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Healthy Demand At Marquette Health Center

11/11/2009, 5:07 PM

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Elizabeth Duffrin

In its first three months, Marquette Elementary School’s new health center attracted twice as many clients as expected. With such high turnout, the center could become self-supporting as early as January, according to staff.

The health center, part of LISC/Chicago's Elev8 program at Marquette and four other middle schools, serves students and their families; eventually, it will serve the wider community.

Eric Young Smith

Parents love it,” said Meridith Casey, the nurse practitioner at the center, which is run by Access Community Health Network. “I think a lot of people are switching over here because they like the care that they’ve gotten, and they like the convenience.”

On July 12, Marquette became the second of Chicago’s five Elev8 school health centers to open with funding from the Atlantic Philanthropies and other grants.

The idea behind Elev8, a national demonstration project, is to show that holistic services for middle school students provided at the school site — from health care, to counseling and mentoring, to academic support and enrichment — can boost their academic achievement and better prepare them for high school.

Principal Paul O’Toole credits Marquette’s health center with helping to increase student attendance in the first months of school. Fewer students are heading home over minor medical complaints, he explained. “Down the road I think it will lead to better achievement,” he added.

Principal Paul O'Toole says the health center has reduced absences and should over time help lead to higher student achievement.

Eric Young Smith

The health centers serve a secondary function, providing needed medical services to families in underserved neighborhoods. While all give first priority for services to middle-school students, they will eventually serve the wider community outside of regular school hours.

Marquette’s center now serves students in grades 6 to 8 and their siblings, and opened to their parents in mid-October. Eventually it will open to the entire Chicago Lawn community.

Accepting a wider client base will allow the health centers to become financially self-supporting within a year. Marquette’s remarkable turnout — 500 clients by mid-October — may allow it to reach that goal in only six months, Access reported.

While Access has opened school health centers before, the enthusiasm greeting the opening of center at Marquette (as well as one at Perspectives Charter School in Auburn Gresham) was unprecedented, said Access administrator Jim Murphy.

The Elev8 health centers hoped to become financially self-supporting within a year, but Marquette's might reach that point within six months.

Eric Young Smith

“In the past, we opened up the school health center the way we opened any other health center,” said Murphy. “We would do a market analysis, connect with governmental officials, make sure it made good business sense for us to be there, and we would hang up a shingle and open up the doors. They opened quietly.”

The Elev8 project was different. Access spent almost two years designing the center with input from parents, school staff and their community partners. Every partner spread the word about the center’s opening. Southwest Organizing Project even sent its HealthCorp volunteer to phone and knock on doors to encourage parents to sign their children up for services.

“By the time we opened up the doors, everyone was excited that we were going to be there,” said Murphy. “The community, the parents, the organizers and the school.”

White House “Urban Czar” Tours Perspectives

11/5/2009, 12:32 PM

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Maureen Kelleher

Perspectives-Calumet Middle School on Oct. 30 hosted a visit from Adolfo Carrión, Jr., director of the White House Office on Urban Affairs, who said he hoped to replicate initiatives like the school's Elev8 program.

In Chicago to address a conference of LISC/Chicago’s New Communities Program, Carrion toured the school, met with a sixth-grade class and visited the school-based health center that’s the centerpiece of LISC’s Elev8 program in five middle schools.

Adolfo Carrion tours Perspectives-Calumet Middle School with (from left) Principal Tamara Davis and Elev8 Director Tenisha Jones.

Eric Young Smith

“He was very impressed with the health center,” said Tenisha Jones, Elev8 director for Perspectives and the Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation (GADC). “I heard him say, ‘We need more of this.’ ”

The visit presented an opportunity to showcase the Elev8 model to a high-level representative of the Obama administration. President Obama created the Office on Urban Affairs last February, with the mission to develop a national strategy to help cities and their surrounding suburbs increase jobs, housing and quality of life.

Carrión, a city planner, grew up in New York City’s Bronx borough and served two terms as borough president before Obama tapped him to lead the new office. As a New Yorker, Carrión is very familiar with the Harlem Children’s Zone, a comprehensive effort to help children and families within a defined geographic area.

The Zone began in 1997 serving a 24-block section of Harlem. By 2007 its network of services, including parenting workshops, charter schools and programs to manage asthma and obesity, were serving 7,400 children and more than 4,100 adults over nearly 100 blocks.

Carrion visits the health center at Perspectives, about which he said: "We need to do more of this."

Eric Young Smith

When Chicago Elev8 partners compared their work to the Harlem effort, “He understood that,” said Carlos Nelson, executive director of GADC.

Representatives from Chicago Elev8 will attend a national conference in New York November 9-10 to learn more about the Harlem Children’s Zone and the Obama administration’s effort to replicate their success through a national Promise Neighborhoods Initiative.

Back in Chicago, Carrión also connected with the young man who took his photo for the Perspectives yearbook, sharing that he too had worked on the yearbook when he was in school.

“It was a really, really good time,” said Principal Tamara Davis. “Not just seeing the school, but visiting the South Side of Chicago and seeing really good and positive things regarding academics and living a healthy lifestyle.”

Marquette Students Interview Clarence Page

11/5/2009, 12:37 PM

Maureen Kelleher

Seven Marquette Elementary School sixth-graders interviewed Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page in a crowded auditorium on October 20 to celebrate the News Literacy Project’s arrival in Chicago.

“What is the difference between facts and truth?” asked Joy Jones, who wants to become a lawyer.

“That’s a terrific question,” Page told her. “It’s something that a lot of people miss.” He went on to cite F.

Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page with Marquette students.

Eric Young Smith

Scott Fitzgerald’s distinction between nonfiction writers, who write facts, and fiction writers, “who write about truth” of the human experience. “Reporters go out and write facts. We columnists try to write truths,” he added. “That’s why we write shorter.”

Through an engaging curriculum and exposure to working reporters, the News Literacy Project helps middle and high school students get at truth by sifting the facts from the spin, marketing and outright hoaxes present in today’s media landscape. (For a more general story about the project, please click here.)

“There is really no other educational approach out there right now to help students know where to find information that is relevant and how to distinguish it from the many opinion-oriented blogs and other biased sources,” said Marquette Principal Paul O’Toole.

Marquette is the first Chicago school to partner with NLP; the event served as a recruiting tool for more local schools and media professionals to get involved. Students from Perspectives Calumet Middle’s budding newspaper had a chance to ask Page about his work during a reception after his talk.

At the same time, representatives from Jet Magazine and the Chicago Tribune met with social studies teacher Courtney Rogers and some of her students. NLP has already recruited an MSNBC producer and reporters from the Tribune and the Associated Press to speak with Rogers’ classes in upcoming weeks.

Media teacher Courtney Rogers

Eric Young Smith

Rogers volunteered to work with NLP for the opportunity to help her students build their research skills. “Middle school is when they start their research,” she said. “They really need to know what is true and what is not. I think it’s really good to start right away.”

Later this year her students will tackle monthly research projects, and the worth of NLP will be put to the test. “They’ll know how to look for sources, which are reliable and which are not.”

Students said NLP activities will help them in social studies and other classes. “It’ll help us figure out some words that are really tough and help us know what’s true and what’s not,” said Oscar Navarette.

Exposure to quality media is also building students’ general knowledge. For example, Navarette learned how vaccines work from a news story about swine flu. “They put a little bit of the swine flu disease inside you” and then your body fights it off so you don’t get sick, he said.

Page was impressed by the passion and determination he saw in the Marquette students. “These kids are wonderful,” he said.

One young man spoke with him afterwards about his desire to be an architect. Page recounted the student’s rationale; “’Math has never been strong in my family. I want to change that.’ How could you not love a kid like that?”

CWFs Step Up in Hard Times

6/30/2009, 4:14 PM

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

With neighborhoods and families struggling through the economic crisis, it’s no surprise that LISC/Chicago’s Centers for Working Families (CWFs) are busier than ever.

“We’re being flooded with people looking for jobs, looking for food stamps, looking to save their house from foreclosure,” said Ricki Lowitz, LISC/Chicago’s senior program officer in charge of the CWF network since its inception in 2004.

LISC/Chicago's Centers for Working Families served more than 8,000 families in 2008.

But the CWFs are also more disciplined than ever, helping families prepare for and find living-wage jobs, craft budgets, set up direct deposits to interest-bearing bank accounts, win loan modifications, apply for government assistance and avoid predatory loans and fee-laden financial services.

The achievements of the 12 CWFs that operated throughout 2008 speak to the value of the program’s integrated menu of services: more than 8,000 families were served; more than 5,000 obtained employment services, with nearly 1,000 placed in jobs and another 1,500 in education and training programs; and nearly 1,000 were helped to apply for benefits or income supports worth over $1 million.

Still, it’s in the people, not the numbers, that the real achievements of the CWFs take form.

Jacqueline Hawkins sees it every day as director of the CWF in South Chicago, where more and more pink slips are leading people to seek employment services.

“We try to ascertain where they’ve been, and what they need to get to where they want to go. Maybe it’s back to school. Maybe it’s re-training. Most often it’s coming up with a budget that fits the new circumstance.”

“And almost always,” said Hawkins, “ it’s about self-esteem … showing someone what they’re worth, or could be worth, so they don’t go away thinking they’re worthless. That much is fundamental.”

State of Renters Here: Insecure

9/17/2009, 12:23 PM

Thursday, September 17, 2009

John McCarron

Too many of Chicago’s 1.3 million renters are reeling from forced evictions due to foreclosures, layoffs, stagnant wages not keeping up with rents, and federal housing policies so hell-bent on home ownership they end up punishing renters.

“It’s pretty bad out there,” began Joy Aruguete, executive director of Bickerdike Redevelopment Corp., in her wrap-up to some 200 housing experts and activists gathered for a “State of Renters” conference Sept. 15 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

"It's pretty bad out there," said Joy Aruguete, executive director of Bickerdike Redevelopment Corp., summarizing the "State of Renters" in Chicago.

John McCarron

“There have to be more resources allocated to rental housing,” said Aruguete, whose agency is one of the most active local lead partners in LISC/Chicago’s New Communities Program. “Renters continue to get squeezed into worse and worse situations, worse housing, worse neighborhoods.”

She said Bickerdike recently advertised the availability of new affordable apartments and, over a five-day period, more than 5,000 people picked up applications.

The Big Squeeze

The centerpiece of the conference, sponsored by the Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) with support from LISC’s NCP and others, was a data-filled study tracing rental conditions here over the past 20 years. Some of its key findings were that:

· Though rental units still outnumber owner-occupied dwellings, between 1990 and 2005 the city lost more than 125,000 affordable rental units.

· Demolition of CHA high-rises, condo conversions and abandonment of larger walk-ups in close-in neighborhoods are combining to disperse renters to far Southwest and Northwest Side neighborhoods more accommodating to owners than renters.

· The rent burden on family budgets continues to outpace both wages and inflation. Between 2000 and 2007, the percent of households spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent grew from 40 percent to 53 percent, while the percent spending more than half their income on rent grew from 20 percent to 30 percent.

· Calls to MTO’s hotline reflect a surge in displacements due to foreclosure, a problem compounded by the fact that foreclosed owners are crowding into the ranks of families searching for affordable apartments.

“Chicago is mired in a foreclosure and affordability crisis,” said MTO executive director John Bartlett, arguing that conditions here and across urban America reflect national policies skewed against renters.

Level that bias

“The Bush administration’s solo strategy pushing homeownership has not and will not work,” Bartlett said. “President Obama needs to move to a more balanced policy. That’s why we’re trying to get the state of renters onto the national agenda.”

Sheila Crowley, president of the Washington-based National Low Income Housing Coalition, said federal policies favor homeowners at the expense of renters.

John McCarron

But shifting federal resources toward rental—perhaps with new or increased rent subsidies, or with individual tax credits—won’t be easy if they are to be funded by cutting incentives for homeownership.

Sheila Crowley, president of the Washington-based National Low Income Housing Coalition, indicated such a tradeoff may be inevitable because the U.S. is subsidizing homeowners “at the expense” of rental housing. Total tax breaks for U.S. homeowners have been estimated at $150 billion per year, roughly three times federal spending on various rental subsidies.

Crowley singled out the deductibility of mortgage interest from one’s taxable income, along with generous capital gains treatment of home sales proceeds, as policies that most favor the wealthy, and “encourage people to get bigger houses with bigger mortgages.”

“How many bathrooms do you really need?” Crowley asked, suggesting some wealthier Americans might consider “right-sizing” their mega-houses.

However the pocketbook politics play out, Bickerdike’s Joy Aruguete summed up the concern of many in NCP with her wrap-up: “If people don’t have decent housing, there’s no way they can participate in the vitality of their communities. We need to organize, organize, organize; and to advocate, advocate, advocate.”

More information: John Bartlett, MTO, 773-292-4980 x226.

Albany Park Ripe for New Business, Study Says

7/14/2009, 2:38 PM

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Elizabeth Duffrin

Despite the turbulent economy, the time is ripe for business expansion in Albany Park and Mayfair on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

That was the surprising finding of a recent analysis by LISC MetroEdge, a non-profit firm that uncovers market potential in under-served neighborhoods.

Liz Griffiths, executive director of the Albany Park Chamber of Commerce, stands above the north branch of the Chicago River, which forms the neighborhood's eastern boundary.

Gordon Walek

The buying power in Mayfair and Albany Park far exceeds the local retail supply, the study found. Businesses often overlook urban markets, particularly those viewed as marginal, explained Helen Dunlap, a senior consultant with LISC/MetroEdge, who co-authored the study.

But Albany Park’s down-in-the heels image is decades out of date, she observed. In fact, nearly half of households in the diverse and densely populated community are middle- to upper-class.

“This is not an area where you’re seeing major foreclosures or unemployment,” she said to 100 neighborhood groups, business owners and residents at a March meeting at the Albany Park Bank. “This is a very powerful market.”

The density of the neighborhood is the secret to its economic power. Residents in the area studied—from Foster Avenue south to Lawrence Avenue, and from Cicero Avenue east to the Chicago River—spend more than $300 million per square mile annually on retail goods and services.

These mannequins advertise top offerings at La Femme Boutique, a clothing and costume store at 4728 N. Kedzie Ave.

Liz Griffiths

That’s triple the spending per square mile of tony Wilmette on the North Shore. In fact, only nine of Chicago’s 77 communities boast more buying-power per square mile, according to MetroEdge.

What Albany Park needs is an image make-over, Dunlap suggested. MetroEdge advised sprucing up some of the shabbier stretches of the commercial district, adding to the retail mix, improving business operations and developing the unused CTA land around the Lawrence & Kimball Brown Line station to add retail space.

But the most immediate goal should be to launch a campaign to market the neighborhood’s quirky mix of ethnic restaurants, gift shops and groceries.

“You have baby goat [sold] in a Middle Eastern store next door to [a store with] Asian fish products next to one of the larger and more renowned Hispanic bakeries,” is how Scott Berman, president of the Lawrence Avenue Development Corp. (LADCOR) describes the heart of the neighborhood at Lawrence and Kimball.

The Fish Guy, at 4423 N. Elston Ave., is an example of Albany Park's diverse businesses.

Gordon Walek

The neighborhood is about 30 percent each Asian and Middle Eastern, and 20 percent each Hispanic and Eastern European, with business owners hailing from places as diverse as Cambodia, Vietnam, Egypt, Jordan, Ecuador, El Salvador and Hungary, according to Berman.

LADCOR commissioned the year-long study and was surprised to learn that MetroEdge considered the neighborhood’s multi-ethnic character such a strong selling point. “That we hadn’t realized,” said Berman.

Siince the study was released in March, the Albany Park Chamber of Commerce has upgraded its ethnic restaurant and culture guide and distributed 40,000 copies to local businesses, the city offices of tourism and cultural affairs, and two nearby colleges, with a second printing planned for downtown hotels, McCormick Place and Navy Pier.

Ethnic restaurants will play a major role in drawing customers to the neighborhood, said Liz Griffiths, executive director of the chamber, as some are already well-known.

The Cambodian Association of Illinois, at 2831 W. Lawrence Ave., features a museum and programs about Cambodian life and culture.

Gordon Walek

Berman said that LADCOR plans to aggressively recruit successful small business owners in other neighborhoods to open second locations in Albany Park. MetroEdge found that demand exceeded supply by 150 percent to 600 percent for garden and building supplies, department store goods, restaurants and bars, clothing and groceries. Berman also plans to approach some chain clothing stores.

Such efforts have been made in the past, but with the MetroEdge study, “We have much greater ammunition,” Berman observed. “We will say to these corporate people, 'Don’t just think Bucktown, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square.' ”

Jesse Arteaga, owner of Chuy’s Chicken Restaurant on Lawrence Avenue, who turned out for the MetroEdge meeting last March, said he liked the idea of attracting more competition. “Businesses feed off of each other,” he explained. “If you go into one place, even if you don’t go into the next, you see that it’s there.”

But space for new retail is scarce in the densely populated neighborhood. For decades, LADCOR and its community partners have periodically lobbied the CTA to develop land near the CTA Brown Line terminal near Lawrence and Kimball and the nearby train yard.

An intense community-wide planning effort for the land got underway in the mid-1990s with the encouragement of then-CTA President Robert Belcaster, but died when commuter demand forced reconstruction of the Brown Line terminal.

Marie's Pizza on Lawrence Avenue is an Albany Park institution.

Gordon Walek

MetroEdge encouraged LADCOR to approach the CTA again, citing new developments: The CTA recently opened an office for transit-oriented development and hired a consultant to identify suitable sites on its property to develop using federal stimulus money.

After the consultant attended the March meeting, Berman said LADCOR whipped out plans and drawings from the mid-90s. (Ideas include a grocery store, day-care center, coffee shop, medical offices, affordable housing for families and seniors and about 400 parking spaces for shoppers and commuters.) “Right now, we are in serious talks with the CTA,” Berman reported.

In the meantime, and on a smaller scale, Griffiths and Berman began leading city-sponsored bus tours of the neighborhood, also on the advice of MetroEdge. (Griffiths even led one for the Lisle Park District.) Click to see an article about one of those from last summer.

Berman said he's hoping that even these small efforts to reintroduce Albany Park will pay off in long run if tour-goers share the experience with friends. “They’ll tell other people, and we’ll get a reputation as an interesting, unusual neighborhood,” he said.

Call (312) 742-1190 to sign up for the next Albany Park bus tour on Saturday, August 15.