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.
