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The Alliance 98

@thealliance98

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🔌Empowering young adults with skills, experiences, and networks to obtain meaningful careers. 🌐
@grounded.studio_
@momentsmedia____
@athl.club98

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🎨 Cuadra De Colores is coming! ✨ We’re celebrating creativity, local artists, and the beauty of our community with a FREE art festival packed with art vendors, live music & performances, live painting, a paint-by-number mural, free food, and a showcase of entries from the “Heal the Hood” @healthehood_lv sticker contest, all in one block! 🙌🏽 Come out and experience a day where art meets culture meets community. Everyone is welcome! 🤎

The festival will feature:
🎨 Art vendors
🎵 Live music & performances curated by @ruidosa.artcollective
🖌️ Live painting
🧩 Paint-by-number mural by @proofstudioschi : City Script Series
🍽️ Free food
🏆 “Heal the Hood” sticker contest showcase
🛹Free skateboard customization by @work26skateshop

Vendor form is live, link in TA98’s & Grounded Studio’s bio‼️

Special thank you to our partners: @chicagodcase , @villapalooza , @mychimyfuture

#CuadraDeColores #TA98 #ChicagoArt #Community #GroundedStudio taken in Little Village, Chicago by @thealliance98

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23 days ago

This Saturday! @ruidosa.artcollective has curated the music and performances for our Cuadra De Colores Art Fest!🎶🎨

We’re bringing you a mix of genres, from house music and cumbia to rock. There’s a little bit of everything for everyone to enjoy. Come celebrate art, music, and community with us!

RSVP link in our bio, we hope you all can join us!

Special thanks to @villapalooza for helping with audio and sound for the day!⭐️

Music by:
@erick_too_dope
@nauvoo_official
@cucucumbiaa
@arma_blancaoficial
@charlydechicago taken in Little Village, Chicago by @thealliance98

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5 days ago

We’re excited to welcome these vendors to our “Cuadra de Colores” Art Fest! 🎨

Art, jewelry, ceramics, crocheted goods, and so much more will be available for sale.Stop by this Saturday to shop and support these talented creatives!🛒

Henna by @hennaisland2023 will be available starting at 2pm!

Vendors:
@01chocoflan
@azul_accessoriess
@claudiarts
@diamond_doodle_
@elmetro.noviene and friends
@gabymakesart
@hennaisland2023
@indaynamaganda
@latienditadelachinita
@morphlverart
@red_cave_
@xocololi taken in Little Village, Chicago by @thealliance98

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2 days ago

⚽️⭐️Join us for Fútbol Fiesta on July 29th, 2026!⚽️⭐️

Enjoy a FREE EVENT with food from Raising Canes, pick up games, bracelet making, ball decorating, TWO @lollapalooza 4 DAY PASS Giveaway, and much more!!

📍:2524 S. Central Park Ave. Chicago IL, 60623
🗓️: July 29th, 2026
⏰: 5:00-8:00 PM

!! For youth ages 13-24 !!

*RSVP LINK IN TA98’S BIO*

Thank you to our supporters: @mychimyfuture + @chifamsupport taken in Chicago, Illinois by @thealliance98

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3 days ago

We’re excited to be hosting this year’s “Healing the Hood” Sticker Contest submissions during our Cuadra De Colores Art Fest! 🖼️

This year, more than 15 local artists with ties to Little Village submitted their designs, and we’re proud to showcase their incredible work.

Brought to you by @healthehood_lv & @enlace.chicago

Stop by, check out the artwork, and grab a free sticker featuring the winning designs while supplies last! 🎉 taken in Little Village, Chicago by @thealliance98

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8 days ago

@work26skateshop will be joining us our “Cuadra De Colores” Art Fest🎨

Free blank skateboard decks will be available for customization. Trucks, wheels, bearings, etc will be available for sale to complete your skateboard set up. We’ll have ramps and ledges on site for people to skate!🛹

We recommend coming early to secure a blank skateboard deck as quantities are limited!

📆: July 25, 20226
⏰: 12-4pm
📍: 3934 W. 26th st

We hope you all can join us! taken in Little Village, Chicago by @thealliance98

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10 days ago

Join us for Un Verano Con Ritmo this Thursday! ❤️‍🔥

Enjoyer a FREE EVENT filled with live music by @losdelacima.official , tacos from @don_pepe_little_village , and much more!!⭐️

✨Bring your own Boots! For the dance tournament!!
✨Lotería
✨Mini Canvass Painting
✨Slime Making
✨Raffles

📍: 3934 W. 26th St, Chicago IL 60623
🗓️: July 16th, 2026
⏰: 5:00-8:00 PM

‼️For youth ages 13-24‼️

*RSVP LINK IN TA98’S BIO*

Thank you to our supporters: @mychimyfuture + @chifamsupport

Flier Designed by: Madison Cervantes taken in Chicago, Illinois by @thealliance98

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11 days ago

For our archives: Amy Ninette Roman

Little Village was always home. Even when life kept pulling her away from it.

West Lawn came first. Then Iowa. Then her parents went their separate ways. Somehow, the road always led back to her grandparents’ house. Back to the block that never stopped feeling like hers.

By seventh grade she had already grown up faster than most. The constant change shaped her in ways that took years to understand — quietly searching for somewhere to belong while holding it all together for everyone else.

What got her through wasn’t a system. It was people.

Ms. Levine, Ms. Garcia, and Ruby Gomez. People who chose to show up when the system didn’t.

Then a friend told her about TA98. She showed up.

It changed everything.

Community, she’ll tell you, is everything. Because when she needed somebody most, her community showed up.

TA98 gave her space to stop surviving and start growing. Today she is the Community Programs Manager at The Alliance 98. Amy ensures every young person she serves feels seen, validated, and reminded that they are enough.

The moment it came full circle was when TA98 and Grounded Studio moved into their storefront on 26th Street. All the hard work. All the late nights. It had all been worth it.

Now she’s the one showing up.

This is Amy Roman. Little Village made. Built on love. Built to last.

Portrait shot and edited by: @momentsmedia____ x @_pedrosvision23 taken in Chicago, Illinois by @thealliance98

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13 days ago

For Our Archives: Pedro Ramirez Medina

In 2009, Little Village was still a neighborhood the rest of Chicago looked past. A community full of culture, full of color, full of people working twice as hard for half the recognition.

That same year, a 13-year-old kid on the block watched his household change overnight. His family became a single-parent home, and just like that, life asked more of him than it should have asked of any kid his age.

His name is Pedro Ramirez Medina.

A year later, he found a camera. Not a professional one. Just his phone. But something happened when he looked through that lens. All the weight he was carrying, the confusion, the grief, the pressure of growing up too soon had somewhere to go. Photography didn’t just give Pedro an outlet. It gave him a language.

For years, he kept it close but kept it careful. He never wanted it to become work. Because when something saves your life, you protect it.

Then in his junior year of high school, a mentor asked him a simple question.

What do you want to do after graduation?

For the first time, Pedro said it out loud. Photography.

That conversation changed everything. His mentor connected him with Jon at Alchemy Chicago. At 16, Pedro earned an internship. Every weekend, he was editing, learning, building, and turning a gift into a craft and a craft into a career.

Today, Pedro Ramirez Medina is the Head of Content at TA98. His lens has captured moments for Joe Freshgoods, Offset, Sentrock, the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago Stars, Derrick Rose, Closed Sessions, and 9th Wonder — just to name a few.

But ask him and he’ll tell you it’s simpler than any name on that list.

He’s shooting for the kid he used to be. So the next generation of Little Village knows that a phone, a vision, and the will to keep going is enough to build something real.

Little Village born. Little Village rooted. This is Pedro.

Portrait shot by: @momentsmedia____ x @byaraceliramirez

Portrait edited by: @momentsmedia____ x @_pedrosvision23 taken in Chicago, Illinois by @thealliance98

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15 days ago

For Our Archives: Araceli Ramirez

Before there was a story to tell, there was 26th and Drake where Ramirez’s grandparents planted the family’s roots in Little Village.

Growing up in a single-parent household, she found family in unexpected places. Aunts, uncles, neighbors, caregivers across different corners of the city who chose to show up for a kid who often felt out of place. They didn’t have to. They did anyway.

That’s what community looked like to her before she had a word for it.

She was always drawn to stories. The ones told around the kitchen table, the ones she found in books. So she studied journalism at Columbia College Chicago, learning how to listen before she learned how to write.

After graduation, TA98 was just beginning to tell its own story, a newsletter, and the early seeds of what would become @ourmomentumm . Since July 2025, she’s served as Co-Founder and Manager of that platform, telling the stories of Little Village and beyond: the creativity, the resilience, the brilliance that was always there.

Her hope is simple: that everyone who walks through TA98’s doors leaves knowing someone believes in them.

Some people write history. She’s making sure Little Village gets to write its own.

Portrait shot and edited by: @momentsmedia____ x @_pedrosvision23 taken in Chicago, Illinois by @thealliance98

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16 days ago

For our archives: Emmanuel Gomez

In Little Village, the walls have always had something to say.

Long before the murals. Long before the studio. A kid named Emmanuel was watching. Taking it all in. The grief. The struggle. The beauty hidden underneath it all.

He found his voice the day he picked up a spray can. It wasn’t just art. It was an escape. A way to make sense of everything he was seeing around him. But to grow that voice, Emmanuel had to leave. Every time he needed creative resources, every time he needed space to create, he had to travel outside the neighborhood he loved.

He never forgot that feeling.

Emmanuel spent years moving through different spaces, chasing his craft, until he found his mentor Sentrock. Working alongside him in studios, on murals, on projects that opened his eyes to a whole new world. He wasn’t just an artist anymore. He was building something.

Then TA98 came knocking with one simple question.

“What do you want to see in the neighborhood?”

His answer never wavered. A creative space. Right here. For the artists who, like him, never should have had to leave to find their voice.

In February 2024, @grounded.studio_ was born.

A space offering workshops, open studio hours, showcase opportunities, and contract work — everything Emmanuel once had to seek elsewhere, now rooted right in Little Village. The community showed up. Local artists praised it. And Emmanuel kept going.

Through his art and through Grounded Studio, Emmanuel is building what he needed as a young person. A place where people feel safe, heard, and supported. Where the next generation of Little Village artists doesn’t have to travel far to find their voice.

Because the walls here have always had something to say.

Now, they finally have a home.

This is Grounded Studio. This is TA98. Chicago built. Built to upset the setup.

Portrait photo shot and edited by: @momentsmedia____ x @_pedrosvision23 taken in Chicago, Illinois by @thealliance98

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17 days ago

For Our Archives: Jackie Covarrubias

West Lawn raised her. The second child of four. Grew up in a household held together by a mother and grandparents who understood that love and sacrifice were the same thing.

Jackie grew up with big dreams and wasn’t afraid to change them. She aspired to be a veterinarian, teacher and an astronaut. She didn’t just want a career, she wanted to create change.

By her senior year of high school, she had narrowed it down. Math teacher. Clean, decided, certain. She packed her bags and headed to the University of Notre Dame to make it happen.

It only took a few weeks for life to redirect her. The math was never the point. The youth were.

She graduated with a major in Sociology, a supplemental major in Latino Studies, and a minor in Education, Schooling, and Society. Then went on to earn her Master of Arts in Teaching from National Louis University. Not because it was the easy path, but because she couldn’t ignore what she was built for.

Since 2014, Jackie has shown up for young people and communities in Little Village, schools and organizations. Wherever youth needed someone in their corner.

She’s not just filling a role. She’s filling a gap she once saw from the other side.

Her mission is simple: help young people see what they’re capable of, and then show them how to balance it all — school, work, and life. Without losing themselves in the process.

That’s the work. that’s Jackie, and Little Village is better with community leaders like her.

Portrait photo shot and edited by: @momentsmedia____ x @_pedrosvision23 taken in Chicago, Illinois by @thealliance98

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18 days ago