Your donation brings healing home.

In 2025, we opened the FRO Community Center in Bronzeville built specifically for the healing of women and their families. It is the first permanent home for our BLOOM Model, a proven violence prevention framework delivering free therapy, case management, education, and wraparound support to women caregivers and families on the South Side of Chicago.

After seven years of building, we are ready to spread BLOOM through Chicago and beyond. Your Juneteenth donation powers daily programming, clinical services, and the staff who make transformation possible so that healing through BLOOM becomes the movement it is destined to be.

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Photo by Ash Lane for The TRiiBE®

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With your donation, we’ll...

Expand our hours to be open daily, so families face fewer time restrictions when seeking the care they need.
Hire dedicated staff to run wellness programming, therapy, and resource navigation at our center.
Provide critical support like transportation and child care that help cohort members graduate with ease.
Increase the number of women & families we serve, while delivering deeper, longer-term care to reduce harm exposure.

Your donation supports the wellness of Black women and their families.

Black moms and caretakers are a key to solving the gun violence epidemic we’re experiencing, but their role as community leaders is being ignored. At the FRO, we pour into Black women, because they are the primary caregivers of the population most accused of and most impacted by firearm homicide: Black youth.

The BLOOM Model is an evidence-informed framework for transforming the lives of women caregivers, and through them, their families and communities. BLOOM delivers free therapy, case management, education, and wraparound wellness to women navigating the impacts of gun violence on the South Side of Chicago.

Your pledge fuels this model. It makes the FRO Community Center the daily home the thousands of families we serve have always deserved. With your investment, Chicago will be safe and healthy for all.

Our Impact: Evidence-Informed Wellness Programs

Through a research partnership with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions, we know that participants experience statistically significant increases in hope, energy, and mood levels after engaging in our BLOOM programs.

This impact is seen in moms like Ana, a 2023 Cohort graduate who shared, “BLOOM transformed my approach to wellness. I’m actively seeking different modes to heal and become a better mother.”

BLOOM Cohort participants also leave the program completing a SMART goal. Graduates have been able to fulfill lifelong dreams like submitting a children's book manuscript to a publisher, applying to an artistic representation agency, and creating a media platform. With an 84% graduation rate, alumni have leveraged the Professional and Leadership Development certificates they gain into opportunities like securing new jobs, exploring trades, going back to school, and entrepreneurship — acts that improve their quality of life. At BLOOM, women emerge as dreamers and builders. Families reach new horizons.

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Why should I pledge my PTO?

Your pledge is a pledge for safe, abundant, and liberated families.

We are working to restore Black families to the gardens they are destined to be, and we need allies in our fight.

This repair requires all of us, because gun violence affects all of us.

Gun violence is a legacy of enslavement that is still affecting our communities over 160 years after it was outlawed. Due to the legacy of enslavement, Black Americans have been historically denied rest and wellness; Black Americans are less likely to have time and access to leisure.

Supporting the restoration of Black families is one of the most significant ways to honor Juneteenth, in addition to lifting up the advocacy of Black women.

Most notably, Dr. Opal Lee of Marshall, Texas.

Since 2016, Dr. Opal Lee has marched to have the legacies and liberation of enslaved Black people honored nationwide through the recognition of Juneteenth. Though the Emancipation Proclamation was passed in 1863, it was only implemented with the passage of the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865, legally freeing enslaved Black people. And even after this passage, in some Southern states, Black people were still in bondage.

Juneteenth marks the true end of chattel slavery in America, which came with the freedom of over 250,000 enslaved people in Galveston Bay, Texas, on June 19, 1865.

And if we really want to get into it—the very celebration of this holiday makes it clear that for Black people in this country, true freedom has always been precarious.

What does it mean to be legally free but societally, culturally, and systemically subjected? To be able to buy a home, but be denied a housing loan because of the color of your skin; to be able to access welfare services, but be demoralized for it; to be able to vote, but be intimidated, harmed, and blocked from turning in a ballot; to be told to heal, but be given no resources to do so?

Our violence prevention programs create an infrastructure of care that has long been denied to Black communities and families.

Your pledge to donate your paid time off for Juneteenth sows a seed in our mission.

This is how we BLOOM.

Sources: Oprah Daily and National Museum of African American History and Culture

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