Founding Organizations | Here to Stay Community Land Trust

Center for Changing Lives

CCL is a HUD-approved housing counseling agency and a Financial Opportunity Center. CCL’s work includes financial coaching, employment coaching, and training with skill enhancement opportunities, along with housing and homeowner counseling. CCL has served more than 1,170 households over the last three years. CCL will leverage its financial and employment coaching to cultivate a pipeline of ready homebuyers, in addition to conducting outreach about the initiative and educating and mobilizing the community around inclusionary housing policy to sustainably fund the initiative.

LUCHA

Founded in 1982, LUCHA is both a US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-approved housing counseling agency as well as a Community Housing Development Organization (CHDO). The LUCHA acronym is also the Spanish word for “struggle,” which reflects the organization’s history of leading the struggle against discrimination, housing displacement, systemic inequity, and patterns of injustice which impact members of Chicago’s low-and moderate-income Latinx and African American communities.

Anchored in Humboldt Park, LUCHA was born out of the Puerto Rican community as it organized for equitable housing. As part of its central commitment to racial equity via affordable housing creation and preservation, LUCHA has built over 280 units of affordable rental housing divided across five developments spanning Humboldt Park, Logan Square, and West Town.

Palenque LSNA

(Liberating Spaces through Neighborhood Action) Founded in 1962, as the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, in 2022, we became Palenque LSNA. Palenque is a multi-issue community organization serving 6,500 residents across the Logan Square, Hermosa, and Avondale neighborhoods. Forty-five community institutions including schools, churches, block clubs, and housing/social service agencies are members of Palenque LSNA. Palenque LSNA is a catalyst for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Immigrant communities and allies to take care of one another and take strategic action for systemic change and a just, resilient, and joyful future.

Palenque LSNA has been the lead organization for two community planning processes since 2003. The most recent quality of life plan, published in October 2018, put forth the solution of the Community Land Trust to help fight rapid gentrification and displacement in the area.

Spanish Coalition for Housing

In 1966, Spanish Coalition for Housing (SCH) began as a grassroots collaboration that sought to address housing issues facing the Latine community and incorporated in 1972. SCH’s mission is to build generational wealth through housing counseling, financial education, and advocacy, by connecting low-to-moderate income households to resources that create housing stability, homeownership, and economic mobility.

SCH is one of the nation’s leading nonprofit HUD Approved Housing Counseling organizations and continues to be a top performer in the housing counseling industry nationally. SCH serves over 5,000 households annually across its comprehensive housing counseling services to include rental/tenancy counseling, homeownership, post-purchase, foreclosure prevention, support and technical assistance to small landlords across Chicago’s 77 Community Areas and suburban Cook County communities; connecting families and individuals to the resources and education they need to achieve their housing and financial wellness goals.

Since 2020, SCH has created over 670 first time homeowners who have purchased their first home and connected over $150 million in affordable capital to support access to sustainable and affordable homeownership.