Vision
We envision a future where Illinois leads the country in ensuring all people have agency, dignity, and freedom to make choices that allow them to thrive across their reproductive lives, during pregnancy and postpartum, and through the earliest years of a child’s life.
Background
In 2023, a group of funders came together to form a collaborative focused on breaking down silos for three interconnected issues:
Illinois has some of the strongest policy commitments in the country:
Yet people still experience services in fragments, and community-based organizations have to braid together multiple funding streams.
The group recognized that these issues are often treated independently by policy, systems, and funding streams, but are closely interconnected in people’s real lives. This results in inefficient gaps and challenging experiences for those seeking services.
Too often, philanthropy is set up in separate issue lanes, with each funder using its own timelines, strategies, and application processes. That can make it hard for community partners to find the right information, and it can also mean funders miss chances to learn from one another and ease the burden on grantees.
