The Resurrection Project, a Pilsen-based nonprofit, was announced as a finalist in Capital One’s $25 million Scaling Pathways to Homeownership initiative that drew 500 applicants from across the country.Resurrection and nine other finalists will each receive $200,000, plus technical assistance, to strengthen their proposals on how to tackle the nation's affordable housing crisis, Capital One said in a news release last week. Resurrection was the only Illinois finalist.The 10 organizations will have three months to work on their proposals, then five will be selected in spring 2027. Each of those five will receive $4.6 million to bring their solutions to life.Capital One launched Scaling Pathways to Homeownership in October 2025, in partnership with the Chicago nonprofit Lever for Change. The $25 million program challenged applicants to think of innovative solutions to the country's affordable housing crisis. The banking company suggested housing counseling, consumer education and for-sale housing production at scale as the building blocks for submissions.Resurrection’s proposal is to expand its Full Circle Homes initiative statewide. The program now serves residents in the southwest Chicago area and helps them with the home-buying process, from coaching and lending to supportive services that help clients stay in their homes. “We know that these barriers are real, and yet we are helping families successfully purchase a home,” said Kristen Komara, Resurrection’s vice president of Full Circle Homes. “We know that what we're doing already is working, and so we saw this opportunity from Capital One to take our model and what we know helps an individual and families become a successful homeowner and scale that beyond the geographies where we work.”Komara said Chicagoans are being inundated with messages that home ownership is out of reach, but their program has helped more than 250 families buy a home in the last year and a half. If selected by Capital One, Resurrection would expand Full Circle Homes with the help of partner organizations. It also wants to develop a Full Circle Homes mobile app that would help potential buyers build mortgage readiness skills, among other services.“We feel like a big need for the communities that we serve is just having a very engaging, client-friendly, client-facing technology that can walk someone through the entire process of buying a home,” Komara said. “We have a vision for it to be multilingual, so it's reaching populations that we're not able to currently serve. We definitely see this as a way to make our services and our homeownership model more accessible.”The Scaling Pathways to Homeownership program is part of Capital One’s $265 billion Community Benefits Plan, which turns "innovative ideas into scalable, real-world solutions for low- and moderate-income communities,” Kerone Vatel, Capital One’s senior vice president and head of community finance, impact and investment, said in a news release. The London-based nonprofit consultancy Spring Impact is providing the technical assistance to finalists. The other nine finalists are: Community Redevelopment Agency of Jackson in Tennessee; Four Bands Community Fund in South Dakota; Great Lakes Housing Services in Michigan; Habitat for Humanity NYC and Westchester County in New York; Hope Enterprise Corp. in Mississippi; Mountain Shadow Association in Montana; Self-Help Enterprises in California; Southside Community Development and Housing Corp. in Virginia; and St. Louis Community Foundation in Missouri. Related Rising mortgage rates and home prices sidelining buyers but now is the time to purchase, report says Capital One partners with Chicago nonprofit to fund ideas for affordable housing solutions ...read more read less