Healing Illinois Grant Awarded to Roots Unbound
The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a Healing Illinois grant from the FieldFoundation and the Illinois Department of Human Services for our project, RootsUnbound: Stories of Removal, Identity, and Return. In an exceptionally competitive funding cycle with 695 applications submitted statewide, only 193 projects were selected, and Roots Unbound is among just 25 initiatives supported across Illinois.
Roots Unbound is an adoption-of-color led initiative that centers the voices of adopted and fostered adults with histories of displacement from families of origin—a community often excluded from racial healing efforts. Through immersive narrative workshops, creative practice labs, and public arts showcases, the project transforms lived experience into collective healing while building a restorative, living archive of adoptee and foster alumni stories.
Developed in collaboration with CSRPC Faculty Director Gina Samuels’s Black Adoption Project, the initiative is housed at CSRPC and advances the Center’s commitment to scholarship, art, and community-engaged, anti-racist praxis.
The project is produced in partnership with Gabriel Gutierrez, adult adoptee and founder of MoFundamentals, the only adoptee- and foster youth–led hip hop dance program in the United States. Grounded in trauma-informed and resilience-centered street dance and arts practices, MoFundamentals creates spaces for healing, truth-telling, and collective care within the foster and adoptee community. Both Dr. Samuels and Mr. Gutierrez were adopted through Cook County Department ofChildren and Family Services (DCFS), grounding this collaboration in shared lived experience and deep community accountability.
This award celebrates CSRPC’s leadership in arts-based racial healing and affirms our ongoing commitment to community-led, liberatory knowledge work.
Read more about Black Adoption Project.
Apply to Roots Unbound workshop.
Roots Unbound Application
It All Begins Here
What is Roots Unbound?
Roots Unbound is a statewide, reparative storytelling and arts-based racial healing initiative funded by Healing Illinois, The Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, and The Black Adoption Project. It is for adults with lived experience of removal from their birth parents—including through foster care, adoption, kinship care, guardianship, and other forms of family separation. The initiative supports adults in reclaiming lost, fragmented, or inaccessible information about their origins and exercising agency to create their own pathways of healing, identity, and belonging.
All accepted participants will be paid 100.00 for completing the workshop. Workshops and creative materials will lead to a community event in June, in which participants may have an option to also participate.
What will we do in the workshops?
These workshops are not research, they are also not formal therapy. They are meant to be informal, fun and collectively caring opportunities to be in a diverse community with other people who share these experiences of family. We center eachother as active placemakers—people who author our own stories, define kinship on our own terms, and build families and communities of choice. Through guided storytelling, creative practice, and collective witnessing, participants engage stories of both loss & gain, disrupted lineage while cultivating new spaces that are relational, cultural, geographic, or imagined.
What to expect in the workshop:
• 4 Hour Workshops: Discussion + Creative practice labs (writing, poetry, art or movement)
• Optional public showcase and digital archive (your work may be selected to be part of a statewide event and/or living digital archive)
• Trauma-informed, community-centered facilitation
• No artistic, writing, or dance experience required
Who It’s For?
• Adults (18+) with lived experience of removal from home/biological parent
• Illinois residents
• Individuals seeking racial healing, connection, and community
We’re Hiring: Multimedia and Marketing Intern
It All Begins Here
For questions, please email Tierra Kilpatrick at kilpatr3@uchicago.edu.
CSRPC Multimedia and Marketing Intern
Federal Work Study Students Preferred!
(Undergraduate/Graduate Position): Winter 2026-Spring 2026
10-15 hours/week
The CSRPC is currently looking for a multimedia and marketing assistant for the 2026 school year. Reporting to the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC), and supported by the Program Administrator of CSRPC, this student will support the Program Administrator with various media projects, outreach and publicity while providing general administrative support during the 2026 academic year.
The ideal candidate will be responsible for maintaining the social media presence of the CSRPC Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook pages. The student will support the Program Administrator with various programmatic communications and amplify the work of center across multiple platforms. The student must have some technical skills with running zoom meetings and be open to providing tech support for afternoon and evening events. The ideal candidate will have a creative background. We encourage the student to be open to sharing ideas and processes to improve our current systems. This position’s responsibilities may be fulfilled from Chicago or remotely, as circumstances permit. Occasional attendance at off campus Center events is also required.
Responsibilities include:
Videotape Center events on and off-campus
Edit video and prepare for online distribution
Manage & update the Center's YouTube and/or Vimeo presence
Assist with updates to media content on the Center's website and social media outlets
Assist with event publicity by distributing flyers & posters physically & virtually
Applications are being accepted via GRADGargoyle, search job ID: 933898 Applicants can also apply through Handshake, search job ID: 10648441. If you have difficulty accessing the application, search "multimedia and marketing assistant" through the respective websites.