Renewing Our Commitments

March 2026 — Moving the Needle // Woods Fund Chicago

Amid 2020’s crises, Woods Fund Chicago made the decision to fundamentally change our approach to grantmaking, shifting to a model dedicated to dialogue and trust-based philanthropy.

Since then, we have consistently revisited and honed our commitments, and the values that inform them. In our biannual report this fall, we’ll dive more deeply into how we’ve grown and enacted the commitments below, but in the meantime we share them as a reassertion to ourselves and our communities of the ways we move in this work.

Advancing Racial Justice

We work to center BIPOC voices, leadership, and organizing; disrupt white supremacy culture; confront power; redistribute resources; and create systemic change.

Shifting Power to Communities

Those most impacted are best suited to lead the process of defining and solving problems: as a grantmaker, we are committed to shifting power back into communities, actively listening to needs, and intentionally fostering collaboration.

Strengthening People-Centered Solutions

Woods Fund Chicago supports communities as they work to hold government accountable to the public good.

Taking Informed Risks and Principled Action

We identify and fund emergent organizing, and stand by community groups and grassroots organizations as they challenge governing systems and fight for racial justice.

Practicing Accountability

We cultivate a culture that values people over systems, and invite the social and racial justice communities we serve to hold us accountable to our values.

Actively Collaborating

We serve as a dynamic partner and catalyst with organizations that share our mission and values.

Organizing at the Intersections: Three Angles on South Chicago's Quantum Computing Campus

South Chicago has a deep history of organizing around the South Works Steel Plant — one rooted in multiple generations of steelworkers who fought for safer working conditions when both the work itself and the fight to unionize could prove deadly. Former steel workers and their descendants fought to avoid the closure of the Steel Plant and the economic abandonment that followed, and have since fought for environmental remediation and responsible stewardship of the site.

Last year, developers broke ground on “Quantum Shore Chicago,” a mega-development with a quantum computing campus at its center, and the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a major tenant. South Side organizers are pushing back, in some cases demanding that the project cease, in others fighting to hold developers accountable via a Community Benefits Agreement.

At their root, all of those fights center the right of a community to decide what happens to it. Below, we look at three ways organizers are framing this fight:

An immediate, unifying line across organizing around the quantum campus is the fight against displacement. After decades of disinvestment, the Southeast Side of Chicago has already experienced landlord turnover, raised rents, and increased property taxes amid real estate speculation driven by the incoming Obama Presidential Center, whose campus in Woodlawn is roughly thirty blocks north of the South Works site.

Southside Together, which has organized tenants across the Southeast Side, fought and won a slate of housing protections around the Presidential Center last fall. They’re fighting for a halt to the quantum center, arguing that the community hasn’t gotten a fair say in the development, that its harms have been understated, and that the investment should be diverted to projects, like much needed grocery stores and transit, that directly serve the surrounding neighborhoods. Capitol B News quotes South Shore resident Jayna McGruder, “We deserve resources, and we also, most importantly, deserve autonomy over our own communities. We’ve been asking for jobs and housing and health care for generations, and instead they’re giving us a war computer.”

Long before the arrival of the quantum campus, local organizers have fought for remediation of the South Works Steel site, which is a brownfield, contaminated with heavy metals and petroleum after decades of steel production. The Coalition for a South Works CBA, including the Alliance of the Southeast, has organized since 2013 for a legally binding CBA with developers seeking to build on the South Works site, including a push for environmental remediation. Without the force of neighbors in active coalition, it’s not clear that the quantum campus developer would have engaged in the voluntary remediation planning which they have pursued, but the public was given a truncated comment window when the EPA reviewed the plans, and organizers have sounded the alarm that adequate protections are not being taken to protect the neighborhoods from further contamination.

Neighbors are still concerned about — and organizing around — the risks of construction on a contaminated site and the longer term energy and water costs associated with a supercomputer on the banks of one of the world’s largest sources of fresh water. Amidst rolled back climate protections and a gutted EPA, frontline communities may be our own first and best defense against environmental threats.

In a moment when the Federal Government has launched a deeply unpopular war, and after a year of unprecedented and illegal deployment of the National Guard in Chicago and beyond, organizers are asking what it might mean for residents to have a military-backed facility in their backyard. How does a neighborhood change when surveillance in the form of patrols and security cameras escalates, and what does it mean to insert additional military and police presence in a majority-Black neighborhood, where we know that presence comes at a profound risk? As Southside Together organizer Andrew Torrence put in a recent article from Capitol B News, “You have Black and brown folks — immigrants — right now shuttered in their homes because they’re afraid, and then there’s this supercomputer being funded by the military in these same neighborhoods.”

As the Quantum Campus construction begins, South Chicago and the surrounding neighborhoods are proving themselves a case study for organizers as a new wave of supercomputer and data center development lands predominantly in Black and Brown communities. A Chicago Reader article quotes resident Jerry Whirley at a December Southside Together press conference: “We are not asking for permission to exist in our own neighborhood. We are demanding a right to decide what happens in it.”

FURTHER READING

Quantum leap or community crossroads?

Chicago Reader

In Chicago, a Pentagon‑backed Lab Could Price Out Black Residents

Capital B News

Pandora’s Box: The science behind quantum computing—and what the U.S. military wants to do with it

Chicago Reader

Returning grantee partners, save the date! You will be sent an Organizational Update form on Wednesday, April 1. The deadline for returning grantee partners is 11:59 PM on Thursday, April 30.

Woods Fund Chicago has separate application windows for new applicants and returning grantee partners; our application window for new grantee partners closed March 10, 2026.

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