-led organizations. A report from Enrich Chicago found that from 2020-2023 that level increased to 40 percent of grants, with 71 percent of grants providing unrestricted support. This is a positive trend, but arts funders can do better.

Each year since 2019, the Chicago Commitment’s Culture, Equity, and the Arts program offers multi-year general operating support grants to arts, cultural, and arts-centered organizations that prioritize equity. In 2024, this program made 25 grants totaling $5.5 million to organizations selected for consideration by a panel of external advisors who made recommendations through a participatory process. These grant recipients are located across the city, from the far North Side to Chicago’s South and West Sides; they work closely with people with disabilities and/or offer programming in traditionally disinvested communities.

In response to the request of current grant recipients of the Culture, Equity, and the Arts program, we considered how to respond to an urgent, collectively defined issue: specifically, the barriers and challenges faced by individual artists and creative workers. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a reevaluation of working conditions for these professionals and created an urgent need for data-driven advocacy to rebuild and reshape the arts sector in a more equitable way. 

Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE) for the Chicago Arts Census, a comprehensive data collection effort created by and with the creative workers of Chicago. The Chicago Arts Census will amplify the voices of creative workers, serve as an advocacy tool for better working and living conditions, and create opportunities for coalition-building across art sectors. 

This award was paired with one to DataArts, now based at Southern Methodist University, to identify the current landscape of artists and the creative workforce living and working in Chicago. It will analyze trends in working conditions, compare results to other cities, and identify areas of opportunity to advance support for workers.

2025 and Beyond

The key themes of the MacArthur Foundation’s contributions in 2024–celebrating leaders from every corner of the city, supporting Chicagoans as they build thriving communities, and bolstering the vibrancy of an independent media sector–will continue into 2025 and beyond. Together these efforts will advance equity in the city for all.