Since 2010, the city of Aurora has given out over $23 million in grants to help the community in ways ranging from expanding affordable housing to supporting local museums.
That’s according to Aurora’s newest open data portal, this one focused on its Community Development Division, which shares information about city assistance programs and grant funding awarded by the city to community organizations over the past several years. It can be accessed at www.aurora.il.us/CommunityDevelopment.
Management Assistant Adam Grubbs said in a city news release announcing the new web page that the new data portal will let residents see how funding has been distributed based on the community’s priorities over the past five years.
Plus, it will give residents another way to help the Community Development Division figure out what gaps currently exist so that grants can be given and programs can be developed to fill those gaps, according to Grubbs.
Many of the grants given by the Community Development Division are funded by federal dollars that come to the city through programs like the Community Development Block Grant or the Home Investment Partnerships Program Grant. The city then distributes these federal dollars to organizations that serve Aurora residents.
Funding prior to 2020 seems to have primarily come from the Home grant, which is specifically for the development of affordable housing and related activities, according to the new open data portal. Up to this point, the city has distributed nearly $6.3 million in funding through this federal grant, not including a one-time special allocation of nearly $1.7 million aimed at addressing homelessness.
In recent years, the Community Development grant has provided more of that federal funding, which has also been to a wider variety of services. The city has distributed $5.5 million in this type of federal funding, not including a $4.2 million special version of the program meant to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
The city’s casino gaming tax does fund a portion of the grants distributed by the Community Development Division, specifically those related to quality of life for residents. These grants go to support things like child care, education, job training, services for homeless people, museums and veterans’ services, among others.
In total, the city has given out over $4.8 million in quality of life grants since 2020, funding that at least in part came from the city’s tax on casino gaming, according to the data portal. Of that total, $2.6 million has gone towards youth or educational services.
The Community Development Open Data Portal also breaks funding down further for specific types of funded services, such as affordable housing. Since 2010, over 31% of the roughly $7.3 million in funding has gone to senior housing, while 35% has gone to public housing, the portal shows.
In addition to just sharing data about the grants given by the Community Development Division, the portal was also designed to show what staff considers when choosing which projects to fund, according to the city’s news release announcing the portal. Plus, the portal explains different types of programs supported by the city division, including various types of housing assistance programs.
This newest data portal joins a variety of others the city maintains across various city functions, including police, fire, public works and development as well as arts and culture. All of these portals can be found online at: opendata-cityofaurora.hub.arcgis.com.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
