Our Owners have voted for 10 organizations to recieve Round Up For Good grant funding for 2027. You can read through each of their project proposals below.
Thank you to all of the 48 organizations that submited a project proposal this year. The work they do is what makes Urbana-Champaign such a wonderful community. And thank you to all of our Owners who voted in this years elections. Please contact marketing@commonground.coop if you have any questions regarding our Round Up For Good program.
Mission: To instill respect, kindness, and compassion for animals as community values.
Project Proposal: The funds from this program will help support outside medical care for animals in our care. This includes emergency care, significant surgeries, and dental procedures.
Mission: Crisis Nursery creates an "Island of Safety" dedicated to the prevention of child abuse and neglect by providing 24-hour emergency care for children and support to strengthen families in crisis. Crisis Nursery is the only emergency-based child care facility in Champaign County that is open 24 hours, 365 days a year for the entire community to access with no fees or income eligibility.
Project Proposal: With a grant from Common Ground’s 2027 Round Up for Good program, Crisis Nursery will secure vital funding for our Safe Children program. This program provides 24/7 temporary care for children aged birth through six whose families are experiencing a crisis or emergency, and no other resources are available to help. A grant from Common Ground, Crisis Nursery's Safe Children program will empower us to continue our work of support vulnerable children and families navigating through crises.
Crisis Nursery has been honored to be selected for previous Round Up for Good cycles through Common Ground. Every contribution directly enhances our capacity to provide essential care for families during their most vulnerable moments. Previous grant cycles have enabled the Nursery to provide over 300 hours of emergency care. While at the Nursery, children engage in activities that foster emotional regulation, social development, and age-appropriate play in a nurturing environment. Beyond immediate emergency intervention, we work intentionally with parents to connect them with long-term community resources. This dual-layered approach creates a pathway out of the crisis cycle, transforming isolated struggle into supported resilience and empowering families to build long-term stability. Our Safe Children program serves as a critical safeguard, ensuring that sudden disruptions, such as job emergencies, medical crises, loss of primary childcare, or homelessness, do not escalate into situations that threaten child safety or family stability.
By investing in our Safe Children program, Common Ground will be a catalyst for profound positive change in the lives of those who need it most. With this grant, we will provide emergency childcare to families experiencing crisis, guiding them toward a brighter future and a stronger community.
Mission: The mission of the Daily Bread Soup Kitchen is to feed the hungry of our community regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. We welcome all volunteer who share an unconditional positive regard for every human being. We provide a safe, respectful and inviting environment in an atmosphere of hope and dignity.
Project Proposal: Pre COVID pandemic, we serve approximately 200 hot, nutritious meals daily, accompanied by a sack lunch. To continue our mission during the COVID pandemic, we began carry out services.
Our number of guests grew, and we were serving more home bound people by providing meals to-go. Since we reopened our doors, and the main dining area, we decided to also continue the carry our meals. Currently, we are providing 400 hot meals with a sack lunch to-go daily. For many of our guests, the meal and sack lunch provided by Daily Bread is their only source of nourishment.
Our guests represent the most in need in the Champaign _ Urbana area. Many are the "working poor" have jobs but not self sufficiency. We noted an increase in the homeless, who live on the streets of our communities. Also, the transient, those who have housing but then face eviction because of unpaid rent or utilities bills. All of our guests have no or low income, and therefore, have difficult feeding themselves or their families.
With funds we receive from Common Ground, we will purchase protein for our sack lunches. The cost of lunch meat and/or cheese continues to increase. Any funding we receive will be used for this purpose. The sack lunch provides an evening meal for many of our guests. Thank you for considering Daily Bread Soup Kitchen.
Mission: Eastern Illinois Foodbank has been alleviating hunger and nourishing stronger communities since 1983.
Project Proposal: EIF will use these funds to support our Foodmobile program, which aims to bring fresh and nutritious grocery options to rural and underserved areas. These distributions bridge the gap between pantry visits for our neighbors experiencing food insecurity. Because EIF is able to purchase food at reduced bulk rates, each $1 we receive is able to be stretched to provide three meals to local families.
Mission: Our purpose is to extend a welcoming hand to immigrant families who are new to our community. When families face obstacles, we are here to help; we provide them with the tools they need to build a future where their talents and skills will help them fulfill the dreams they had when they first arrived in this country.
Project Proposal: ISCU has had the privilege to receive funds from The Round up for Good Grant several years running, this has allowed us to slowly but intentionally build an internal food assistance program within our organization. What started out as an initiative to distribute gift cards for clients with no access to SNAP benefits living well below the poverty line to have gift cards for grocery shopping. The following year that transitioned into a mock snap program for those that don’t qualify, with bi-weekly distributions of gift cards over an 8 week period. Last year, our program blossomed into a fully functioning client focused food pantry with non perishables, hygiene items, pregnancy tests, condoms, over the counter medication, and related resources for clients to access directly upon intake, with the supplementation of the gift card program. This program requires us to purchase items to keep the food pantry stocked, and to have access to the funds to maintain the mock snap program. We more than look forward to the opportunity to continue developing this program and we now serve hundreds of people who benefit from the accessibility of this resource.
Mission: Planned Parenthood of Illinois is the leader in providing and promoting compassionate, comprehensive reproductive health care, education, and rights.
Project Proposal: The Round Up for Good Grant will help fund services at PPIL’s Champaign Health Center, including abortion, birth control, emergency contraception, gender-affirming care, HIV services, pregnancy testing and planning, STD treatment and testing, vaccines, and preventative care. As sexual and reproductive rights remain under serious and enduring threat from the current federal administration and cuts to Medicaid put pressure on already strained household budgets, ensuring affordable, low-barrier access to these services is more important than ever.
Last year, the Champaign Health Center served 5,247 patients, providing 5,805 STI screenings, 126 cancer screenings, 1,411 gender affirming care appointments, and 1,644 contraceptive counseling sessions. These figures demonstrate PPIL’s place as a vital lifeline to community members who may not otherwise receive care. Champaign County is a HRSA-designated Health Provider Shortage Area for low-income populations, for instance, which presents serious barriers for the 44 percent of county households who cannot afford the basic cost of living according to data from United for Alice.
PPIL also supports local community education and organizing efforts. These help provide Champaign residents and students at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and other schools opportunities to connect and learn, such as workshops on gender-affirming care facilitated for medical students at the Carle Foundation Hospital.
Mission: At Prairie Rivers Network, our mission is to protect water, heal land, and inspire change. Using the creative power of science, law, and collective action, we protect and restore our rivers, return healthy soils and diverse wildlife to our lands, and transform how we care for the earth and for each other.
Project Proposal: Protect the Middle Fork of the Vermilion River
Just as our rivers and streams connect our communities, Prairie Rivers Network (PRN) works to connect and activate people to protect water, heal land, and inspire change. PRN seeks funding to scale our community outreach efforts in our multi-year push to ensure the safe removal of the coal ash that remains along the banks of the Middle Fork of the Vermilion River. The river is Illinois’ only federally designated National Scenic River; more importantly, it's one of the largest natural areas connected via bike trail and available to the thousands of Common Ground owners in the region. This project will help restore this local treasure to its full potential, support critical habitat for wildlife, and help build and activate the next generation of clean water activists in our community.
The site, located right next to Kickapoo State Park, is home to a former coal-burning power plant operated by Dynegy (now owned by Vistra Energy) for more than 50 years before closing in 2011. The plant’s closure left behind an estimated 3 million cubic yards of coal ash, including arsenic, chromium, lead, and other toxins, in its unlined impoundments next to the Middle Fork. Following a lawsuit settlement, Dynegy submitted plans to remove the coal ash from the river’s banks. More than four years later, those plans still have not been approved by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, leaving the river and our communities at risk.
PRN and partners have been working to protect the Middle Fork for decades, but there is a new urgency to act now. The site's aging infrastructure, mixed with extreme weather from climate change, underscores the need to safely remove the coal ash from the floodplain and build climate resilience for future flood events. Just weeks ago, Dynegy’s erosion monitoring revealed that the river bank requires armoring to prevent more dangerous erosion and avoid a catastrophic breach. A week after the report was issued, torrential rainfall in the river basin led to the third-highest flood on record for the Middle Fork. One thing is clear: until the coal ash is removed, the Middle Fork of the Vermilion River, and all who rely on it, remain at risk.
The Round Up For Good program would help the PRN team expand public understanding of this issue and mobilize the community to generate action. Despite some recent media coverage on these threats, PRN and partners believe that a wider, sustained communications strategy, including local storytellers and distributed educational materials, are needed to help people understand the true scale of what’s at stake. Funding would support broader communications about how coal ash endangers the Middle Fork and wildlife, and would build pressure on the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to act immediately.
Once the permit is issued by IEPA the community will have a chance to respond. PRN staff will provide technical expertise and ensure the community, including those living in the floodplain and further downstream, have a voice in the permitting process. PRN has provided these tools, training, and resources for other communities across the state implementing our new coal ash rules, but these efforts will help local activists – including co-op members – protect one of our most valued natural places here in Central Illinois.
Finally, funding from Round Up for Good would help re-energize community engagement and build the next generation of clean water champions. Our work continues to build a network of activistists willing to lend their time, expertise, financial support and voices to make lasting change. Protecting the Middle Fork is an ongoing battle, one that PRN has been working at for decades, and with this community-funded support we will continue to champion it forever.
Mission: We provide compassionate, comprehensive support to those affected by sexual trauma. We care for our communities through prevention education programs that promote consent.
Project Proposal: Sexual violence prevention services conducted by RACES are provided to residents of Champaign County aged three and older at no cost. RACES uses a comprehensive, multi-level, evidence-informed strategy to provide programming to students, parents, teachers, and other community members. Age-appropriate programming is offered to all residents of Champaign County. Special attention is given to ensuring the inclusion of historically underserved and marginalized communities, including racial and ethnic minorities, rural residents, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and individuals with disabilities.
RACES is committed to serving all members of the community and the agency recognizes that individuals who are racial and ethnic minorities and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community are at higher risk of sexual victimization and may face unique barriers to receiving services. Agency curricula are intentionally designed to be inclusive of minority populations and programming is offered to all schools in Champaign County, including those with high proportions of students of color. RACES also participates in events that focus on minority populations, including CU Pride Fest and minority-specific health fairs.
RACES’ staff travel to all parts of Champaign County where services are requested and see reaching rural residents as equally important to reaching residents in more urban settings. Agency staff work hard to meet request for programs, regardless of their distance from the agency's office in Urbana. RACES has long-standing relationships in schools that serve rural residents, including Heritage High School in Broadlands and Gifford Elementary School. To further increase access for rural schools, RACES is working on developing supplemental, virtual programming that can be offered asynchronously. In addition to the benefits students experience from receiving this programming, RACES recognizes that the Prevention Education program is often the first point of contact people have with any of the agency’s services. This further increases the importance of reaching rural areas that might otherwise be unaware of the therapy, crisis intervention, and advocacy services available at no cost through RACES.
The most common locations for RACES prevention programming are K-12 schools. All school-based programs are multi-session and fulfill Erin’s Law (mandates sexual violence prevention programming) and National Sexuality Education Standards. Programs are designed to allow participants to choose how they engage with these topics, including the option to step out as needed. Sessions are structured to increase safety and to allow for an immediate response to a child, if they disclose that they have been abused. Students are also taught skills to empower them to identify trusted adults and other resources.
RACES educational programming has a strong focus on increasing empathy for survivors of sexual violence and reducing stigma. This training can have an impact on interacting with others beyond survivors of sexual violence. Programming also centers the intersection of sexual violence and other forms of violence. The CDC recognizes the importance of these connections, published in their brief, Connecting the Dots: An Overview of the Links Among Multiple Forms of Violence (https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/183359).
As with most education initiatives, the ultimate desired outcome is to change behaviors and attitudes for a lifetime; we seek to reduce the overall rates of sexual violence and to create more appropriate and sensitive societal response to survivors of sexual violence. RACES staff provided programming to nearly 4,400 students in Champaign County during the 2025-2026 school year. Results from the previous school year's assessments, given pre-visit and post-visit (four sessions), show that 52% of students decreased their acceptance of risk factors and and 25% increased their knowledge and acceptance of preventive factors, both of which indicate positive societal change.
RACES is the only agency in the county that provides sexual violence prevention education, thanks in part to the support from a Round Up for Good Grant. RACES has been fortunate to receive these grants for multiple years, and this has allowed us to increase our staff capacity to be able to reach more students in our community. If selected, funds will continue to be used to cover staff compensation and related expenses, which will allow RACES to maintain its current high level of service provision at no cost to local schools or organizations.
Mission: Making healthy food accessible for all by nurturing productive land and cultivating diverse, inclusive communities.
Project Proposal: Recently, Sola Gratia Farm took on management of the CU Farm to School Program, as budgetary constraints risked its shutdown. The CU Farm to School Program aims to help K-12 students across our community connect with our agricultural community and build lifelong healthy habits through gardening opportunities, real-world connections, and bringing local food to school meals and snacks. We are passionate about young people engaging with their community, understanding where their food comes from, and leading active, healthy lives. Funding for the CU Farm to School Program (through Sola Gratia Farm) will support projects such as increased field trip and classroom visit opportunities for students with Sola Gratia Farm Educators and expansion of the Curriculum Kit check-out program to bring ag and nutrition into every classroom.
Mission: To provide free books to people incarcerated in Illinois and foster local education about prisons and the carceral system.
Project Proposal: B2P is aligned with several of the Ends of the Common Ground Food Coop. As a volunteer run organization, we are committed to collective governance and inclusivity, and we have a significant impact on the community that volunteers. B2P support the resilience of the communities of the families and loved ones of incarcerated people who receive them because the books that are sent in have a ripple effect. The books are also shared and discussed by people on the inside. It is worth mentioning as well that a common request from prisoners is books on basic nutrition and gardening.
We share a goal of impacting the local community by also serving people detained in our county jail. Each week, an average of 50 people visit our small lending library in the Jail, which is staffed by volunteers. B2P is also the primary source of books for the Champaign County Youth Detention Center library.
Prisoners who receive our materials describe our service as a light in the darkness, one of the only reliable means of information, critical to an increase in their math and reading proficiency, the reason they developed a “reading habit,” a means to education, essential to passing the GED exam, access to a larger world, a catalyst to deeper self-understanding. Most significantly, our shipments remind them of their humanity, and that not everyone on the outside has given up on them. This gives hope and a reason to persevere.
B2P has made a difference in the lives of those who volunteer here. Reading letters from those people in custody humanizes prisoners and challenges the stereotypes that abound about who is locked up in our prisons. Volunteers have testified that their experience at B2P has changed their lives by providing them with the opportunity to make a real difference with their time and by collaborating locally with people from diverse backgrounds and walks of life.
Currently, B2P faces three financial challenges, one of which a Round Up award would help us address.
First, shipping is one of our largest expenditures. Currently we can ship to each prisoner on average every three to four months. We long to make this rate steady at two and a half to three months because we continue to hear from prisoners that books are a lifeline for them. A grant would allow us to maintain and possibly increase the rate, so that a prisoner could look forward to getting our books four to five times each year, instead of three.
Second, the most requested book by incarcerated people nationwide is the English dictionary. B2P has raised money to purchase dictionaries in bulk but even so, have never been able to meet demand. Our budget constraints cause us to ration a prisoner to one dictionary every five years. Paperback dictionaries consulted frequently quickly fall apart long before 5 years as prisoners tell us. With a Round Up grant, we would aim to increase our bulk purchase to be able to send dictionaries every three years to prisoners who request them.
Lastly, IDOC continues to be unreasonably suspicious of the marks of a used book, interpreting minor stains, highlighter, yellowing pages as possible signs of contraband. B2P was set up to rely on donations of gently used books but in recent years, especially since IDOC’s ban on physical mail for prisoners in 2025, we have had to struggle with the frustration of having the book a prisoner requests, but unable to send it because of minor blemishes. A grant would allow B2P to purchase new to like-new high-demand books to meet reasonable requests from people in custody, such as books on the trades, basic nutrition, World Almanacs, financial literacy.
At B2P we know that access to learning is the number one factor determining whether people return to prison, yet access to education remains deeply restricted. UC Books to Prisoners fills this gap by ensuring that learning is possible even when institutions fail to provide it. But more importantly, we believe that access to information is a human right.
In one of three ways, a grant from Common Ground’s Round Up for Good program would be used to increase our provision of humane services to our neighbors behind bars, most of whom will be coming home someday.
Thank you for your consideration and for the nourishment you provide this community.