The Power of Community Champions: Income Advance Grows to Chicago

For about a year, the Rhino Foods Foundation team has been working with the Corporate Coalition of Chicago and Woodstock Institute to bring the Income Advance Program to Chicago.

The Corporate Coalition of Chicago came to us already on a mission: find a small dollar benefit for their members and for the wider Chicago area. Working with Woodstock Institute, they had explored several options, but each one fell short on long term impact. Access was there. Deeper impact wasn't. Then they found the Income Advance Program’s and our Gold Standard. What set it apart was that it didn't stop at short term access. It also helps people build emergency savings, improve their credit scores, and develop a safe, trusting relationship with a bank. Once they saw that, the question shifted from whether to move forward to how.

The first step in bringing the program to a new region is finding a lender willing to build it out. In Chicago, that lender is Great Lakes Credit Union, an institution with a long standing commitment to economic and community development in the area. Great Lakes has been the backbone of initiatives across Chicago focused on trust and equity, and they said yes early. Over the past eight months they built out the program from the ground up and launched it in April 2026. Now that it's live, they're beginning to pilot the program with a couple of employers.

Working with the team in Chicago reinforced something we've also seen while growing the program in other markets: community champions are key to getting a program off the ground. They know the needs of the community, hold relationships with local stakeholders, and open doors so the program gets designed with intention rather than dropped in from outside. Rhino Foods Foundation is a small team, and we lean on champions like the Corporate Coalition of Chicago and Woodstock Institute to keep the program growing so more people can access safe, equitable credit and build long term financial stability. That collective impact approach is what's carrying Income Advance toward reaching the greater Chicago workforce, built specifically around what folks in Chicago actually need.

If you're reading this and want to bring the program to your own community or workplace, reach out. We'd love to work with you.