LISC Chicago

ISU Teacher Pipeline Brings Gusher of Talent to CPS

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Improving urban education means attracting and keeping the best and brightest teachers in urban schools. That’s one of the few truisms about education on which people from virtually any point on the political spectrum can agree.

The College of Education at Illinois State University has one of the largest teacher education programs in the country, but for decades ISU struggled to place teachers in Chicago Public Schools. From 1967 to 2004, ISU records show, 487 alumni were hired by CPS – or about 13 per year on average. Yet since 2004, another 367 have gone to work for CPS – a considerably faster flow of 46 per year.

Katie Meersman, who graduated ISU's College of Education in 2012, works with a student at Westcott Elementary in Auburn Gresham during her time as a STEP-UP Fellow and PDS Intern.

Stefanie Lee-Berardi

Last spring, CPS hosted 1,200 student teachers from 64 different universities across the nation, and the district hired only 8 percent (97 teachers), yet almost 40 percent of those hired graduated from ISU.

The recent hiring upsurge coincides with a new partnership that ISU launched eight years ago with LISC Chicago and one of its partner agencies, Enlace Chicago (then called Little Village Community Development Corp.), which not only provides student teaching experience but attempts to immerse students in their respective communities. The seed of the idea germinated from discussions between LISC and State Farm about how universities could better partner with citizen-based organizations.

Named the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline™, it has consistently worked with 16 schools in Little Village, spreading to six schools in Auburn Gresham in 2011-12 and five schools in Albany Park this school year. LISC lead agencies have been tapped in all three places – Enlace in Little Village, Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corp., and North River Commission in Albany Park – to help facilitate the university-school and university-CBO relationships.

The program works to build bonds and encourage these student teachers – many of them white and from the suburbs or rural areas – to consider urban, minority-majority school districts like Chicago’s. This approach has drawn notice in Washington, D.C., reaching even as high as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who mentioned the program’s work in community immersion of students as a model—and whose department has invited Robert Lee, founding director of the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline and others to give presentations on how they’ve structured the program, particularly with regard to cultural competency.

A Little Village family sits down to dinner with a STEP-UP Fellow, part of the program's optional residential component that helps to further immerse ISU students in their respective communities.

Rachel Bujalski

“Providing [students] with a cultural context for the community in which they will work demonstrates your commitment to improving education for every child in your neighborhood,” wrote Peggi Zelinko, director of the Department of Education’s Teacher Quality Program Office, in a July 2011 letter to ISU.

Lee and an ISU colleague presented to the department and other universities participating in the federal Teacher Quality Partnership in June 2012, highlighting research showing the beneficial effects of cultural competence on teaching and learning.

“We are really excited to highlight the literature and your publications in this area and want to use this meeting as a time to discuss and review the reform that have been implemented, researched and supported through literature, research, and promising practice,” wrote Patricia Barrett, DOE management and program analyst for teacher quality, before the meeting.

Nuts, Bolts and Numbers
Teacher education students are not required to participate in the pipeline. ISU graduates approximately 1,500 education students per year, but only 133 new students enrolled last year, joining the existing pipeline of 340 still on-campus, says Lee.

Mitchell Staroscik, a 2010 ISU graduate, assists a student at CICS Longwood during a science class.

Stefanie Lee-Berardi

ISU Alum 'Glad to Be Back' at Auburn Gresham Academy

Among the 367 new Illinois State University recruits to Chicago Public Schools in the past eight years has been Mitchell Staroscik, who, while an undergraduate at ISU, says he brought environmental sciences to life for high school students through real-world experiences in their community.

Now an early childhood development teacher at Simeon Career Academy in Auburn Gresham, Staroscik has returned to the school where he did his student teaching. And he’s glad to be there, having connected with students, faculty and staff during his student teaching days in fall 2010.

“I was having different conversations with students and learning about them, more than just getting the science across to them,” he recalls. “I don’t think that I know, necessarily, where they’re coming from – their lives have been very different from mine, for better or worse.”

Indeed, the time Staroscik spent learning about Auburn Gresham has given him a common knowledge that creates a mutual comfort level, he says. “There is something to be said for eating at the same restaurants. You’re more willing to hang out in the neighborhood.”

When talking with friends or family members who might be nervous about hanging out in Auburn Gresham, Staroscik adds, “I can explain to people how Auburn Gresham is actually nice – how there’s good places and good people.”

Staroscik began with the summer-long STEP-UP program at Spry Elementary in Little Village and lived with the pastor’s family in La Villita Community Church. He taught summer school in the morning and worked for Enlace Chicago in the afternoons, handling data collection that contributed to grant writing to obtain more funding for the agency’s violence prevention work.

“We only take students who are supremely motivated to end up teaching in urban education and in Chicago,” he says of ISU’s program, having returned to serve as a STEP-UP Resident Advisor “You go through the interview process and talk about your commitment.”

Staroscik says his summer experience as a fellow prepared him greatly for his semester at Simeon. “I already felt like I had done student teaching,” he says.

Staroscik’s position at Simeon focuses on teaching early childhood development as part of the school’s Teaching Academy.

“It’s partly human development biology class, partly teacher preparation work,” he says. “Right before I left student teaching, I told the principal, ‘I want to be here.’ I have a wonderful respect for the administration. We have great students. They gave me a call this summer and said, ‘Hey, we have an opening.’ I’m so happy to be back.”

In Chicago, a total of 132 ISU students have participated in the program’s culminating, senior yearlong Professional Development School internship, averaging 30 per year in recent years Lee says. ISU also has a total of a dozen PDS sites across the state of Illinois, including Wheeling, Pekin, Elgin, Springfield, Normal, Palatine, St. Charles, Bloomington, and a consortium of 13 rural high schools.

Lee reports a growth in interest in the program, noting for example that 1,200 teacher education students are expected to participate in 51 “clinical trips” of one to three days apiece to participate in service learning opportunities at partner schools. That’s a six-fold increase since 2006, when 200 students took part in eight such trips, he says.

Another indicator of growth has been the fact that for the past three years, ISU students have had the opportunity to get an early taste of the pipeline the summer after either their sophomore or junior year, by participating in a four-week intensive residency program called Summer Teacher Education Partnership for Urban Preparation. These STEP-UP fellows, who have totaled 61 over the three summers, simultaneously teach, intern at community-based organizations and take seminars on a variety of topics, while living in their respective communities with host families.

Nine Years, Three Communities
Katya Nuques, associate director of Enlace Chicago, recalls that her organization worked closely with LISC and ISU in their quest to create the pipeline. “The challenge they had identified was, this institution [ISU] graduated one of the highest numbers of teaching students in the nation, but the numbers of teachers coming to Chicago was almost nothing,” she says.

Little Village seemed like a worthwhile place to start given the 26 schools serving 18,000 students in that community. And Enlace had deep experience both working in the community and partnering with its schools, says Nuques, who served as director of education from 2005-10 and returned to that role on an interim basis in 2012.

Kathy Thin (from left), Laura Mueller and Leslie Gonzalez, all 2011 ISU graduates, review student work during a STEP-UP workshop.

Rachel Bujalski

“Most of the students are white students from suburban or rural areas of Illinois. They have very limited knowledge of what urban education entails,” she says. “The students get a very real sense of what teaching is like, and what it’s like to teach in an urban setting.”

Since 2010, Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corp. has helped develop partnerships with Rudyard Kipling, Westcott, Clara Barton and Green elementary schools, as well as Perspectives Calumet and Simeon Career Academy. The ISU partnership has helped to build on the work GADC was already doing, says Tenisha Jones, director of education for the agency.

“It allows us to tap into their expertise,” she says. “They work to help us promote what we’re trying to do.” Responds Dakota Pawlicki, program coordinator, “We couldn’t do this work without GADC’s partnership.”

Each community competed to have ISU establish a program at their local schools. Faculty and staff from ISU toured three communities in early 2010 and selected Auburn Gresham for the program. Working with GADC staff, they then met with aldermen, ministers and residents who participated in a charrette and took a tour of the community with ISU staff, said Jones. The university asks LISC partner agencies to showcase their plans and vision, and how they see ISU fitting into their quality-of-life efforts through the New Communities Program.

STEP-UP Fellows work with youth and residents at the 26th Street Plaza in Little Village during a STEP-UP community action project.

Verenice D'Santiago

In Albany Park, the pipeline started flowing last October through the PDS to Patrick Henry and North River elementary schools and expanded to Schurz, Mather and Roosevelt high schools in January. Even prior to then, ISU students from the other two neighborhoods already have visited classrooms and community institutions, says Melissa McDaniel, program director at the North River Commission.

She’s been impressed with ISU’s genuine willingness to work with the community and schools to tailor the program; for example, when someone suggested that teaching fellows learn more about the administrative side of schools, the university responded. “I love that it’s a fluid opportunity, as opposed to a set program,” she says. “It’s about responding to what schools say they need.” McDaniel adds, “I haven’t seen a program like ISU’s that is intentionally trying to invest resources in a school.”

Residency Component
The pipeline has a residency component that some students choose to take advantage of once they arrive in Chicago for student teaching, which sets it apart from other programs. Pawlicki says the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline works with local partners to find housing for the ISU students.

Last year, seven students lived in Auburn Gresham and 29 lived in Little Village housing for example, while this school year there are four in Auburn Gresham and 16 in Little Village; the number will vary each year, he says. ISU professors also live in the same housing during the summer months as they work to redesign their courses. A grant from State Farm subsidizes their stay to make it more affordable.

STEP-UP Fellows work at a corner "pocket park" in Little Village.

Rachel Bujalski

Other students live nearby and choose to commute, says Sarah Cohen, site coordinator in Auburn-Gresham. “Regardless of [where they live], they’re all participating in community programming,” she says. “They get to know an inside-out perspective on where students are coming from, on a day-to-day basis. They help them develop tools to prosper. They’re not just going into the classroom to teach.”

Pawlicki says this “fundamentally changes the way a teacher approaches their classroom. … It really does equip candidates with the tools and the knowledge about the way communities work, the lay of the land.”

Local partners play a major role in setting up this dynamic, Nuques says. “Who’s going to identify those host families, for example?” she says. “Your staff member’s mom has a house, or someone we know from the church, or a lady who works in our garden. You need to have a deep knowledge of the community to make these programs successful.”

It’s critical for candidates to understand where students come from, Lee says. “They understand the neighborhood dynamics. Working with the community-based organizations, they’re able to partner in different ways,” he says. “For most candidates, it’s not their first introduction to the neighborhood,” as many already have participated in our other programming.

It changes the relationship for CPS students to run into their teachers at the local grocery store, for example, Lee says. “It provides another layer of ownership and respect,” he says. The hope is that it will help combat the “outrageous” turnover rates of 60 percent to 70 percent per year in some schools, he says, adding: “Kids experience that.” Jones agrees it’s “devastating” for students to build trust in a teacher and then have that person leave.

Bridget Heneghan, a 2012 ISU graduate, reads aloud while teaching at Westcott Elementary.

Stefanie Lee-Berardi

ISU teaching students in Little Village get grounded before they move into the community with community tours and school visits, where they meet the principals, other teachers and students, Nuques says. Whether they participate in PDS or STEP-UP, the students work in community-based organizations doing anything from planting community gardens to tutoring at Boys and Girls Clubs, Nuques says.

“We think it’s very important that they live here and work here—hopefully both. It’s a little bit more of a realistic picture,” she says. “It’s a great experience to learn about each other and find commonalities and similar interests.”

Living in the neighborhood makes it less likely that students will burn out, Cohen says, because they’ll better understand students’ lives—that in Auburn Gresham, for example, an unusually high number of students live with their grandparents. And student teachers learn to view their neighborhoods from the same asset-based lens as do LISC and its partner agencies—and to reject the negativity about so-called “inner city” neighborhoods that’s so often seen in the media, Lee says.

That’s meant, for example, that some have challenged local beat officers who demand to know what they’re doing in the neighborhood, Lee says. At first they’re afraid to do so, but then “their mindset shifted, and they started engaging with the police: ‘What do you mean?’ ” he says. “They’re starting to become social justice advocates.”

Coursework Redesign
Since 2006, 56 courses across 22 disciplines have been redesigned at ISU through the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline. Each course includes a clinical experience that ranges from one-day to multi-day visits to Chicago classrooms and communities. ISU facultyredesigning its on-campus coursework with help from the partner CBOs, Lee says, has changed the definition of students’ clinical hours to less passive, “fly on the wall” activities and more in the way of working directly with students.

Rachel Grgin, ISU class of 2012, reads with a student from Westcott Elementary.

Stefanie Lee-Berardi

In addition to time in classrooms and schools, students are completing community-asset mapping projects, exchanging knowledge and experiences with local youth, and engaging in civic and service learning projects with community-based organizations.

Each clinical trip includes balanced time in the school and in the community, providing an early immersion into Chicago communities and meaningful opportunities for development of cultural competencies.It’s also given students the option to join the Pipeline as early as freshman year since some general education courses have also been retooled.

ISU students can also participate in the CONNECT mentorship program established in 2010, through which they are paired with older elementary school students and help them work through challenges those students identify for themselves. They interact weekly on Skype, elementary school students visit ISU’s campus to learn more about college, and the college students have a chance to visit Chicago, where they engage in youth-led and -identified community service projects like tree planting or cleaning-up a rundown athletic field, complete with new equipment.

At Simeon, high school students receive a dose of their own teacher education through the pipeline’s TEACH program, Lee says. “That’s a large push, getting high school students interested in the profession,” he says. “It’s about getting them thinking of ways to give back to their own community right now and becoming a mentor or a tutor at an elementary school that they attended.”

The partnerships with schools lead to ongoing relationships, Cohen says. “We’re giving back and providing professional development to them—helping with after-school programs,” she says. “It’s not just us talking to the school and then leaving. Students graduate, and then significant numbers get jobs in the schools.”

Quad at 10, Looking Forward and Back

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Time flies when you’re trying to re-develop a neighborhood, even when it seems to take forever to get anything done.

QCDC staff and board members at ground breaking earlier this year for Shops & Lofts development at 47th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

Gordon Walek

Ten years ago, the Quad Communities Development Corporation (QCDC) was formed to enlist residents, businesses, elected officials and other people and institutions in North Kenwood-Oakland, Douglas, and Grand Boulevard to look hard at their neighborhoods, identify what’s needed to make them better, document those recommendations, and then get on with the difficult business of transforming plans into reality.

It’s the same approach followed by 13 other neighborhood lead agencies in LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program – an ambitious, long-term effort funded by the MacArthur Foundation to strengthen underserved communities through comprehensive planning and implementation.

For QCDC’s staff, supporters, and neighborhood partners, it’s been quite a decade. And they’re celebrating it this Thursday with a big shebang at Maggiano’s on North Clark Street. Chances are, amid the speeches and toasts, the backslapping and glad-handing, there’ll be some quiet reflection about how that was then and this is now. Because where QCDC and its neighborhoods are today is different than where they were in 2003.

How it started

To get the lay of the land in the early days, read John McCarron’s overview of the challenges QCDC faced in 2006. Gentrification – not foreclosure – was the enemy. The neighborhoods – rich in historic homes, conveniently located near Chicago’s Loop and employment centers, and absent some notorious Chicago Housing Authority projects razed through the Plan for Transformation – had the potential to catch real estate fire, with the threat of boosting rents and home values beyond the means of long-time residents.

Former QCDC board chair (and current Cook County board president) Toni Preckwinkle, left, and QCDC Executive Director Bernita Johnson-Gabriel at Reavis Elementary.

Alex Fledderjohn

The Great Recession of 2008 solved that problem. Now, the market rate housing in Lake Park Crescent and Oakwood Shores (the mixed income developments that replaced the public housing projects) have been a tougher sell than expected, and the sour economy generally discouraged further residential development. Meanwhile, persistently high unemployment has suppressed the number of shoppers who’d been counted on to support many new local businesses.

But QCDC, technically a start-up back in 2003, has been adaptive and resilient. It made a plan – a quality-of-life plan – and stuck to it, regardless of the massive economic forces beyond its control.

From planning to reality

It planned for a farmer’s market. It has a farmers’ market. It planned for more businesses on Cottage Grove Avenue and to "banish the gray" along commercial corridors. It has more businesses on Cottage Grove Avenue. It planned to establish a Center for Working Families in the neighborhood. It has a CWF in the neighborhood. It planned for an ambitious retail/residential complex at 47th and Cottage. It’s getting a retail/residential complex at 47th and Cottage.

According to a LISC analysis in late 2011, more than $11 million in grants and low-interest loans to QCDC and other partners have leveraged $144 million in additional neighborhood investment. Seventy percent of the actions outlined in the group’s quality-of-life plan have been implemented, or are in the process of being implemented.

Banners that QCDC installed to spruce up the Cottage Grove commercial corridor.

Alex Fledderjohn

“QCDC has gone from being a start-up built around the leadership of the former 4th Ward alderman (Toni Preckwinkle, now president of the Cook County Board) to a highly respected organization,” said Susana Vasquez, LISC Chicago’s executive director and former director of the New Communities Program. “The last few years have been a struggle for every neighborhood organization, but QCDC showed it can take a punch and remain standing. Shops & Lofts is a good example of that.”

Shops & Lofts, the retail/residential complex at 47th and Cottage, had its genesis in the pre-2008 days of easy money and blind ambition – though even under those circumstances it was a tough sell. Still, QCDC stuck with it (read another McCarron piece to see how), and more than seven years after initiating the project, broke ground earlier this spring for a development that will include a Walmart, other retail space, and rental apartments.

“"We've tried to honor the community's plan, despite unforeseeable challenges,” said Bernita Johnson-Gabriel, who signed on as QCDC’s NCP director in 2004 and became executive director three years later. “I am grateful to all who have contributed to QCDC's success and look forward to another 10 years of positioning the south lakefront communities of North Kenwood, Oakland , Douglas, and Grand Boulevard as vibrant and exciting places to live, work and play."

Worth the Wait: Hispanic Housing’s North & Talman

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Twelve years.

Seems like a long time to complete an affordable housing project – even one with 110 apartments spanning an entire city block – but consider what else was happening the day Paul Roldan first inspected the vacant buildings on the 2600 block of West North Avenue.

It was September 11, 2001.

Hispanic Housing's Paul Roldan at the North & Talman affordable housing development on West North Avenue.

John McCarron

“We were on the roof of this warehouse, doing a walk-through with the owner’s broker,” remembers Hipolito “Paul” Roldan, president of Hispanic Housing Development Corporation (HHDC.) “I get a call from my assistant, back at the office. She tells me one of the World Trade Center buildings has just ‘come down.’ And I said: ‘What do you mean ‘come down’?” Buildings like that don’t just ‘come down.’”

Then again, we’ve all learned a thing or two about how easy it is to destroy buildings and disrupt lives since that terrible morning in 2001. Federal funds that might have gone to strengthen neighborhoods instead were needed to combat terrorism here and abroad. Private funding for housing, meanwhile, took a wrong turn into subprime lending fed by shaky mortgage bonds. Now a nation struggles to recover from a Great Recession … and neighborhoods like Humboldt Park struggle to replace hundreds of dwellings lost to foreclosure and abandonment.

So Roldan is not complaining about how long it took to complete all three phases of HHDC’s North & Talman development. Nor is LISC Chicago, which stood behind the $40 million project every step of the way, from a pre-development line-of-credit to a “bridge” loan that soon will be repaid from property tax increment (TIF) proceeds.

The LISC network

This is how LISC works, not by acting unilaterally, but by enabling capable local partners like Hispanic Housing to tap into the expertise and wherewithal of other partners in its broad network. In this case, the key players were the City of Chicago, the State of Illinois, the Federal Home Loan Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Fannie Mae, MB Financial Bank, and Allstate Insurance (whose flexible, low-interest financing made the $2 million bridge loan possible). The development also spanned the tenures of three separate aldermen - Manny Flores, Billy Ocasio, and Proco Joe Moreno.

Hispanic Housing is one of the most capable and prolific partners in LISC Chicago's neighborhood network. Since its founding in 1975, HHDC has developed more than 3,600 units of rental and for-sale housing and manages another 1,250 units for the Chicago Housing Authority.

As with all LISC-aided projects, there was strategic intent behind North & Talman. The goal was to fill-in some of the “missing teeth” along a tired stretch of North Avenue between gentrified West Town and the verdant expanse of Humboldt Park, with its namesake neighborhood to the west.

Not that North & Talman is about gentrification. To the contrary, all 110 apartments are locked permanently into affordable rents for families earning from 15 to 80 percent of the area’s median income. Qualifying seniors, for instance, are paying $500 to $600 monthly for units that would command $1,400 at market rate.

So a senior like Sabina Sanchez, and her husband of 45 years, Luis, were recently able to move out of cramped, over-priced housing and into a gleaming, sunlit one-bedroom unit at North & Talman Phase II.

“Here I’ve got everything,” she said to a visitor, ticking off the advantages: shopping at Cermak Produce across the street; walking to big park just two blocks away; and, not to be overlooked, washing clothes in the comfort and security of the building’s first-floor laundry room … just down the corridor from the well-equipped exercise room.

Green re-use

But it’s the entire neighborhood that benefits, as will be manifest soon when Hispanic formally dedicates the project’s third and final phase – a 5-story, 27-unit family building flanked by three new two-flats along the Washtenaw Avenue end of the block.

Architects Weese Langley Weese redesigned the warehouses on North Avenue and designed new structures to replace wood frame houses.

Gordon Walek

Some recent history: The first phase reclaimed a vacant furniture store located mid-block. Architects Weese Langley Weese found a way to save and restore the ornate terra cotta façade of the old Rusnak Brothers Furniture emporium while selectively demolishing parts of the store’s sprawling interior to make room for sunlit bays and tenant parking. Phase II involved replacement of abandoned balloon-frame houses at the block’s east end with Ms. Sanchez’ “got everything” five-story for seniors.

But it was the Phase III building on the other corner that proved the biggest challenge. It required the near-complete rebuild of a steel-framed warehouse – the one where Paul Roldan got the news about Sept. 11.

“This was a three-dimensional puzzle,” said Mark Kruse, Hispanic Housing’s vice-president for development. The warehouse’s steel frame was re-usable … but not its 18-foot ceiling heights. So workers had to peel off the exterior walls, re-brace the steel frame, weld new floor beams at the desired heights, then raise new exterior walls to bind it all together while providing for ample window openings.

It helped that Hispanic Housing used its own subsidiary general contractor, Tropic Construction Company, enabling it not only to smooth over the inevitable delays and budget bumps, but to employ a goodly number of local tradesmen and laborers. And do it all with sustainability in mind.

Details on the 2654 buildling.

Gordon Walek

“Saving these buildings is the green way to go,” Kruse said. “You get into these old ones. You see the quality of materials that were used. Sending it off to a landfill, that’s a huge waste of energy.”

Issues solved

Many other issues were raised and resolved during North & Talman’s 12-year gestation. There were political objections to “too much” subsidized housing; contentious community meetings where some decried the “loss” of retail; holdups in city acquisition of the derelict balloon-frames; vaulted sidewalks that had to be filled-in and re-poured; not to mention the aftershocks of 9/11 followed by the credit market meltdown triggered by the subprime fiasco. Yet at the end of the day, North & Talman got done … and done well.

“Hispanic Housing? They’re great,” said Barbara Beck, LISC Chicago’s director of financial services and underwriting. “Their tenacity and ability to stick with it, despite all the hurdles, is exactly what it takes in this market and in these times.”

“It was a decade-long fight,” added Paul Roldan. “But many generations of people are going to be able to live there, decently and affordably, long after we’ve forgotten what we were bitching and moaning about.”

More information:

Paul Roldan, HHDC, 312-602-6500 proldan@hhdevcorp.com
Barbara Beck, LISC Chicago, 312-422-9553, bbeck@LISC.org

Donor Profile

LISC’s involvement in the North & Talman development would not have been possible without the financial support of Allstate Insurance Company, a long-time LISC funder. The $2 million bridge loan was drawn from a $10 million, 10-year low interest loan that Allstate made to LISC Chicago and other LISC offices in cities throughout the Midwest.

The loan is one of several ways in which Allstate supports LISC Chicago. Another example is a $250,000 grant the company made to support the recently-launched Neighborhood Safety Initiative (NSI), through which LISC Chicago and its neighborhood partners will develop an all-in, all-at-once approach to reducing violent crime, hoping to turn the tide in North Lawndale and South Chicago. NSI will activate multiple networks – everything from block clubs and job counselors, to Chicago Police Department bike cops and City of Chicago departments – to change the culture in those neighborhoods.

Allstate contributes in other ways, too. For many years, it has been among the lead sponsors of the Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards, LISC’s 20-year-old ceremony that celebrates and recognizes outstanding achievement in neighborhood development and community building.

Just as important, Allstate understands and supports the value of sharing its human capital with the organizations it helps fund. Mary Pat McKeown, Allstate’s Portfolio Manager, Private Asset Investment Group, is an active member of LISC Chicago’s board of advisors.

Crowdfunding for Community Development? Yes Indeed

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Editor's note: Five of LISC's partners had successfully funded their Seed Chicago Kickstarter campaigns as they approached their funding deadlines on May 16, raising more than $48,900 for community improvement projects. View the results.

When World Business Chicago launched its Seed Chicago campaign in early April on the “crowdfunding” website called Kickstarter, it was a bold enough idea that the national news site Atlantic Cities asked, “Could Kickstarter Work as a Tool for Neighborhood Economic Development?”

It’s still early, but the answer looks like: “Yes.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel picks up lunch from The Tamalespaceship food truck in Pilsen, one of the first 11 projects to be posted for funding consideration via Seed Chicago.

Patrick Pyszka, City of Chicago

It took only four days for Teamwork Englewood to fully fund its $5,500 project to teach 15 youth how to build a simple computer (called Raspberry Pi) and code a website. Blowing past the initial goal so quickly, project leader Demond Drummer of Teamwork Englewood asked supporters for “stretch goals,” then doubled the planned summer program to 30 youth. Donations topped $9,000 last week, closing on the new goal of $10,000.

The second of 11 first-wave projects was fully funded a couple of weeks later. That one, called Global Gardens Bees ‘n Seeds, will add beehives and a seed-saving garden to an Albany Park farm where refugees from Bhutan and Burma are growing food for their families. More than $5,000 has been raised so far.

But it’s not a slam-dunk for every project.

The urban-farming-and-job-training organization Growing Home Inc. has attracted more than 170 backers. But it still needs $11,000 to reach its $20,000 goal. And some of the for-profit participants, who were recruited into the program through the micro-lending organization Accion Chicago, set ambitious fundraising goals. A hair-braiding school in Englewood, for instance, hopes to raise $32,000, and the Tamalespaceship food truck business needs $34,000 to build out a storefront restaurant in Pilsen.

Kickstarter uses an all-or-nothing approach. If you reach your goal, all backers’ credit cards are charged. If you don’t, no one is charged.

“You have to have a great idea, first,” says LISC Program Officer Dionne Baux, who helped surface the first round of nonprofit participants from within LISC’s Neighborhood Network. “But you also have to set your fundraising goal to a level you can reach, and you have to really promote the project to all of your networks of supporters.”

World Business Chicago will soon announce an "open call" for new projects.

Patrick Pyszka, City of Chicago

Another hurdle is that Kickstarter accepts donations only through the Internet. To back a project, one must first register on Kickstarter, and then create or link to an existing Amazon Payments account. This could be a significant barrier, Baux said, in neighborhoods with lower Internet usage and income levels.

Still, World Business Chicago (WBC) is excited about the potential of Kickstarter to “catalyze reinvestment, grow small businesses and spur employment growth.” On April 15, Mayor Rahm Emanuel engaged in a roundtable discussion with leaders of all 11 inaugural projects, noting that “we as a city will only be as strong as our neighborhoods are strong.”

Seed Chicago is an opportunity to highlight “the best of what Chicago has to offer,” said Julia Stasch, vice president of U.S. programs for the MacArthur Foundation. By learning from this initial group of projects and recruiting more, the project could generate $1 million in investment annually and create 250 jobs, Stasch said.

And that would provide a very clear answer to the question of whether crowdfunding can spur development of Chicago neighborhoods.

World Business Chicago will soon announce an “open call” for new projects, and it’s already soliciting ideas from interested individuals and organizations.

Neighborhood Network Eyes Health Insurance Push

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0600

LISC Chicago’s Neighborhood Network is gearing up for a tidal wave of change around health care as implementation begins this year on the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

At a “Healthy Wednesday” session on April 3, more than 65 organizers, financial counselors and health care practitioners got a quick course on how the landmark program will roll out, and what it will take to enroll thousands of newly eligible individuals.

Data from Illinois Health Matters show that the African American and Latino communities where LISC Neighborhood Network partners are concentrated have faced the biggest deficits in health insurance to date -- and have the most to gain from Affordable Care Act implementation.

Courtesy Illinois Health Matters

“This is the first of many conversations we’ll have about ACA and how we are going to plug into this massive thing,” said LISC Program Officer Dominique Williams. “It’s a huge opportunity for our partners to connect residents to the resources they need to be healthier.”

The ACA law makes 730,000 people in Cook County eligible for expanded Medicaid coverage or subsidized health insurance. Another 130,000 will be able to buy insurance without a subsidy on the state’s new health insurance web portal, nicknamed ABE for Applications for Benefits Eligibility.

“I’ve been in this field for 24 years, and this is the biggest change in all that time,” said Stephanie Altman, programs and policy director for Health and Disabilities Advocates, which is helping train organizations for new ACA-related roles. “It’s a big enrollment challenge, more than the AllKids program [health coverage for low-income children]; it comes close to the scale of Medicare Part D enrollment.”

Central to meeting that challenge will be networks of trained helpers who will educate consumers about their choices and connect them to the ABE portal, which launches October 1. The portal will determine each person’s eligibility category based on information that the enrollee enters into the system.

Illinois Health Matters has broken down profiles of uninsured adults and what they'll be eligible for under the ACA in communities across Chicago.

Courtesy Illinois Health Matters

Three types of helpers will be used: Navigators, In-Person Assistors and Certified Applications Counselors. Some of them will be hired by community-based organizations, with federal and state funding.

Illinois was awarded $115.8 million by the federal government on April 8 to support its health insurance marketplace. “A large portion of this federal funding will pay for outreach activities and consumer assistance” according to Stephani Becker, project director for Illinois Health Matters, who also participated in the April 3 workshop.

On the Illinois Health Matters blog, she referenced research from Enroll America that shows 78 percent of the uninsured don’t know about the new health insurance exchanges, and 83 percent who could be eligible for the new Medicaid expansion don’t know about it.

A “tremendous amount of work needs to get done to tell people about the new options and enroll them into a plan,” Becker wrote.

LISC partners likely to be involved in ACA promotion and enrollment are its Centers for Working Families, where financial counselors can help clients understand their enrollment options; LISC lead agencies, many of which are already involved in health programming; and other community-based organizations involved with health care.

Illinois Matters features an online mapping tool at http://visualizingreform.illinoishealthmatters.org/uninsured

See a schedule of deadlines and program milestones on the Illinois Health Matters blog. For details on program eligibility and categories, download the April 3 presentation by Health and Disability Advocates’ Stephanie Altman and Stefani Becker.

For more information on LISC Chicago’s Healthy Communities campaign, contact Program Officer Dominique Williams, dwilliams@lisc.org or (312) 422-9571.

LISC Chicago’s health work is funded in part by the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute.

This video from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation further explains how health care reform will be implemented:

Viceroy Hotel Gets New Life

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Despite its Chicago landmark status, the old Viceroy Hotel on the city’s Near West Side hadn’t had much to cheer about in recent years, much like the people who used to live there.

It was down and out and so were the guests. But a new day’s dawning for the handsome art deco structure at 1519 W. Warren Blvd., thanks to a $20 million plus transformation of the space into Harvest Commons – 89 affordable studio apartments for people who are at risk of becoming homeless or were incarcerated and are trying to get back on their feet.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and the cast of hundreds typically required to finance affordable housing deals, cut the proverbial ribbon on the rehabbed building Friday morning, ushering in a new era for the Viceroy on the southern edge of Union Park. Heartland Housing, Inc., the development arm of the Heartland Alliance, is the developer (along with First Baptist Congregational Church) and did most of the heavy lifting. But a host of other organizations, including LISC Chicago, had a hand in making it happen.

The affordable apartments at Harvest Commons will provide housing to people of modest means.

Courtesy of Heartland Housing

LISC’s financial contribution was more than $432,000 in predevelopment loans and bridge financing that allowed Heartland to cover architectural fees, market studies, title searches and other such essentials necessary for any real estate project. LISC also provided a $25,000 “project initiation loan” to St. Leonard’s Ministries for predevelopment expenses related to Gracie’s Coffee Shop, a 2,000-square-foot commercial space on the ground floor that will employ the formerly incarcerated women who are expected to be among Harvest Commons’ tenants. St. Leonard’s, just a few blocks west on Warren, will also supply supportive services for residents.

Additional partners include U.S. Bank, Enterprise, the Illinois Housing Development Authority, the City of Chicago, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, among others.

But LISC Chicago also played a key role through its support of the Near West Side Community Development Corporation, the New Communities Program’s lead agency in the neighborhood. In the quality-of-life plan it developed through NCP, Near West placed a significant emphasis on maintaining, and developing, affordable housing. The rehabbed Viceroy fits the bill perfectly.

“I can’t imagine a better use for the space,” said LISC Chicago Executive Director Susana Vasquez. “The location is fantastic, the apartments affordable, the support services superb, and a fine piece of architecture gets preserved in the process. What’s not to like?”

She noted that the “working poor” who likely will be prime tenant candidates, don’t have many comparable housing choices in the neighborhood, which is convenient to downtown service jobs, public transit, health care services, educational institutions and recreational facilities.

“The value of safe, affordable housing at a time when people of modest means are being squeezed by forces beyond their control can’t be emphasized enough,” said Vasquez. “Harvest Commons represents an opportunity for people who, like the building itself, are looking for a second chance. And it’s a credit to everyone who worked on this project that they’re going to get it.”

See more coverage at DNAinfo.com.

Panel Traces Path from Childhood Trauma to Youth Violence

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0600

For decades, Americans have debated whether and to what extent violence committed by adolescents and young adults can be attributed to having had a bad childhood.

Evidence continues to grow that trauma like abuse, neglect and witnessing violence at an early age rewires children’s brains and thus adversely affects their mental health going forward, helping to explain the “reactive aggression” that prompts a range of anti-social behaviors, according to participants in a roundtable discussion hosted by LISC Chicago on Jan. 30, the second in the “Healthy Wednesday” series on a variety of topics.

Panelists Brad Stolbach (purple shirt), a pediatrician at La Rabida Children’s Hospital, and Eddie Bocanegra, a congregational organizer at the Community Renewal Society and a graduate student at University of Chicago, discuss the issues with audience members after the event.

Gordon Walek

The United Nations’ definition of a child soldier—in part, “any person under 18 years of age, who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity”—applies to those who have experienced multiple traumas and, in particular, witnessed violence, even if not actually during wartime, said Dr. Brad Stolbach a pediatrician at La Rabida Children’s Hospital.

And children experiencing such traumas in Colombia or Nepal, rather than Chicago or New York, probably would be routinely referred to as child soldiers, he said. “We need to understand what’s happening in context: That means developmental context, looking through a trauma lens, and using information … to understand how what we’re seeing makes sense,” he added. “If we see them in their developmental context, then we can understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, and then we can try to help.”

The undeniable existence of the potential connections between trauma and deteriorating mental health and aggression doesn’t fully justify the anti-social actions of any one individual, cautioned Dr. Elena Quintana, executive director of the Institute of Public Safety and Social Justice at The Adler School of Professional Psychology. But it does help explain the statistical likelihoods, she told the 40 or so attendees at the forum, many of them from LISC New Communities Program lead agencies.

“This is really about looking at trends,” Quintana said. “If your body is readying itself for war when you’re a kid, it’s really hard to calm down when you’re an adult because you’ve become wired in that way. … The need for modulation of that brain development leads to health-risk behaviors.” Trauma impairs social, emotional and cognitive development, she added.

Kathryn Saclarides Bocanegra (right), director of violence prevention at Enlace Chicago, the lead agency for Little Village in LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program, talks with an audience member.

Gordon Walek

Ground Level View
As director of violence prevention at Enlace Chicago, the lead agency for Little Village in the New Communities Program, Kathryn Saclarides Bocanegra has seen at the ground level how exposure to violence leads to behavioral problems as a youth, which lead to increased risks for one’s own outcomes.

“If you’re a witness, you’re much more likely to be a victim or a perpetrator,” she said. “Trauma, in communities like Little Village … can become part of the common human experience. It’s just accepted: This is the way life is.” And residents have reason to think so, even if they’re wrong in the larger sense: “We can’t get angry at people for responding normally to abnormal conditions.”

Oversimplified media accounts of how and why violence happens lead to superficial and ineffective responses, such as harsh school discipline and incarceration, Saclarides Bocanegra said. She pointed to the November 2012 murder of 20-year-old Freddie Hernandez, a Little Village resident, as a case study.

The son of immigrant parents who was born in Little Village, Hernandez was exposed to domestic violence, his father left the family when he was in fifth grade, and his mother (as sole provider) needed to work unstable jobs due to her documentation status and couldn’t adequately attend to her children, Saclarides Bocanegra said.

Dr. Elena Quintana, executive director of the Institute of Public Safety and Social Justice at The Adler School of Professional Psychology, answers an audience member's question.

Gordon Walek

Hernandez experienced academic difficulties and bullying both from schoolmates and from the police, who sometimes picked him up and dropped him in opposition gang territory, she said. He became initiated into a gang in significant measure for the protection against his bullies that provided.

After dropping out of high school at age 16, Hernandez righted himself, attended mentoring sessions and left the gang at 18. He showed promise but still lived in the same community and had a certain reputation among his peers.

At 20, he was killed, and the Chicago Tribune reported that police suspected the murder was “gang related,” which Saclarides Bocanegra said is sadly typical. “Do you see how much is missing from the whole way in how we unpack the life of this person?” she said. “And that’s usually the most polite version we get.”

People in the community and elsewhere started blaming Hernandez or his parents for his killing. When in reality, “Freddie’s death was 20 years in the making,” Saclarides Bocanegra said. “It didn’t just happen that night when somebody picked up a gun, got in a car and was involved in a drive-by shooting.”

To interrupt such cycles, she added, community groups don’t have to collect data or design new programming, but it helps when they simply integrate this way of thinking into existing programs. “You have to get people to look at each other and reconnect to each other: ‘My well-being is connected to your well-being.’ ”

Where Research Points
Quintana presented research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) – a collaboration between Drs. Robert Anda of the federal Centers for Disease Control, Vincent Felitti of Kaiser Permanente and Laura Porter of the Family Policy Council in Washington state – which has helped draw the connections between ACEs and mental instability in a vast sample of 17,000 mostly middle-class, college-educated patients.

The survey asked about childhood abuse and neglect (including physical, emotional or sexual), family experiences with mental illness, incarceration or domestic violence, divorce or parental loss, and substance abuse. Two-thirds of those surveyed had experienced at least one ACE, and 87 percent of those with one had experienced two; women were 50 percent more likely to have had at least five, Quintana said. “[Adverse childhood experiences] kind of travel in packs,” she said.

This "pie slice" chart shows the percentage of survey respondents who had experienced each of the following outcomes. “If you are able to prevent adverse childhood experiences, it’s like putting a giant sponge in the middle of this oil slick and sucking it up all at once," Quintana said.

Chart by Sasha Silveanu

Referring to a graph that displayed each ACE outcome as a pie slice, and the percentage of respondents who had experienced each as an oddly-shaped “oil slick” in the center (see graph, at left), she said, “If you are able to prevent adverse childhood experiences, it’s like putting a giant sponge in the middle of this oil slick and sucking it up all at once. You can prevent all of these things simultaneously.”

Without that sponge, the oil slick tends to spread, Quintana said. To stop it, those who work with youth need to approach them in a non-judgmental way to ensure they don’t “run away,” she said. “Shame and blame paralyze people. We really need to change the way we look at public health issues, where we put that shame and blame aside.”

Then, to promote healing and resilience among the “walking wounded,” they must find “a trustworthy person to talk to about their true situation or feelings,” gain “the ability to reframe their life” and realize that, for example, their parents’ drinking problem is not their fault, Quintana said. That leads to the ability “to have hope for your future,” she said, which is aided by such factors as intelligence, talent, skill mastery and the opportunity for creative expression. “We have to address trauma if we really want lasting community safety,” Quintana concluded.

Based on checklists given to kids and adults about what adverse experience they had experienced and when, the ACEs study helps to put violence in a larger context, Stolbach said. Yet public policy tends to put it only in a narrow criminal context, and governments spend millions on prisons without adequately addressing the underlying issues, he said, which disproportionately affect people of color and poor people.

Research has shown that multifaceted trauma—of the sort that particularly affects prison populations, youth in juvenile detention and children in foster care—impacts numerous developmental capacities, such as the ability to understand one’s own emotions, self-soothe or to feel empathy toward others, Stolbach said.

Jim Alexander compares notes with LISC Chicago Executive Director Susana Vasquez.

Gordon Walek

According to “violence interrupters” from the anti-violence group CeaseFire, he said, many youth with whom they work had multiple self-reports of violence in their family and communities and ongoing trauma as a result. The average age of the first exposure was 6, he added, while the average age at which participants first saw violence was 8. “It starts early.” Multiple types of maltreatment produces hair-trigger “reactive aggression.”

Institutions like Adler and La Rabida are providing training on recognizing and dealing with ACEs, Stolbach said. “Any time a child experiences a trauma, it’s an opportunity,” he said. “We would save billions of dollars” if public health was handled more pro-actively and comprehensively.

Solutions for Engagement
Eddie Bocanegra knows all of this first-hand. He has worked with the University of Illinois and CeaseFire to mediate conflicts and stop the violence in Pilsen, Little Village, the town of Cicero, and occasionally Gage Park, and he was among those whose violence prevention work was featured in the 2011 film, “The Interrupters.” Bocanegra also was formerly incarcerated for 14 years for “taking someone’s life in my community” during his years as a gang member.

Now a congregational organizer at the Community Renewal Society and a student at University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, Bocanegra talked about a number of programs in the neighborhoods he works that attempt to address the causes and/or effects of violence. “I was left dealing with the aftermath. What happens to these families when they have to bury their son” or constantly be visiting him in the hospital, he said.

Once such effort, Grupo Consuelo, rallies parents who lost children to shooting, stabbing or suicide but don’t necessarily have the “luxury” to take time off work to grieve for an extended period. “What do we do with these families? How do we support them afterward … through this process of grieving?” he said. “How do we stop their remaining kids from becoming victims—or from becoming perpetrators?”

Randall Blakey, LaSalle Street Church executive pastor, chats with Stolbach.

Gordon Walek

That’s where LuchARTE comes in: The community arts group engages gang-involved youth and uses art to process their life trauma; an ACEs survey of participants showed that all had experienced physical abuse and witnessed violence, and 75 percent had witnessed homicide, among other findings, Bocanegra said.

Another program called Urban Warriors specifically targets combat veterans and other young men with a need to process trauma. The program tries to educate these youth, who have the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as their parents. “Why is it that they get high?” he said. “Why is it that they have these maladaptive behaviors or coping mechanisms?”

Finally, Bocanegra talked about FORCE, a/k/a Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality, which works with ex-offenders, many of whom committed their crimes at a very young age, and attempts to help them overcome the obstacles that having a record creates. “I am discriminated against because of my background,” he said simply. “People constantly ask me, ‘Eddie, how did you make it?’ ”

His answer: a supportive family, friends who invested in him, professors from his undergraduate days at Northeastern Illinois University who believed in him. Now, as an organizer, Bocanegra focuses on creating systemic change.

“It’s one thing to work with these individuals, but if their home environment doesn’t change, if their community doesn’t change, then we haven’t done anything,” he says. “How do we build bridges between people who need these services … and the clinicians that are often from streets [in places] like Roselle, or Michigan Avenue, or Skokie, or Evanston?”

To learn more about the cyclical connections between mental health and violence, Saclarides Bocanegra recommended the book “Changing Places: How Communities Will Improve the Health of Boys of Color,” edited by Christopher Edley Jr., and Jorge Ruiz de Velasco.

For further details on the presentations at this “Healthy Wednesday” session, download this Powerpoint.

LISC Chicago's health work is funded in part by The Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute.

Two Neighborhoods Plan “All-In” Safety Initiatives

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0600

For years, the gang killings and other violent crimes have taken their toll, undercutting the hard work of building stronger communities. The headlines blare about the baby Jonylah Watkins, shot in her father’s lap, and the teenager Hadiya Pendleton, killed in a neighborhood park, but every week there are other stories that do just as much damage.

The victims are not just the innocents or the gang-involved criminals who have been shot and killed, but all the students and parents and business owners who live with the fear of gunshots and gang warfare, who go about daily life in the shadows of violence.

The 14th annual Ecumenical Easter Service, scheduled for this Saturday, March 30, will begin with an anti-violence procession led by the South Chicago CeaseFire staff from Claretian Associates. For more information, please click here.

Courtesy Claretian Associates

Despite a steady decline in overall crime, the murder rate rose in 2012, to 510 homicides, most of them in poor South and West Side neighborhoods. And that’s just the surface layer. Underneath are thousands of non-fatal shootings and stabbings, and tens of thousands of other violent crimes, often highly concentrated in “hot spots” like the 87th Street corridor in South Chicago, or 13th Street in North Lawndale.

The violence is corrosive. “We had group interviews with 40 youth and what I heard was that everybody in our group had had someone in their family killed,” said Tracie Worthy, the New Communities Program manager at Lawndale Christian Development Corporation (LCDC). “Six had dropped out of school, and that was because of a death of a father or uncle or cousin. They didn’t know where to get support, so they sunk into depression.”

A neighborhood-led response
Starting this spring, LISC Chicago and its neighborhood partners will launch an all-in, all-at-once approach to reducing violent crime, hoping to turn the tide in North Lawndale and South Chicago.

With seed funding from Allstate Insurance, the Neighborhood Safety Initiative (NSI) will activate multiple networks – everything from block clubs and job counselors, to Chicago Police Department bike cops and City of Chicago departments – to change the culture in those neighborhoods.

This graphic captures the virtuous cycle that LISC Chicago and its partners believe the Neighborhood Safety Initiative will set in motion in North Lawndale and South Chicago.

“We’ve been building up to this for years,” said Keri Blackwell, LISC Chicago’s director for programs and its liaison to the Chicago Police Department. “This is more than organizing basketball games on the streets, or beefing up youth programs. It’s an attempt to create true collaboration among all the groups affected by crime, to build up the community’s capacity, and to provide a framework for accountability.”

NSI will not be a quick fix, added Blackwell, which is why LISC has committed to at least three years of support to the two communities, and to other neighborhoods as additional resources are raised. NSI will activate and strengthen the neighborhood networks and employ best practices that show promise for crime reduction. But it will also add other elements typically lacking in such efforts, including strong local leadership, police involvement from commanders to beat cops, and additional support from both local and citywide advisory boards.

“This is an important step in addressing the violence issue,” said Victoria Dinges, vice president corporate relations - public social responsibility of Allstate Insurance. “What’s promising is that NSI will build on LISC’s existing networks and expand them to new partners.”

Safe South Chicago
Much of the NSI structure has been roughed in already in South Chicago, where the LISC lead agency, Claretian Associates, has been working with neighborhood partners and 4th District Cmdr. Berscott Ruiz to develop strategies that will be implemented this summer and fall.

B-Ball on the Block attracts big crowds with sports, arts, food--and safety provided by a visible police presence.

Courtesy Lawndale Christian Development Corp.

The former steel-mill neighborhood is home turf for two major gangs – the Latin Kings and Black P Stones – and at least five smaller gang factions that together have created a brutal street culture of drug trafficking, boundary skirmishes and retaliatory shootings.

There were 14 homicides in South Chicago in 2012, up from four in 2011. A police gang audit identified about 175 active gang members. The department and community leaders believe that 80 percent of violent crime stems from the gang culture.

Claretian and its neighborhood partners have been working closely with the 4th District since 2009, when three youth were gunned down while walking home from school. The South Chicago Chamber of Commerce has organized businesses to help stem burglaries on Commercial Avenue, and block clubs were mobilized to stop a “Brick Squad” of youth who were breaking into cars.

“It’s not the gangs alone,” said Angela Hurlock, Claretian’s executive director. “It is also the lack of education and jobs, and the kids at Bowen High School not finishing school, so they can’t get jobs.”

The 4th District’s executive officer, Capt. Ruth Wedster, noted a “new dynamic” of very young offenders, from 10 to 15 years old. More than 70 percent of the 2012 violent-crime arrests in a South Chicago target area were of individuals aged 21 or under. The burglary crew that broke the window at Radio Shack included a 9-year-old boy.

Reducing those types of crimes requires more than enforcement. That’s why the local police have “adopted” a group of children from the nearby Trumbull Park Homes housing development, and why the community organized a “Nosey Neighbors” campaign that engages residents in safety-oriented activities such as music fests and block parties. It all contributes to building a culture of trust, and one that encourages residents to report crime to police. “It makes a big difference to the CPD if the community wants the help from us,” said Cmdr. Ruiz.

Culture shifts

The Chicago Police already combine sophisticated intelligence gathering with special enforcement teams to address violence and retaliatory shootings. They also use “call-ins” to bring known gang offenders into meetings with law enforcement and neighborhood leaders to urge a stop to the violence. Supportive services are offered to help offenders stay out of trouble, and aggressive enforcement is promised if they don’t.

But that hasn’t been enough. Crime researchers, police and community leaders all agree that major culture shifts are required to rebuild the community structures and norms – known as collective efficacy – that will help youth resist the gang culture and lead to sustained reductions in crime.

A huge challenge is convincing residents to call police when they witness criminal activity. “Neighbors will say ‘Why should I call when the drug dealing is right out in the open; the police must know where it is,’ ” said LCDC’s Tracie Worthy. “But if you don’t call, the police won’t come. And when you go to a CAPS meeting and complain, the first thing the police will do is look up the calls for service and show you that they didn’t receive any.”

10th District Cmdr. Maria Peña greets a group of boys, while other police officers hang out, at a North Lawndale street event last summer.

Courtesy LCDC

One reason people don’t get involved is gang intimidation around “being a snitch.” One crime hot spot in North Lawndale is the 1300-block of South Christiana, but when police organized a meeting to address the issue, attendance was sparse. “It takes a lot of meetings with people to get their trust,” said Kim Jackson, executive director of LCDC. “We have an opportunity to shape this whole conversation and how things should go, but it’s going to take some work.”

Building better relationships between police and neighbors will get a boost this year as the department trains all 12,500 of its sworn officers in “police legitimacy and procedural justice,” which stresses respectful treatment of residents and better explanations of why a traffic stop or other enforcement action is being taken.

The program has support from the very top – Police Supt. Garry McCarthy – but both neighborhood leaders and police officials recognize that it will take years of culture change to build trusting and effective relationships.

Jobs, youth, counseling

The Neighborhood Safety Initiative is a complex undertaking that will require participation across dozens of organizations and sectors of society. Among the big drivers:

Jobs – Many crimes are committed because residents need money to survive and don’t have the training or life skills for traditional work. So a big need is for transitional employment programs that connect participants to education or skills programs.
Youth – Young people in low-income communities are exposed to gangs from an early age and may see them as a supportive structure that offers opportunities to be protected, earn money and gain prestige. Counteracting that force will require equally strong youth programs that provide positive alternatives to gang recruitment.
Trauma – Urban violence, like war, can create Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and living in poverty can cause “Adverse Childhood Experiences” that have lasting negative effects. In both cases, mental-health services can be a big help, but they must be available locally and be trusted by those who need them.
Research – A wealth of best-practice research is available to inform the NSI work, but community leaders may not be familiar with what would work locally. NSI will engage professional researchers to help create and fine-tune local strategies.
Support – Neighborhoods and individuals can better address crime issues if they face fewer every day pressures of broken-down housing, inadequate schools or poor health. Programs that solve these problems are critical to reaching safety goals.

North Lawndale youth wear T-shirts that promote peace, unity and respect.

Courtesy LCDC

“This is going to take a tremendous amount of effort, over a period of years,” said LISC’s Keri Blackwell. “But what has been done so far has not been enough. We’ve got to build real long-term collaboration and make better use of existing resources to change the course of these neighborhoods. And the really promising thing is that we’ve got the right people at the table to get this done.”

Fired Up, Ready to Go: LISC Chicago’s Neighborhood Network

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Leverage and results – smart investors insist on both.

You invest in organizations that know their business and apply every dollar to maximum advantage. You invest in those that deliver a reliable and measureable result.

In the complex business of urban community development, no vehicle matches the leverage and impact of every dollar invested quite like LISC Chicago.

LISC Chicago brings together the community development community annually to celebrate the Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards.

Eric Young Smith

For 33 years LISC has been Chicago’s indispensible intermediary between funders seeking to improve the quality of life in the city’s at-risk neighborhoods and the community-based organizations and developers that know how to get things done there.

During the last 12 years, thanks to an extraordinary investment by the MacArthur Foundation, LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program has woven a network of working relationships and best-practice methods. NCP became a national “how-to” model for comprehensive community development.

Comprehensive? One lesson learned early on is that real estate investment, be it subsidized housing or shiny new stores, does not, by itself, “turn around” troubled neighborhoods. Of course it doesn’t.

Not when residents lack the skills and education needed to join the post-industrial workforce; not when there’s no fresh produce at the corner liquor-and-Lottery store; not when there’s no safe place for children to play or medical clinics to treat chronic conditions like asthma and diabetes.

A truly healthy neighborhood is composed of many things. That’s why struggling communities, more than anything, seek a partner possessing the technical capacity, managerial flexibility and financial backing to help neighborhoods help themselves.

Stabilizing and improving neighborhood housing remains a key cornerstone for LISC Chicago, most recently through its involvement in the city's Micro-Market Recovery Program, designed to mitigate against the ill effects of foreclosures.

Gordon Walek

As we broaden our effort beyond the initial New Communities neighborhoods, we’re strengthening this platform and expanding our NCP Network. We believe it’s the best model yet devised for enabling entire neighborhoods, and the individuals who live in them, to gain control of their future.

Then again, we’re always looking for additional partners … and for our existing partners to step up with new ideas and wherewithal.

New ideas? Consider the energy generated by just this sampling of programs we launched and/or fine-tuned during 2012:

Smart Communities – So far more than 550 households and 46 businesses have adopted broadband Internet, and more than 2,000 adults have received digital skills training, as part of this partnership with the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology.

Using a one-time, $7 million federal stimulus grant and the skills and hardware contributed by our many tech-savvy partners, Smart Communities has delivered more than 1,000 netbook and desktop computers to help bridge the digital divide; we also helped five neighborhoods create Internet “portals.” These feature local businesses, neighborhood news and timely listings of community activities and resources. Take a look at www.pilsenportal.org for one shining example.

LISC Chicago has helped bring about 21st century skills and workplaces through efforts like its quiet brokering of the Green Exchange development in Logan Square.

Gordon Walek

Measureable results? New survey research from the universities of Illinois and Iowa found that residents of our five Smart Communities are taking to the Internet at a rate 15 percent faster than other neighborhoods.

"This is about redeveloping the skill set of Chicagoans and bringing us up to the level of other cities,” says John Tolva, the city’s chief technology officer. But more needs to be done, he admits, especially with expiration of the federal startup grant.

So the MacArthur Foundation has stepped up once more by supporting one full-time tech leader in each of the five Smart Communities during 2013. McCormick Tribune Foundation is also getting involved, as is Comcast. Who’s next?

Centers for Working Families – Innovation has been a constant at our 13 Centers for Working Families, where in 2012 more than 12,000 Chicagoans received some combination of job placement, public benefits counseling and one-on-one financial advice.

A new partnership with Citibank, for instance, is issuing Banamex USA secured credit cards as a credit-building tool. This might sound counterintuitive, but timely card payments have helped the previously un-scored reach credit ratings in the 740-760 range in just three months.

Through Kennedy-King College and LISC's Centers for Working Familes, Army vet Terrence Prayer's now employed as an IT professional at Allscripts, a provider of health records systems, in the Merchandise Mart.

Eric Young Smith

Next up in 2013 – expansion of CWF’s partnership with the City Colleges of Chicago as part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s effort to reconnect graduates with our region’s growth industries. The idea isn’t to supplant college placement services but to ensure CCC students have the skills and supports needed to meet basic needs, focus on their studies, and begin climbing a career ladder.

The new partnership is being piloted with great success at the Kennedy-King campus in Englewood, where the CWF staffed by Metropolitan Family Services coaches students in the fundamentals of job-hunting – from what to wear, to what to say at that first interview.

“Suddenly I’m somebody,” exulted Terence Prayer, a Kennedy-King student who won admission to an Allscripts trainee program, one of several college-to-career arrangements negotiated by the Emanuel administration.

The once-homeless Prayer remembers how he was provided a suit coat and collared shirt – plus some intensive interview prepping – by CWF counselors. “They held our hand step-by-step, right down to the wording of my [resume] cover letter. It all came together. They give you a base, a base you can build on.”

Youth Sports Programming – Keeping kids positively engaged in organized sports doesn’t just help them stay healthy … it can help them stay alive. That’s just the sad reality in a city that endured more than 500 homicides in 2012. The dead are mostly young, mostly black or Hispanic, and mostly shot either because of gang rivalries or because they simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In addition to its namesake attraction, Hoops in the 'Hood provides young people the opportunity to participate in soccer, face-painting, chess-playing and other peaceable activities.

Eric Young Smith

One place and time where nobody gets shot are the Friday afternoon basketball tournaments called Hoops in the 'Hood, held in public spaces under the auspices of the city, LISC Chicago, our local partners and State Farm Insurance.

Now entering its seventh season, Hoops is going strong in 12 neighborhoods with the potential to expand to more. By roping off a local street or schoolyard, a Hoops gathering, which usually includes a refreshment table and even a local arts-and-crafts bazaar, lets neighbors regain control over streets too often monopolized by gangs. The kids are safe and the only mind-altering stuff being pushed is sportsmanship and mutual respect.

Measuring community-wide impact of such programming is tricky. But consider this: according to a LISC analysis of police data, the number of crimes reported in the vicinity of a regular Hoops site in East Garfield Park has been cut in half during basketball games over a recent three summers. A coincidence? We think not.

Not everyone plays basketball, so LISC has partnered with the city, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, the cyclists at Active Transportation Alliance and World Sport Chicago on a PlayStreets program featuring dancing, jump rope, giant chessboards and other ways get folks outdoors, moving and socializing.

More than 50 such events were scheduled last fall, with more in the works this spring. Also, with the National Football League, we’re supporting a Grassroots Program that has rebuilt 10 community football fields in the city and close-in suburbs.

Driver Sacha McLeod and helper Joel Casey are ready to weigh fruits and veggies aboard the Fresh Moves mobile produce market. LISC's health advisory committee has called for more traveling grocers.

John McCarron

“Just the idea of parents and kids being in a public play space is a very big deal,” says Rob Castañeda, whose Hoops affiliate in Little Village, called Beyond the Ball, has turned dozens of teenagers toward school and career and away from street life. The challenge, he points out, now that we know what works, is to “bring it to other blocks.”

Neighborhood Health and Safety Initiatives -- During 2012, and into 2013, LISC Chicago organized a series of neighborhood assemblies with Dr. Bechara Choucair, commissionerof the Chicago Department of Public Health.

More than 50 community leaders have relayed health-related concerns and suggestions, ranging from violence suppression techniques, to elimination of “food deserts,” to changes in city regulations that prohibit, for instance, the transport of organic compost from one community garden to another.

“We cannot move the needle on our own,” Dr. Choucair told a recent gathering in the North Park neighborhood. “We have to be working with community partners, and a key strategy is working with the LISC New Communities.”

No health issue stirred the city in 2012 – or prompted more discussion at meetings with Dr. Choucair – than youth violence. A major new LISC effort in 2013 will be the Neighborhood Safety Initiative, a three-year pilot with the Chicago Police in two communities. Initial funding is from Allstate Insurance. The idea is to use LISC’s Neighborhood Network in an intensive effort to spur community cooperation with, and dispel mistrust of, the police as they work to prevent and solve violent crimes.

Real Estate Development -- And while real estate investment doesn't by itself "turn around" troubled neighborhoods, it's a key ingredient in many redevelopment efforts. In 2012, LISC Chicago completed $4.67 million in real estate lending, incluiding $640,000 for the 72-unit historic Strand Hotel in Woodlawn; $300,000 for development of LGBT housing in a former police station on the North Side; and $382,000 for new veterans housing in Auburn Gresham.

Thirteen neighborhood teens from seventh through 10th grades tended to the Junior Green Youth Farm last summer, an initiative of LISC Chicago's Elev8 program at Reavis Elementary School.

Gordon Walek

On to 2013!
The above is but a slice of what LISC Chicago was doing in 2012 … and what we’re planning for the remainder of 2013. Suffice it to say, our Neighborhood Network is in place; it has been tested, it works and it is ready to leverage new investments to deliver measureable results.

“For neighborhoods and cities to remain strong,” urges Lori Healey, chair of LISC Chicago’s Board of Advisors, “they must constantly innovate. That innovation often comes from the grassroots. Strong neighborhood networks are often the first to recognize problems, spot opportunities and forge creative solutions.”

It’s what we do.

A Micro-Market Miracle on Central Park?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Orlando Graham could buy a house anywhere.

So why is this college-educated, ex-NBA player and successful security executive looking at a red brick two-flat smack in the middle of an entire block of foreclosed properties on Chicago’s West Side?

“It’s a great opportunity,” explained Graham. “I look to be part of the future. If I get in now, and if John keeps recruiting good people, it changes into something bigger. … It’s all going to come up.”

Artsy plywood windows signal help is on the way for this Franklin Boulevard walk-up, through the city's Micro-Market Recovery Program, of which LISC Chicago is a key partner.

John McCarron

John-the-recruiter-of-good-people is John Groene, director of the West Humboldt Park office of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, or NHS. Operating out of a converted gas station at 3601 W. Chicago Ave., Groene and his small staff have a two-fold mission: 1) help families avoid foreclosure; and 2) save as many foreclosed-and-vacant houses as possible by gaining control, preventing further damage and–hardest of all–finding and helping responsible new owners.

Talk about “mission impossible.”

Like other knowledgeable leaders in the foreclosure fight, Groene admits there’s no way non-profits like NHS–despite their considerable corporate, philanthropic and government support–can, by themselves, stabilize and restore the city’s foreclosure-wracked housing stock. Not when new research shows that one in seven city residences were hit with foreclosure during to 2005-11 mortgage meltdown. Not when research shows that, in ground-zero neighborhoods like West Humboldt, the foreclosure toll was an appalling one in three.

Only a strong rebound by the private real estate market can reverse damage of that scale and magnitude.

The micro approach
That’s why LISC Chicago is helping the City of Chicago and Mayor Rahm Emanuel implement a kind of triage/stimulus strategy called the Micro-Market Recovery Program, or MMRP.

Rather than scatter inadequate public and private resources across the city, or even across entire neighborhoods, MMRP is focusing on just a handful of hard-hit blocks in a handful of hard-hit neighborhoods. These “micro markets” were carefully chosen, however, so they include, or are near, existing public investments that can anchor a wider recovery.

In the case of West Humboldt, one of MMRP’s initial nine target neighborhoods, a rectangular subset of 15 blocks was chosen. Therein are 123 foreclosures … yet the zone is bracketed by the CTA’s Green Line, broad tree-lined boulevards, a revitalizing high school and the magnificent Garfield Park Conservatory.

Located close to the Garfield Park Conservatory, the 500-block of Central Park Avenue fits the city's build-on-strength MMRP strategy.

John McCarron

So when a row of foreclosed and abandoned masonry buildings on the 500 block of North Central Park Avenue, just north of the Conservatory, ended up in demolition court–their windows having been smashed, their plumbing ripped out–NHS obtained Cook County Circuit Court designation as temporary “receiver.”

A rehabber and re-seller of homes and small flats with historic support from the city’s banking industry, NHS is a boots-on-the-ground partner in the MMRP mix. Its hired contractors moved quickly to board up all five two-flats, paint faux-windows on the plywood, clean out interior filth and do some remedial landscaping.

Having spent about $10,000 on each, Groene explained, NHS is now foreclosing on the foreclosers—which is to say, the unresponsive mortgage lenders and/or long-gone owners, none of whom have shown interest in trying to pay back taxes or utility bills, much less repay lien-holding NHS.

If this sounds like a convoluted and time-consuming method for gaining control over blighted and dangerous empties, that’s because it is. Illinois’ judicial foreclosure process is a blessing when it comes to buying time for families to negotiate better mortgage terms, said Groene, but it’s a curse when occupants are long-gone and the lender isn’t stepping up to manage its property.

A buyer’s bargain
So part of Groene’s job, once he finds a prospective buyer, is to keep them enthused about their hoped-for investment while NHS lawyers maneuver in court to gain a clean title for resale.

Fortunately, NHS has a growing list of incentives for patient buyers willing to endure some paperwork. Groene figures Orlando Graham can buy that red-brick two-flat for no more than what NHS paid to save it, plus rehab costs, all rolled into a deeply subsidized purchase/rehab loan of about $120,000 booked through NHS.

Former professional hoopster Orlando Graham could buy anywhere, but he likes the upside he sees for the 500-block.

John McCarron

How deeply subsidized?

Very. A recent city expansion of its tax increment financing program, or TIF, offers loan forgiveness of 25 percent over five years for qualifying owner-occupants. Another subsidy offered by the city’s federally funded Neighborhood Stabilization Program, or NSP, forgives up to half the loan over an owner’s 15-year occupancy.

Yet another subsidy is being offered through the offices of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, a leader in the national fight to win reparations from lenders complicit in the sub-prime mess. Buyers qualifying for the AG’s “City Lift” program can get up to $15,000 in down payment assistance.

All told, said Groene, Graham could end up owning a freshly rehabbed two-flat with monthly mortgage payments considerably less than he’d pay elsewhere on a standard 30-year fixed-rate rate loan.

Still, there’s no guarantee Graham will buy the two-flat. A better deal could materialize any day. So the prospective buyer has been restive … but still pumped.

“It’s an excellent location,” said Graham, who oversees the security force of 175 that guards Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “You have the Chicago Avenue bus which goes right to where I work. There’s the Green Line. The Conservatory, The new Westinghouse College Prep High School. I just want to be part of it.”

Pushing the model
So what’s next for Chicago’s MMRP effort?

Obviously, program partners are looking for a faster way to gain control of abandoned properties so they can be resold, fixed and occupied. One way, Groene said, might be for courts to make greater use of existing state laws allowing cities to seize property considered abandoned and/or a public nuisance. Another would be to acquire batches of properties for bulk resale to carefully screened developers.

John Groene of NHS (left), which manages MMRP, says helping buyers like Orlando Graham is key to solving the foreclosure crisis.

John McCarron

“Single-family foreclosures are the greatest challenge,” said Jack Markowski, a former city housing commissioner, who’s now president of the Community Investment Corporation, a nonprofit specializing in saving larger apartment buildings.

CIC is also part of the turnaround on North Central Park, having recently saved a 17-unit walk-up just around the corner on Franklin Boulevard. The building’s brightly painted plywood “windows” signal that somebody cares. And in fact, a solid developer/owner has been engaged by CIC to turn it around.

“A neighborhood might have four or five foreclosed walk-ups,” said Markowski, who’s part of the MMRP brain trust. “But it’s got hundreds of vacant houses, every one in its own stage of foreclosure or tax delinquency. So how do you get to any scale?”

Little wonder Mercy Portfolio Services, the city’s hired NSP coordinator and another MMRP partner, has switched focus from rehabbing bungalows to turning around foreclosed multi-units. In its third year of federal funding, Mercy has purchased more than 800 foreclosed dwelling units … but has found a lot more qualified renters than buyers. There is, in other words, a nagging shortage of Orlando Grahams.

“We need to have an end-user in mind,” echoed Andrew Mooney, commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing and Economic Development and quarterback of the MMRP effort. “Having the city own these properties is, in many ways, no better than leaving them lender-owned.”

Susana Vasquez, LISC Chicago’s executive director, seconded Mooney, adding that the main challenge “is to cost-effectively create a market of owner-occupants and small investors” for the smaller empties that dot neighborhoods like West Humboldt. Those would include places like Chicago Lawn, where MMRP is helping neighborhood contractors, buyers and the Southwest Organizing Project work with residents as they recover from the foreclosure tsunami.

Slam dunk
Back on Central Park Avenue, John-the-recruiter echoes those concerns with a nod toward the 6-foot, 7-inch Orlando Graham.

“The critical partner in all this is the buyer, the Mr. Grahams,” said Groene. “It’s easy to have someone say ‘I want to buy this building with your subsidy and rent it out.’ But to find people who say ‘I want to buy and live there with my family,’ well, that changes everything. That’s what creates the stability and the buy-in.”

Graham has owned before but never has been a landlord. So he’s signed-up to take a one-day crash course in property management offered by CIC.

“It’s been a process with the whole foreclosure thing,” said Graham. A second-round NBA draft pick in 1988, he played a season for Golden State before finishing his roundball career on the European circuit.

“You get impatient,” he admits. “John tells me to check in once a week. But I’m ready to go. It’s a great block … a great opportunity.”

More information:

Jack Swenson, LISC MMRP coordinator, (312) 422-9574

John Groene, NHS, (773) 533-5570 jgroene@nhschicago.org

New Pillars Lend Support to Woodlawn Renewal

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Woodlawn is rising again … though the challenges, like gravity, seem never to go away.

Its comeback slowed by the Great Recession, its people saddened by the death of a beloved leader, the storied South Side neighborhood is rallying around an ambitious housing development and other locally driven plans for safer streets and better schools.

The Rev. Dr. Byron T. Brazier has followed in the considerable footsteps of his father, Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, while bringing his own business background to his role as chair of the Network of Woodlawn.

John McCarron

There’s a new thrust, too, coming from a native son determined to see his father’s vision come true.

But the Rev. Dr. Byron T. Brazier goes about the work a bit differently than did his father, Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, who built Apostolic Church of God into one of the city’s largest and most influential congregations.

Perhaps that’s because Byron Brazier, before returning to help his father manage the 22,000-member church in the late ’90s, first honed considerable management skills working for Johnson & Johnson, IBM Corporation and then his own consulting firm.

Bishop Brazier, who passed in October of 2010, had woven a network of intensely personal relationships that stretched from movers and shakers such as former Mayor Richard M. Daley, to the bus drivers and beat cops on 63^rd Street. In the ’60s he founded The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) to fight urban renewal abuses. Later he worked with the city and the University of Chicago on a succession of community redevelopment efforts and was closely involved with LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program (NCP).

Byron Brazier shares his father’s fire, though he also brings a gift for organization that might be just what Woodlawn needs at this stage of its redevelopment. Dr. Brazier chairs the Network of Woodlawn, or NOW, which has succeeded the NCP/Woodlawn coordinating team as the neighborhood’s NCP flagship.

“You can’t pitch a program into a community if there’s no catcher,” Dr. Brazier says of the need for any struggling neighborhood to have a central node for community input and a point of entry outside investment. “So when you go to Woodlawn, you know whom to talk to.”

The four pillars
But it’s not that simple.

The Network of Woodlawn's Wesley Walker and the University of Chicago's Will Towns foresee continued renewed growth along 63rd Street.

John McCarron

Not when one-third of Woodlawn children still live in what’s officially described as “deep” poverty and when nine of its elementary schools face sanctions for missing state targets on standardized tests.

Not when gun-related youth violence continues to weigh on all aspects of life, what with 42 murders in the neighborhood last year compared to 36 in 2011 … and another three just in the first month of 2013.

Not when many longtime homeowners view with some suspicion the subsidized housing being built and rehabbed hereabouts – the source, they claim, of many of the neighborhood’s problems.

So complex are the challenges that Dr. Brazier and his NOW board determined early on that the typical soup-to-nuts organizational format wouldn’t work for this new community development corporation. In order to attract more outside investment – public investment, private investment, philanthropic investment – and to better manage those investments, NOW is being set up as an umbrella overseeing four distinct non-profit subsidiaries, each with discreet but mutually supporting budgets, goals and strategies.

The four “pillars” of NOW are:

Bill Eager of the Preservation of Affordable Housing, Inc., says partnerships are remaking Woodlawn.

John McCarron

Education – Centered on the Woodlawn Children’s Promise Community, a joint effort with the U. of C. and others to upgrade the neighborhood’s so-so public schools. Children’s Promise will encompass all stages of human development, from pre-natal nurturing to post-graduate career placement, all modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City.

Public safety – Centered on the Woodlawn Public Safety Alliance, created last year as an antidote to increasing youth violence. Most shootings occur south of 63^rd Street and west of Cottage Grove Avenue, but the shadow of violence threatens to erode the entire community’s sense of wellbeing.

Health & Human Services – A broad, multi-partner effort to deal with challenges ranging from asthma (the leading cause of school non-attendance) to binge drinking to the unavailability of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Community Development – Centered on a new Woodlawn Partnership for Economic Development, the effort aims to “incubate, initiate and coordinate” a stable economic foundation for the community. Consultants are doing an inventory and outlining possibilities that build on the 2005 NCP quality-of-life plan.

Beneath the pillars
It’s all very ambitious, to be sure, but Dr. Brazier has chosen well the person who’ll be coordinating the effort full-time. Wesley Walker, once a program officer for LISC Chicago, has returned from a tour of community development work in the Twin Cities to take over as Network of Woodlawn’s executive director.

A decade ago Walker helped roll out NCP. Now, he suggests, Woodlawn’s new approach may prove a viable model for other local NCP affiliates as they move into the looser-but-wider New Communities network.

POAH's Felicia Dawson helps families return to Woodlawn Park.

John McCarron

The danger, of course, is the complexity of administering five distinct organizations – NOW plus the pillars – whose partners and constituencies are sure to overlap. But Walker, like Dr. Brazier, predicts the benefits will outweigh any difficulties.

For one thing, both argue, grant-makers generally prefer to support issue-specific programs with defined goals and measured outcomes, as opposed to umbrella groups like NOW with a more comprehensive outlook. For another, NOW is setting up to provide “back office” support to all four subsidiaries, minimizing bureaucratic drag.

The NOW experiment is being watched closely, to be sure, by several funders and partners including LISC Chicago’s Executive Director Susana Vasquez. She might have preferred a simpler organizational model but respects the local vision to not only continue promoting comprehensive planning, but to begin building the organizational infrastructure for comprehensive implementation.

“Other neighborhoods like Humboldt Park have several nonprofit organizations that take on the tasks of the pillars model,” says Vasquez. “No one organization can serve all the needs for a community. There is value to building that infrastructure and, from the start, thinking of back office issues and programmatic coordination.”

Well-connected
Byron Brazier is a close confidante of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Dr. Brazier co-chaired the mayor’s transition committee and is an Emanuel appointee to the Public Building Commission. He also chairs the aforementioned Children’s Promise Community and is on the board of several influential civic groups such as Metropolis Strategies and the Metropolitan Planning Council.

See a larger version of this chart.

Not that Dr. Brazier is a fan of everything coming down the pipe from City Hall. He doesn’t hide his skepticism, for instance, about a forthcoming city concept plan to convert many of the vacant lots in west Woodlawn and nearby Washington Park into community gardens, ball fields and other open space amenities.

Byron Brazier has a larger vision for Woodlawn. Granted it may never regain the 81,000 folks who called it home back in 1960, before white flight and a half-century of neglect reduced that number by two-thirds. But its location – on the lakefront, next to one of the world’s great universities, bracketed by first class parks and public transit – makes it a natural for what he sees as an inevitable next wave of real estate development.

“We’re not about managing people in their poverty,” said the 62-year-old doctor of ministry from the prestigious McCormick Theological Seminary. “We have the poor. Now we need to balance with the middle class. Everyone wins.”

Then again, other leaders who had input to the city’s forthcoming Green & Healthy land use plan for the mid-South Side – including Ald. Willie Cochran (20^th) and the U. of C.-affiliated Southeast Chicago Commission – are sure to seek Dr. Brazier’s support, especially on the plan’s call for commercial redevelopment of transit “nodes” such as 63^rd and Cottage Grove.

Choice development
The embodiment of Dr. Brazier’s more densely populated vision is rising along both sides of Cottage Grove north of 63^rd Street. Where a worn-out warren of low-income housing known as Grove Parc once stood, now rises Woodlawn Park, a stylish, post-modern mix of affordable apartments and town houses.

The developer is the Boston-based non-profit POAH (for Preservation of Affordable Housing, Inc.) and its work is underwritten not just by federal rent subsidies and tax credits but by an innovative companion grant called the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. The idea behind HUD’s first-ever Choice grant is to amplify the impact of Woodlawn Park by leveraging ripples of revitalization across the entire neighborhood.

Woodlawn Park, a stylish, post-modern mix of affordable apartments and town houses, now rises where the rundown Grove Parc once stood.

Gordon Walek

One example of that: a homebuyer support program that aims to bring 80 middle-class families into the mix. All of Grove Parc’s original 504 subsidized apartments will be replaced. Many are located in existing but newly rehabbed apartment buildings not far from the LEED-certified new construction along Cottage Grove. Other initiatives funded in part by the $32.5 million Choice grant include plans for a Center for Working Families satellite managed by Metropolitan Family Services, plus support for the Network of Woodlawn along with its education and public safety initiatives.

“What the Choice grant did was force us out of our silos,” said Felicia Dawson, who manages tenant relations for POAH at Woodlawn Park. “We’ve got the social services working hand-in-glove with property management, the youth programs working with the schools, the university with the community.”

Dawson has her hands full, however, diffusing the fears of some longtime residents, especially homeowners, leery of so many rent-subsidized families moving nearby.

“We’re infuriated,” said Corey Howard, a homeowner and block club president of 6100 S. St. Lawrence Avenue. “You’ve got thousands coming here on Section 8 or on [rent] vouchers, lots of 18-year-old kids raising kids, so the market-rate renters are going someplace else, … and the owners, they’re losing their investment.”

POAH’s Dawson begs to differ, arguing that the rehab and re-occupation of West Woodlawn’s foreclosed and vacant walk-ups is stabilizing an at-risk neighborhood.

Maroon magic
Less obvious but no less real, Dawson said, has been a coming together of east and west Woodlawn. Too often they were “like the Hatfields and McCoys,” with folks west of Cottage feeling they were passed over in favor of the more well-endowed east.

Bill Eager, POAH vice-president for Chicago operations, lays much of the program’s success to President Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago and his vice president for civic engagement, Derek Douglas.

“We’ve got the social services working hand-in-glove with property management, the youth programs working with the schools, the university with the community,” said Felicia Dawson, who manages tenant relations for POAH at Woodlawn Park.

Gordon Walek

For instance, the university was quick to chime in with $1 million in support of the recently announced Gigabit Neighborhood Gateway Program. Coupled with a $2 million state grant, the plan is to connect Woodlawn and other mid-South neighborhoods into a college-centric broadband network that eventually will serve nearly 80,000 households.

Eager also welcomes the school’s encouragement of employees to rent market-rate units at Woodlawn Park or, better yet, buy Woodlawn two- or three-flats through the school’s Employer Assisted Housing program. The university is also a mainstay of the Children’s Promise school program and is expected soon to announce construction of a charter school on 63^rd Street.

“There’s nothing but opportunity on these blocks,” said Will Towns, who recently left the city’s program to rehab foreclosed homes to help the U. of C. do redevelopment near the campus. “Look at the quality of the housing stock. Look at the amenities nearby. Opportunities are everywhere, only now we have the community partners to get things done.”

To one degree or another, LISC Chicago has seeded much of what’s happening in Woodlawn. From its 10-year backing of NOW and its NCP antecedents to predevelopment loans on Woodlawn Park; from loans and equity investments on some 500 homes elsewhere in the neighborhood to its technical and financial support of the Choice Neighborhoods and Children’s Promise applications, LISC has been there.

It may well be, though, as the New Communities platform expands across the city to become a wider network of tools and relationships, that Network of Woodlawn is, in a way, paying it back by becoming a viable model for NCP’s next phase. Not the only model, perhaps, but one capable of making real the dreams of an earlier generation of community leaders, beginning with those of the late Bishop Arthur Brazier.

More information: Wesley Walker, NOW, wwalker@ncpwoodlawn.org

SWOP receives $750,000 MacArthur award

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:00:00 -0600

The Southwest Organizing Project, LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program lead agency in Chicago Lawn, has received a $750,000 award from the MacArthur Foundation in recognition of its efforts to help residents overcome foreclosures and violence.

Each red dot on this 2009 map represents a foreclosed home in the 60629 zip code, which includes Chicago Lawn.

SWOP

That’s big money for a scrappy outfit like SWOP, whose 15 employees work in a warren of rooms amid banged-up furniture on the second floor of a building at 2609 W. 63rd St. Some of the money, says SWOP Executive Director Jeff Bartow, will be used to find larger quarters for the nonprofit’s offices.

Chicago Lawn is, in many respects, ground zero for the city’s foreclosure crisis. Too many of the neighborhood’s sturdy brick two-flats and bungalows are boarded up and abandoned – their former owners victims of subprime mortgages, unemployment and other residual effects of the 2008 financial meltdown.

SWOP, without a lot of help, has been a lonely advocate for those at the bottom of the economic food chain – working people who’d scrimped and saved to realize the dream of home ownership only to have it yanked from under them by forces beyond their control. Through community organizing, foreclosure counseling, and other efforts, SWOP’s doing what it can to alleviate the suffering.

In 2009, SWOP worked with Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago and the Bank of America on loan modification applications for residents fighting to save their homes.

David McDowell

For more than 10 years, LISC Chicago, with support from the MacArthur Foundation and others, has provided grants and community planning skills to SWOP and its partners to address problems in the areas of education, safety and foreclosure. For the last year, SWOP and LISC Chicago have been developing a program that will allow the organization to more effectively and efficiently match vacant properties with interested local buyers and help them arrange reasonable financing.

Like its more famous “genius” awards, MacArthur’s Award for Creative and Effective Institutions (SWOP was one of 13 institutions in five countries to receive it on February 27) doesn’t stem from a nomination or a recommendation. To qualify, organizations must have demonstrated “exceptional creativity and effectiveness,” among other things, been a previous MacArthur grantee, and engaged in work central to one of MacArthur’s core programs. MacArthur long ago identified foreclosures as a major societal ill and has been supporting creative solutions to the problem.

As an award winner, SWOP’s in impressive company. Other awardees include StoryCorps ($1 million), which captures, shares (via public radio) and archives stories of a diverse range of Americans for future generations (and will be in Chicago this spring); the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University ($750,000), which protects the rights and well-being of young people in the juvenile justice system; and the Housing Partnership Network ($1.5 million), a Boston-based organization that fosters collaboration among more than 100 affordable housing and community development leaders. See descriptions of all winners and videos about their work.

CNDA 2013: Getting Engaged, Healthy and Strong

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Chicago and its neighborhoods have reached an “inflection point” where problems once considered too difficult to address are being analyzed with an eye toward investments critical to their solution.

So while Mayor Rahm Emanuel praised the winning brick-and-mortar projects saluted at the 19th annual Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards, he also challenged the audience of community development practitioners and funders to do even more.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel praised the winners at the 19th annual Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards--and challenged community builders to do more to improve their neighborhoods.

Eric Young Smith

Most of all, the mayor urged the 1,500 who came to the Chicago Hilton & Towers on Feb. 13 to reach out to young people “whose optimism and youthfulness have been taken from them.”

For the city to succeed, the mayor said, these disaffected teenagers and young adults need to “see themselves as sharing in the success of our global city.”

Emanuel did not specifically address the wave of lethal violence that has shaken neighborhoods on the West and South sides, nor did he elaborate on the painful proposal – released earlier that day – to close more than 120 underutilized schools. But as he spoke of “hard decisions,” of “investing in the right things” and of “bridging the difference” between blunted aspirations in the neighborhoods compared to the energy building downtown, the context was broadly appreciated.

Earlier in the evening Susana Vasquez, executive director of LISC Chicago, which hosts the event, also called for “stretching ourselves.”

“What will make us stronger as a city in the months and years ahead is stretching ourselves to build new relationships with people and parts of the city that are not as familiar, and forging new coalitions," said Vasquez. "That's how we are going to break through on some of these toughest issues: by continuing to push ourselves to build trust."

Julia Stasch, Vice President of US Programs at the MacArthur Foundation, received the Richard M. Daley Friend of the Neighborhoods Award.

Eric Young Smith

In the same vein, Lori Healey, board chair of LISC Chicago and of this year’s CNDA, called on the community development faithful to “take a closer look at the emerging challenges and opportunities facing Chicago.”

Healthy & Strong
Before the awards ceremony, which is held annually to celebrate outstanding projects and achievements in the city’s neighborhoods, a panel of health experts discussed what it takes achieve “Healthy neighborhoods/Strong city” – this year’s CNDA theme. But upfront it was made achingly clear that some neighborhoods are a lot healthier than others.

Dr. Steve Whitman, director of the Sinai Urban Health Institute, cited a string of data points showing that Chicago has work to do, especially in neighborhoods of color:

Life expectancy among blacks in Chicago is eight years less than for whites (71 years vs. 79) with, for instance, residents of affluent Lakeview outliving those in West Garfield Park by 14 years on average, or 83 vs. 69 years.
The infant mortality rate among Chicago blacks is roughly three times that for whites.
Diabetes has reached epidemic levels in minority neighborhoods such as Humboldt Park, where it now afflicts 21 percent of the population, versus “only” 8 percent citywide … which is bad enough.

"That's how we are going to break through on some of these toughest issues: by continuing to push ourselves to build trust," said Susana Vasquez, executive director of LISC Chicago.

Eric Young Smith

Panelist Jeff Bartow, executive director of the Southwest Organizing Project, said the Great Recession and epidemic of home foreclosures has forced people to make dreadful trade-offs. “Should I buy my diabetes medicine or pay my mortgage. What kind of choices are those?”

Dr. Stephanie Whyte, chief health officer for the Chicago Public Schools, made the point that health and learning are directly linked. Fewer than 10 percent of CPS students have had their vision checked before kindergarten, she said. Sexually-transmitted infections are so rampant among 13- to 24-year-olds that Cook County ranks first in the nation for gonorrhea and syphilis, second for chlamydia.

Mike Tomas, executive director of the Garfield Park Community Council, said access to quality food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, is a key to tackling the twin problems of obesity and diabetes. One innovation: a Garfield Park Garden Network of more than 30 community gardens plus a year-round greenhouse funded by Kraft Foods.

In summary, moderator Dr. Cheryl Whitaker, chair of the Illinois Health Information Exchange Authority, urged everyone at the Forum to “get more involved … to engage locally with our elected officials … get involved at the local level on the streets we live on.”

Panelist Jeff Bartow, executive director of the Southwest Organizing Project, talked about the epidemic of foreclosures in his part of the city and others.

Eric Young Smith

Neighborhood winners
The people and projects honored as 2012’s best all exemplified, in one way or another, the dynamic process of getting engaged, getting healthy and getting strong.

The winners were:

The Chicago Community Trust Outstanding Community Strategy of the Year Award
Growing Home Inc. for Urban Farms in Englewood
The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Outstanding Non-Profit Neighborhood Real Estate Project
Lawndale Christian Health Center for Lawndale Christian Health and Fitness Center
The Polk Bros. Foundation Affordable Rental Housing Preservation Award
5T Management and Community Investment Corporation for 5800 S. Michigan

“People like us need to get more involved … to engage locally with our elected officials … get involved at the local level on the streets we live on," said Dr. Cheryl R. Whitaker, chair of the Illinois Health Information Exchange Authority.

Eric Young Smith

The Outstanding For-Profit Neighborhood Real Estate Project Award
Baum Development for the Green Exchange
Special Recognition Award
Black Ensemble Theater Cultural Center
The Richard H. Driehaus Awards for Architectural Excellence in Community Design
      First Place – Urbanworks, Ltd. For La Casa Student Housing
      Second Place – Pappageorge Haymes Partners/Koo and Associates, Ltd. For Park Douglas
      Third Place – JGMA for the UNO Soccer Academy
The PrivateBank Norman Bobins Leadership Award
Modesto Tico Valle, Center on Halsted
The Richard M. Daley Friend of the Neighborhood Award
Julia M. Stasch, vice president of US programs, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

A Safe Place to Play

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:00:00 -0600

At first glance, there’s no confusing the kids and adults exercising in the middle of the closed-off streets with, say, the buff and cut human specimens seen in advertisements for health clubs and spas.

No, these streets – in Pilsen, Little Village, Brighton Park, Woodlawn, Chicago Lawn and South Chicago, closed off to traffic at intervals through the PlayStreets program – and these people, are a million figurative miles from the Ballys, the East Bank Clubs, perhaps even the Ys.

A simple jump rope provided plenty of physical activity to these young people at a PlayStreets event in Chicago Lawn last fall.

Tony Giron for Active Transportation Alliance

But their purpose is fundamentally the same – to get the body parts moving, the heart rate up, the pounds off. Oh, and for the neighborhood folks, to avoid getting shot in the process.

PlayStreets, a strategy begun last summer and spearheaded by Chicago’s Department of Public Health, periodically closed off city streets for three-hour intervals in designated neighborhoods so residents – kids and adults – would have safe places to play outside. LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program agencies and partners in those neighborhoods, such as Gads Hill Center in Pilsen, plus the Active Transportation Alliance and World Sport Chicago, developed the programming and helped turn out the crowds.

The activities – ranging from exercise and Zumba classes to hula hoop contests, basketball games and matches with giant chess pieces – are ostensibly designed to address the obesity epidemic that’s wreaking all kinds of health problems in poor and rich neighborhoods alike. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois (BCBSIL) is the sole funder of this public health initiative.

Recently, PlayStreets organizers gathered to analyze the 48 PlayStreets sessions that occurred last summer and fall and discuss plans for additional street closings when activities resume this spring.

A stranger might not think the process of shutting a few blocks down to traffic and getting kids and their parents to shake a leg would be all that big a deal. But in Chicago, it is.

“Just the idea of parents and kids being in a public play space is a very big deal,” said Rob Castañeda, executive director of Beyond the Ball, a Little Village-based organization that builds stronger communities through youth engagement in sports and play.

Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Bechara Choucair, Beyond the Ball's Rob Castaneda, and Claretian Associates' Jackie Samuel and Graciela Robledo at a PlayStreets event in Pilsen last September.

Gordon Walek

And it’s not necessarily because people would rather be inside, watching TV and eating snacks. In many neighborhoods, safe public play spaces just aren’t available. Some communities, such as Little Village, have very little park space. And in those that have parks, getting there often involves crossing gang boundaries and other urban barriers that threaten physical safety and well-being.

“Some of our neighborhoods have the highest crime rates in the world,” said Castañeda. “When you talk about public health in our city, to say that it’s about exercise is only a small part of the picture.”

For Jackie Samuel, the New Communities Program director at Claretian Associates who helped organize activities in South Chicago, PlayStreets is about “giving people permission” to come out and play.

“My target was adults,” she said. “If they’re not out there, that’s really important. It’s a no-brainer for kids to be out there, but they need their parents to approve.”

In other words, this program is about way more than exercise. It’s about safety and social cohesion and opening streets to the residents who live on them. And implementing such a program is, well, complicated.

In South Chicago, for example, Samuel helped organize PlayStreets events in four “zones” (i.e. areas of gang turf). For purposes of consistency and predictability, it would have been easier to have the events on the same block in the same zone every week. But that would have precluded people from other zones who feared crossing those gang boundaries from participating.

At PlayStreets events, even cerebral games like chess take on a physical fitness dimension, as these youngsters in Pilsen demonstrate.

Gordon Walek

“I’m trying to blend the borders,” said Samuel, to open the neighborhood up to everyone. “But that takes time. Jobs or sports are the only ways to cross those borders.”

Castañeda agreed. “How,” he asked, “do we take the culture in this place and bring it to other blocks?’

That’s just one of the challenges that PlayStreets will face when it resumes with Spring-PlayStreets, scheduled from March 25-29 during Chicago Public Schools spring break. The single-day events will feature at least three hours of continuous physical activity, including sports, play games and other group activities identified by the neighborhood-based partners. Up to six PlayStreets events will be scheduled.

The PlayStreets events last fall attracted 2,900 youngsters and 800 adults. According to data gathered by the partner organizations, 44 percent of the kids were “rigorously active” during their PlayStreets experience, as were 30 percent of the adults. Seventy percent of all participants were active as opposed to sedentary.

“It was purposeful,” said Samuel. “We got people who ordinarily don’t participate in these things.”

The question now for the PlayStreets organizers is how to get even more people out for future events.

Ryan Priester, NCP organizer with the Network of Woodlawn, who worked on PlayStreets in that neighborhood (and scheduled events in schools and a parking lot, as opposed to shutting down streets), recommended enlisting the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Park District as organizers, hosts and providers.

“Families have made it clear they need this to continue,” he said. “This is our [Woodlawn’s] first venture into athletic mentoring for kids. We need something year-round and we need long-term commitments. Because what happens when this stops?”

Bookman Exits LISC Chicago

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Eric Young Smith

Joel Bookman, LISC Chicago’s director of programs, is leaving the organization on January 31 to return to his consulting practice in economic and community development and strategic planning.

In his eight years at LISC Chicago, Bookman served in numerous capacities, including director of the New Communities Program and, from 2010-2011, acting co-executive director of the Chicago office. He also was instrumental in creating the Institute for Comprehensive Community Development and was its managing director for two years.

Prior to joining LISC Chicago, Bookman had been a consultant to the company for 16 years, and as executive director of the Lawrence Avenue Development Corporation, was among the recipients of LISC Chicago’s first grants back in 1980.

“On behalf of LISC Chicago, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Joel for his valuable service to comprehensive community development in Chicago’s neighborhoods,” said Susana Vasquez, LISC Chicago’s executive director, in a note to her staff. “We wish him well in his future endeavors.”

NCP Groups Gain Voice in School Closings

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Spurred in part by the threat of school closings, groups in neighborhoods served by LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program (NCP) are organizing like never before to influence district decision-making.

Chicago plans to drastically reduce the number of its schools this year in the wake of a budget crisis and dwindling enrollment. Four NCP neighborhoods – Bronzeville, Englewood, Humboldt Park and North Lawndale – have formed Community Action Councils to provide input on school closings and other actions at the district's urging.

Logan Square Neighborhood Association has formed the Logan Square School Facilities Council to protest replacement of neighborhood schools with those that have selective or lottery enrollment. They're especially alarmed about an alderman’s proposal to transform under-enrolled Ames Middle School, into a military academy.

Juan Francisco Hernandez

At the same time, other NCP neighborhoods not in immediate danger of school closings are organizing to influence the district's 10-year plan for investing in school facilities, due in draft this month. The North River Commission in Albany Park, for instance, wants sufficient seats in a variety of magnet programs.

In recent years, NCP groups have become a growing force in education organizing as well as a stabilizing force in a changing district, observed Chris Brown, LISC Chicago’s NCP director.

"In the past five years, Chicago Public Schools has had five CEOs, rapid turnover of principals and central office staff and two district reorganizations,” he said. “At the same time only one executive director of an NCP lead agency has left."

NCP groups are able to sustain relationships with parents and teachers, consistent programming in schools and the momentum for school improvement, he said. "They are the institutional memory."

Some wonder, however, how much influence NCP groups will ultimately wield on school closings or other decisions.

Lead agencies from New Communities Program neighborhood provide institutional memory to the education planning process, says Chris Brown, NCP director and former education director at LISC Chicago.

Gordon Walek

“You are always hopeful, but you know that CPS has a tendency to do exactly what they want to do,” remarked Bernita Johnson-Gabriel, executive director of the Quad Communities Development Corp. CPS, she noted, initiated the Bronzeville Community Action Council and asked QCDC to participate.

“The good news is that we’ve been at the table together,” Johnson-Gabriel added, explaining that district staff attend council meetings and provide needed data.

NCP groups have already influenced the board's thinking on community decision-making, said Bill Gerstein, special projects manager for the district's Office of Family and Community Engagement.

The idea for Community Action Councils came from observing the intensive, community-wide education planning carried out by two NCP groups – The Resurrection Project, which organized the Pilsen Education Task Force, and the Network of Woodlawn, which launched the Woodlawn Promise Community, said Gerstein.

And when CPS decided to open a new high school in Back of the Yards, the district reached out to an NCP education committee to bring community members into the planning process, said Craig Chico, executive director of Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council.

“With our NCP education committee, we were bringing all the stakeholders and community residents together, anyway,” he said. “So it was a natural fit.”

School closings

Eric Young Smith

In 2002, the district began closing low-performing and under-enrolled neighborhood schools, often replacing them with magnet or specialty schools that drew students from outside the neighborhood.

These closings were done with little community input, however, other than an emotionally charged, last-minute hearing at CPS’s Clark Street headquarters before the school board made its final decision.

"It was frustrating," said Tracie Worthy, NCP director at Lawndale Christian Development Corp. "People felt like their opinions and thoughts didn't matter. Somebody else made the decision and you had to react to it."

In 2010, Bob Runcie, a chief district administrator overseeing school closings, decided that the community needed a greater voice in those decisions but also more information. “He noticed a lot of parents didn't know their schools were underperforming and underutilized,” Gerstein said.

Runcie thought that the planning done by Pilsen and Woodlawn seemed like the right model for getting community input. The new Office of Family and Community Engagement, organized under Runcie's leadership, began reaching out to community organizations to form the Community Action Councils. Some of the first organizations they approached were lead NCP agencies, said Gerstein.

“These were community-based organizations deeply embedded in the community that represented the community,” Gerstein explained. “You've got a lot more cohesion [than some other neighborhoods] because they’ve already done the work, they’ve brought a lot of stakeholders to the table, they’ve got a quality-of-life plan,” he added. “What we tried to tease out of them was more specific education plans.”

Prior to the establishment of the Community Action Councils in partnership with LISC, Chicago Public Schools often seemed to be unconcerned about community input, says Tracie Worthy (center), NCP director at Lawndale Christian Development Corp.

Gordon Walek

Community Action Councils from three NCP neighborhoods were among those who submitted education plans to the board in September and October 2011 (North Lawndale will do so in 2013).

Bronzeville's plan included launching the rigorous International Baccalaureate program at more schools and magnet programs at neighborhood schools in each quadrant of the community. East Humboldt Park's plan covered birth to high school graduation and included all-day preschool, classes for high school credit in middle school, and the option to enroll in college classes during high school.

Changing leadership stalled progress on the plans. Begun during CEO Ron Huberman's tenure, the plans were completed and presented in fall 2011 to his successor, Jean-Claude Brizard. But he never responded to the councils, leaving many frustrated.

But the new Chicago schools chief, CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, already has met with the councils and in early November appointed a nine-person School Utilization Commission, including civic leaders, retired school employees and an elementary school parent to review their proposals.

To provide time for that review, the state legislature agreed to extend the district’s deadline from December 1 to March 31 to report on its plan for school closings, consolidations and other school actions that would go into effect at the end of the current school year.

Budget shortfalls
The district’s push to close an increasing number of neighborhood schools comes in the wake of city budget shortfalls and declining population. Chicago Public Schools has space in its 681 schools for 500,000 students but an enrollment of only 400,000.

Mike Rodriguez (center), executive director at Enlace Chicago in Little Village, said his agency--which doesn't have a formal Community Action Council--has been organizing to transform one of its under-enrolled schools into an early education center.

Gordon Walek

Bronzeville has 32 under-enrolled schools, according to the district, and soon its Community Action Council will need to recommend which should close or remain open. It will also insist, however, that schools receiving displaced students have adequate resources, such as computer labs and school libraries, said Johnson-Gabriel of QCDC. "You're going to save operating money [by closing a school] so at least some of it should be invested in the receiving site."

North Lawndale Community Action Council, organized by Lawndale Christian Development Corp., found out from the district that all but one of its eight neighborhood schools under-enrolled. The council asked neighborhood principals to write a plan for housing more than one school in a building.

The growing number of charter and other specialty schools with citywide enrollment is also contributing to the shrinking of neighborhood school enrollments, noted Betty Green, a retired principal and nonprofit leader who is North Lawndale Community Action Council's co-chair. In addition to its eight neighborhood schools, North Lawndale has five charter schools, she said.

Enlace Chicago in Little Village, which does not have a community action council, has been organizing to transform one of its under-enrolled schools into an early education center, said Executive Director Mike Rodriguez. The center would include childcare for infants and toddlers, preschool, all-day kindergarten and afterschool programs.

In Albany Park, the North River Commission launched what Executive Director Perry Gunn calls “an unofficial community action council” last spring to set an agenda for improving education in the neighborhood. A chief concern: ensuring the district’s master facilities plan includes sufficient seats in magnet programs, magnet schools and other specialty schools to suit a variety of student interests, including technology and the arts.

“The North River Commission has had CPS officials at meetings in the past, but this has been a very intentional effort on [our] part to be at the table while plans are unfolding,” said Gunn.

Logan Square Neighborhood Association, meanwhile, declined to start a community action council. Instead it organized local school council members to form the Logan Square School Facilities Council. That council is protesting the replacement of under-performing or under-enrolled neighborhood schools with those having selective or lottery enrollment, said Joanna Brown, LSNA's lead education organizer.

North River Commission in Albany Park is working hard to ensure that enough magnet and other specialty schools exist to suit a range of student interests, such as technology and the arts, according to Perry Gunn, executive director.

They are alarmed in particular about an alderman’s proposal to transform Ames Middle School, which is at 60 percent of its enrollment capacity, into a military academy.

“The resources are going to specialized schools and schools that have citywide attendance areas. We see a real disinterest in improving neighborhood [schools]," said Brown.

School opening
Back of the Yards doesn’t have any under-enrolled schools to target for closing. Instead, the 30 members of its NCP education committee are working closely with CPS officials on a more desirable task – opening the neighborhood’s first high school in September 2013.

In late October 2012, Southwest Side High School Network Chief Liz Kirby and her deputy sat down in an elementary school conference room with education committee members, who include neighborhood nonprofits, residents and school principals.

Members discussed the school’s proposed curriculum, its admission procedures and especially safety in and around the new school building.

“I think you have some good ideas,” said Kirby, “getting the [police] commander here, even [the man] who places the safe passage workers.”

Later, Kirby said that having the NCP committee in place was a huge advantage in planning the high school. “You get a sense of what the community wants – their needs, their concerns, the resources they bring to developing a new school.”

It also helps city entities to coordinate services, she added. Since the community’s plan calls for park district programs in the school after hours and a strong police presence to ensure safety, “This provides a place for the police department, the park, to work in concert.”

Kirby even invited two members of the education committee to join the five-person team that selected the high school’s first principal.

“It seems like some doors have been opened to us [in] becoming an NCP neighborhood,” remarked Craig Chico of Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, the NCP lead agency. “[It] helped us learn the model of collaboration that that brought so many voices from the community together and made one a louder, stronger voice.”

Manufacturing Skills Go Regional ... and Personal

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 12:00:00 -0600

Khalelah Ervin has been bounced around by the Great Recession long enough to know you can’t be sure about much of anything these days.

Except for one thing: “I know when I get out of here, I’ll be a CNC machinist. I know that.”

“Here” is the manufacturing skills program operated by the Jane Addams Resource Corp. on Chicago’s North Side. A “CNC machinist” is someone who can set up and operate a hugely sophisticated device that churns out complex metal parts with speed and precision.

CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control. A CNC-qualified machinist can expect to earn at least $15-an-hour to start with full benefits – a wage that can double after a brief apprenticeship period.

One thing Ervin may not know, however, is that she’s at the cutting edge of what Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s top economic advisors are calling “Strategy No. 1” for creating economic growth and jobs.

“Become a leading advanced manufacturing hub” is the first of 10 primary recommendations made by World Business Chicago in its 2012 “Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs” commissioned by Emanuel. And by “advanced manufacturing,” the panel of experts means exactly the sort of thing Ervin is learning to do.

She won’t be bolting together parts on some assembly line. That kind of semi-skilled manufacturing is still migrating overseas. Instead she’ll be programming computer-guided machine-tools that spin and cut blank steel into precision parts with tolerances as small as three thousandths (.003) of an inch.

A growth sector
Sure, manufacturing has taken a hit over the past three decades. The sector was hit again during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, and many people think it’s all but disappeared.

JARC Executive Director Guy Loudon leads sector-aligned training of the sort that World Business Chicago has recommended.

John McCarron

Not so. The Chicago region, with its skilled-but-aging metal-bending workforce and matchless transportation infrastructure, has clung stubbornly to high value-added enterprises such as computer-assisted machine tooling. We still make the machines that make the machines.

The WBC report found that manufacturing still adds $54 billion-a-year to the Chicago area’s GRP or gross regional product – second only to real estate sales and development. And while only 5 percent of the region’s workforce is engaged in making stuff, momentum in “advanced manufacturing” is powering a 3.3 percent annual growth rate -- a pace exceeding that of the region’s overall economy.

“A renaissance is anticipated in manufacturing toward more advanced products and processes,” the WBC experts predicted. This will entail “adoption of innovative, cutting-edge science and technology, usually executed by relatively high-skilled workers who receive above-average wages.”

But therein lays a problem. Skilled older workers are retiring in droves and too few young workers have the desire or the preparation to take their place. Strange as it may seem, what with unemployment rates stubbornly high, area manufacturers have trouble finding entry-level workers with basic skills.

Several education and training efforts have been launched recently. Among them are the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council (CMRC) which has partnered with Chicago Public Schools to create the Austin Polytechnic Academy on the Far West Side; and an expanded program in advanced manufacturing at Harper College in Palatine that’s funded in part by a recent $12.9 million grant from U.S. Department of Labor.

A working model
Doubtless those are worthy programs. But it may well be that the Jane Addams model comes closest to meeting the here-and-now needs of not only Chicago’s unskilled-but-eager-to-learn unemployed … but also area manufacturers scrambling for skilled help.

Trainer Daniel Sanders explains how to operate a computer-guided milling machine.

John McCarron

“The work we do at JARC is demand-driven,” explains Executive Director Guy Loudon. “We’re responsive to what’s going on in advanced manufacturing … and that’s true of our coursework, our hands-on-competencies and attainment of industry credentials.”

The centerpiece is JARC’s Careers in Manufacturing Program. It trains unemployed adults, including dropouts and ex-offenders, in CNC machining, welding and general manufacturing skills such as milling, punch press, forklift operation and, of course, safety. In 2012, 75 graduates were placed in good-paying jobs, many with name-brand manufacturers, from Navistar and Electro-Motive to Federal Mogul and Caterpillar. One-year retention rates approach 100 percent.

The key, says Loudon, is keeping in touch with what the market needs. One way JARC does this is by delivering some of its training to existing employees, either on-location at their plants or in JARC’s training facility at 4229 N. Honore St. in the Ravenswood Industrial Corridor. On-site training, in close collaboration with supervisors and foremen, helps keep JARC in touch with new machinery, new processes and, of course, new job openings.

“We have come to depend upon JARC for customized training,” said Gene Cottini, manager of training and development at S&C Electric, one of Chicago’s largest manufacturing employers. There are several organizations doing job training in the city, he said, “However there are none that compare with JARC in terms of effectiveness and positive impact on the community.”

A sector approach
Another key to success, said Loudon, is JARC’s early adoption of a “sector” approach to training – one that embraces the entire Chicago region as its service area but doesn’t try to be all things to all employers.

“So you favor some industries over others precisely because they offer family-sustaining career opportunities,” Loudon explained. “If you want to connect low-income people in low-income neighborhoods to the regional economy, you’ve got to invest in and align with the growth sectors of that economy.”

So JARC is sending its graduates, nearly all of who live in the city, as far west as Streamwood. Transportation is an issue, he admits, but once hired people tend to work it out, often with the help of the employer or co-workers.

JARC’s sectoral thinking anticipates some of the latest economic development research on the evolution of industry “clusters” and their importance to regional economic growth. Indeed, Loudon is one the business assistance professionals advising LISC Chicago and RW Ventures on their study – funded by the MacArthur Foundation – examining how clusters of companies might take mutual advantage of job training and the assets of Chicago neighborhoods.

But thinking beyond municipal boundaries is easier said than done. Local officials, especially city aldermen, tend to want recipients of city grants and loans to focus on local business needs and issues. Sending graduates off to factories in Elk Grove Village might not impress when a program like JARC applies for a city subsidy such as the Local Industrial Retention Initiative or a CDBG or TIF Works grant.

It helps, said Loudon, that nearly all JARC trainees are from the city, and that another wing of the organization focuses exclusively on industrial retention. JARC’s real estate subsidiary has developed business incubators, not just along the Ravenswood Corridor but as far west as its Carroll Street incubator in West Garfield Park.

The CWF component
Then there’s the human factor. Loudon argues that career development involves a lot more than being able to read a blueprint or operate high-tech machinery. So the non-profit was more than eager to bring into its portfolio one of LISC Chicago’s Centers for Working Families (CWF).

“All of our trainees are connected to CWF,” said Loudon. “Usually there’s a two-way street between someone losing their job and their life unraveling. One usually follows the other, or vice-versa. So you need a holistic strategy for people to put their lives back together.”

“Besides,” he said, “a lot of employers are using credit ratings. You go to a job interview and the interviewer says ‘Wow, you owe Best Buy $3,000 from 2008.’ Or, ‘Your car was repossessed.’ It gets to character … and how organized you are in your life.”

Trainee Khalelah Ervin, also a client of the Center for Working Families at JARC, measures a practice block.

John McCarron

So all students in the JARC pipeline get coached on family budgeting skills, debt avoidance, available income supports such as SNAP food assistance, even opening a bank account with direct deposit to avoid check-cashing fees charged by currency exchanges. JARC’s CWF also encourages walk-ins from the neighborhood and provides them with general job prep and placement as well as financial counseling. Job-seekers also can hone their digital skills or scan “help wanted” listings in an adjoining Community Technology Center.

Khalelah’s story
Like a lot of incoming JARC trainees, she wasn’t ready to read a mechanical blueprint or compute fractions expressed as decimals. So Khalelah Ervin, a 30-year-old mom with five kids age 6 to 14, first had to take JARC’s “bridge” classroom sequence. That accomplished, she was now cutting and milling on JARC’s machine shop floor … and loving it.

“A while back I lost my manufacturing job, and I miss it. It’s something I enjoy,” she says. “I took an office job, but it wasn’t the same. I had to get back to manufacturing.”

She credits JARC’s CWF with helping her roll over her old 401(k) savings plan and, more importantly, “keeping me from filing for bankruptcy. I had a lot of medical bills. It’s complicated.”

And so is precision machining. But there she was, slicing off a slab of hard blue wax and getting ready to practice the many cuts, mills, taps and chamfers that she’ll be required to do on her final exam in a few weeks … when she’ll do it in steel.

“Jobs can come and go,” she said of her developing craft, “but this is something I’ll always have.”

More information: www.jane-addams.org

Michael Slezak, JARC, 773-728-9769, michaels@jane-addams.org

Sheryl Morris, JARC CWF, 773-728-9769, sherylm@jane-addams.org

Ricki Lowitz, LISC Chicago, 312-422-9559, rlowitz@lisc.org

Southwest Side Purchase Pool Drives Quantity Discounts

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:00:00 -0600

“The more you buy, the more you save” (aka ‘spaving’) has to be one of advertising’s most egregious clichés, encouraging shoppers to buy things in quantity that they may not need in the first place.

But some small businesses in the Chicago Lawn and West Lawn neighborhoods are proving the copywriters right. They’ve formed a pool to purchase basic services – waste hauling, electricity and credit card processing – that’s saving them thousands of dollars and reaping a small profit for Greater Southwest Development Corp., which organized the pool last February.

Now Greater Southwest is encouraging other community groups to join the pool, earning a profit for them while helping their local shopkeepers and commercial corridors become more competitive in today’s rough-and-tumble marketplace. Nick Kollias, Greater Southwest's commercial director, explained how at a recent lunch meeting at LISC Chicago, part of the LISC Commercial Corridor Brown Bag Luncheon Series.

Nick Kollias, Greater Southwest's commercial director, explained how the organization has rolled out its shared services at a recent lunch meeting at LISC Chicago, part of the LISC Commercial Corridor Brown Bag Luncheon Series.

Gordon Walek

"If I understand correctly, I don't have to do the infrastructure, all I have to do is find the businesses that want to participate?" said Roger Sosa, business recruitment manager for Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. "That's big."

Greater Southwest currently has 60 small businesses signed up for one or more of its three discounted services – waste hauling, electricity and credit card processing.

But business owners are requesting additional products and services, including insurance, Internet, cable, telephone, office supplies and maintenance services. "That's what we're doing right now," said Kollias. "We're seeing how many more services we can incorporate."

And the model can be replicated throughout every neighborhood in the city, he added.

Greater Southwest started the service pool by pitching the idea to vendors. Waste haulers were difficult to reach directly, so they worked through brokers, who can offer businesses a 10 percent discount on waste disposal without breaking a contract or changing providers, Kollias said. Those able to switch vendors were able to save as much as 42 percent.

Roger Sosa, business recruitment manager for Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, seemed impressed by the shared services model that Greater Southwest has put into place.

Gordon Walek

Overall, signing up for one or more services saved business owners an average of $2,000 in under a year. “For our businesses on the Southwest Side, that’s a huge amount,” Kollias said. “That can be equal to two months’ rent for them.”

To get a break on credit card processing, Greater Southwest bypassed the 700 “indirect” processors that subcontract with larger processors and therefore charge higher fees. Instead, they approached some of the 11 large processors directly and then “took it a step further,” Kollias explained. “We said, ‘We want wholesale rates.’ ”

Businesses in wealthier neighborhoods can expect to save much more, he added. And offering more services to more businesses will increase the potential profit for a chamber of commerce or community development corporation. Greater Southwest has earned $7,800 so far.

Perry Gunn, executive director of the North River Commission, wondered how much liability a service pool organizer would face if clients ran into problems with a particular vendor.

Ghian Foreman, Greater Southwest’s executive director, says the only complaint to date regarding service provided through the pool has been from Greater Southwest itself about not getting its garbage picked up on time.

Gordon Walek

“Zero,” said Ghian Foreman, Greater Southwest’s executive director. “Their contract is with the vendor. But the risk is [that someone says], ‘Perry you introduced me to Nick the garbage man, and he didn’t pick up my garbage.’

“In real life, we had one complaint,” he continued. “It was from [us]. We didn’t get our garbage picked up.”

Dionne Baux, program officer with LISC Chicago, wondered if Greater Southwest’s established relationships with neighborhood business owners were necessary for launching the service pool.

Kollias agreed, explaining that that’s why other chambers of commerce and CDCs need to sell the service pool in their own neighborhoods. “If Greater Southwest goes to Humboldt Park, they’re going to be, ‘Who are you?’ ”

To ease the expansion of the service pool, Greater Southwest has designed a website that other groups can brand with their own logos. Business owners can visit the website for their own neighborhood, upload their bills and chose their service providers. Vendors also can sign-up to provide group discounts.

Dionne Baux, program officer with LISC Chicago, asked whether Greater Southwest’s established relationships with neighborhood business owners were necessary for launching the service pool. Indeed, Kollias responded.

Gordon Walek

The more the pool expands, the greater the potential benefits, he noted. “It’s one thing to have 50 businesses opt in, and it’s another thing to have 5,000.”

This luncheon was sponsored by First Eagle Bank. LISC Chicago holds brown-bag luncheons for commercial corridor managers every other month on a range of topics at 135 S. LaSalle St., 22nd floor. For more information about future brown bags, contact Jake Ament at jament@lisc.org, or (312) 422-9573.

For more information on joining Greater Southwest Development Corp. service pool, contact Nick Kollias at n.kollias@greatersouthwest.org or (773) 362-3371.

Training Program Reweaves the Fabric for Small Businesses

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Beyond the barbershop, the bodega, the custom cabinetmaker and the jumble of other storefronts on the west side of the 5900-block of South Pulaski Road is the unassuming entrance to Private Label Linens. It’s the kind of place you’d walk by a million times without even seeing.

And even if you saw it, so what? Just another Chicago Lawn business among the thousands that line Pulaski and many of Chicago’s other main drags, far from the shadows of the downtown skyscrapers, the spectacular lakefront, and the renowned cultural institutions that give the city its juice.

But behind the door at 5954 S. Pulaski is what really fuels Chicago and everyplace else – people working. In this case, about 15 of them – mostly Latino women who live within a one- or two-mile radius – cutting, sewing, folding, mailing, washing and drying fabric. Fabric that will become tablecloths, napkins, drapes, uniforms.

It’s exactly the type of business – in operation for at least two years, with annual revenues between $150,000 and $4 million – that Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program is designed to help. The program, led by Goldman and administered in Chicago by City Colleges of Chicago, focuses on giving small business owners (from metro Chicago and surrounding areas) greater access to business education, financial capital and business support services.

Participants in the training program (a total of nine classes, one day every other week) gain practical knowledge and skills that can be put to work immediately, such as contract negotiation, marketing, accounting and people management.

Richard Schneider and his wife, Susan, run Private Label Linens, where Maria Espinoza works a sewing machine.

Gordon Walek

Small businesses, according to Goldman, have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years. They represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms, hire 40 percent of high tech workers and produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms. Who knew?

Presiding over the operation at Private Label Linens is Richard Schneider, a recent graduate of the Small Businesses program who, with wife Susan, runs the business.

Learning the ropes
Schneider comes by the work honestly. His grandfather, Sam Schechter, began selling bridal veils 82 years ago. As a youngster, Schneider hung out at Schechter’s store, first in the Loop and later at 64^th and Halsted, helping out here and there, learning about sales, products, customers, deliveries and everything else that goes into running a business. Not that he identified it as his life’s work.

“Always thought I’d be a college professor,” said Schneider, who, among the bolts of cloth and cutting machines and industrial-sized washers and dryers in his chaotic Pulaski Road operation, looks more like an academic than a textile industrialist. But after studying the classics (translating Beowulf, transcribing Gregorian chants) at Lake Forest College, living in Europe for a couple years, working as a waiter and maitre d’ in the International Club at the Drake Hotel, and as a private chef, he never got around to the Ivory Tower life.

In 1985, after his grandfather succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, Schneider took over the business and has run it ever since. The Pulaski Road operation handles linens. His related business – in bridal veils and novelty fabrics – is Supreme Novelty Fabrics on West Fulton Street in Chicago.

The nondescript exterior at Private Label Linens opens into one of the many small businesses that fuel Chicago's economy--and that the Goldman Sachs program is designed to help.

Gordon Walek

Note that nowhere in his quixotic journey from classics student to European Dharma Bum to private chef to small business owner was there a stop at the Harvard Business School or Kellogg or Wharton. Schneider matriculated at the school of hard knocks and by his reckoning was at the top of his class. His MBA equivalent was on-the-job training at the feet of his grandfather.

And he had the customers – for tablecloths, table drapes, napkins, you name it – to prove it, ranging from Chicago’s finest hotels to the White House. Indeed, just the other day, he said, Susan Schneider was en route to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the family Prius, delivering a custom order of White House linens.

No, Schneider didn’t apply for a slot in the Small Businesses curriculum – which came to his attention through an ad in Crain’s online edition – to brush up on his business skills. He applied because he thought it might lead to low-interest loans from Goldman. Money, not training, was his interest.

The money hasn’t happened. But something almost better did. He learned he didn’t know everything.

Getting with the program
“It was a really cool thing to have this learning experience,” he said. “The application alone was thought-provoking. It helped me learn a lot about my business. They asked me what my greatest business accomplishment was. My answer was, staying in business.”

Lucia Flores (left) and Gladys Sanchez are among the 15 or so employees of Private Label Linens, who spend their days cutting, sewing, folding, mailing, washing and drying fabric.

Gordon Walek

When Schneider showed up for the first day of class on the 10^th floor of the Harold Washington College (one of the City Colleges of Chicago) in the Loop, he felt like the instructors, based on his detailed application (which included two years of tax returns and operational financials), already knew his whole story. The instructors, incidentally, come from various business backgrounds and academia. They function as coaches and advisers.

“They taught me about accounting, about balance sheets, about profit and loss,” he said. “I didn’t know any of that – had always run things by my gut. Learning about all that really helped and it actually got me interested in parts of the business – like financials – that I’d always avoided. Now I’m on it every month and that will lead to something better.”

The classes also included meetings with the mayor of Chicago and Penny Pritzker, the business leader and philanthropist. “Just talking to them was fantastic,” said Schneider. “The mayor was very sympathetic with the difficult process of acquiring small business licenses. He wants to streamline it.”

And Schneider said the classes made him feel much less cynical and, well, alone. “You get really close to people in the class,” he said. “You learn everyone’s in the same boat 90 percent of the time, dealing with employees, overhead, etc., regardless of the type of business. It helps to know the suffering is shared by others.”

So far, about 90 Chicago-area businesspeople have completed the curriculum here – about 800 nationwide. Last fall, in Chicago, there were 160 applicants for 35 slots. To be eligible, a business must have been in operation for at least two years, with annual revenues between $150,000 and $4 million. And no “recreational” owners welcomed.

Private Label Linens sells tablecloths, napkins, drapes and uniforms. Among their customers: the White House.

Gordon Walek

“We’re looking for owners with a fire in the belly and an equity ownership stake in the company,” said Bral Spight, executive director of Chicago’s 10,000 Small Businesses program.

“It was a great luxury,” said Schneider, “to have someone come into my business and give me advice. I look at the program as a sort of reality show. What was happening in the classroom situation was very similar to what was happening in my business. And that gave me a new kind of energy.”

If Schneider’s energized, you can bet his employees are, too. Private Label Linens has a striking whistle-while-you-work vibe that could become even more cheerful if Schneider’s newfound skills result in greater efficiency and profitability.

“It’s like I was the old Richard before the program, and the new Richard now,” he said. “I’m just a lot more open-minded about how the business works.”

LISC Chicago is a community partner in the Goldman Sachs Small Businesses program. For more information, contact Bral Spight, executive director, 10,000 Small Businesses, (312)553-6087, bspight@ccc.edu.

‘Dean’ Jim Capraro Retires from LISC Chicago Board

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Jim Capraro, the Southwest Side dynamo who helped define community development in Chicago, has retired from the LISC Chicago Board of Advisors after 23 years of service. But he’s still doing the work he loves.

Although he's retiring from LISC Chicago's Board of Advisors, Jim Capraro will continue in his role as an advocate for neighborhood redevelopment.

Gordon Walek

Capraro helped define the first wave of nonprofit community development after he became executive director of the fledgling Greater Southwest Development Corporation in 1976. He had spent the previous years on picket lines and in protest marches, fighting the Vietnam War, racial discrimination and bank redlining. But coming back to his home neighborhood, he wanted to do more than criticize the policies and practices of others.

“I realized that stopping disinvestment doesn’t fix the damage, that someone had to work on that, so we started talking about reinvestment,” Capraro said, speaking by cell phone from the Miami airport, returning from a consultation in Jacksonville, Fla. “Nobody else was doing reinvestment work, and really we didn’t know what we were doing at the beginning. So we started with some seminars on how neighborhood shopping districts work, and learning about real estate transactions.”

Capraro was a quick study, and soon developed a method that would help stabilize big chunks of the Southwest Side. Early on he lured a Jewel grocery store to anchor a shopping center at the corner of 61st and Western, when few companies were investing in outlying neighborhoods. Later he helped convince Nabisco to reinvest in its Oreo cookie factory rather than leave the neighborhood. He promoted construction of the CTA Orange Line to Midway Airport, created an industrial development on a former dump site, and always kept organizing residents and businesses to address local issues.

Jim Capraro's engagement with community development practitioners - here at a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago conference organized by the Institute for Comprehensive Community Development - is legendary.

Gordon Walek

But he did more than improve his own neighborhoods. By sharing his bubbly enthusiasm with others – and teaching them his methods of listening, building coalitions and wooing supporters – he has helped make comprehensive community development a thriving industry in Chicago and around the country. In recent years he has flown more than a million miles to 27 different cities and two rural communities, mostly to coach others about quality-of-life planning and implementation. He’s even brought his spiel to community groups in Munich, Germany, and Milan, Italy. And to keep in touch with his colleagues between visits, Jim became an early adopter of video conferencing and other web tools.

“I love when I work with people on leadership development,” he said, especially coaching “regular people from the neighborhood who could stand on a stage and go toe to toe with a bank president or an alderman.”

He is proud, too, of the physical and organizational legacies that he has left behind, from a senior housing building on 63rd Street to Special Service Area #3, the first neighborhood-focused special taxing district in Chicago.

“Jim has tremendous insight into the issues that communities face and how to address them,” said Susana Vasquez, executive director of LISC Chicago. “He’s made significant contributions to LISC as a member of our Board of Advisors, but also to the whole network of practitioners in Chicago and around the nation.”

Of all his community work, Capraro says leadership development - "coaching regular people from the neighborhood" - gives him the greatest pleasure.

Gordon Walek

What’s next? The dean of Chicago community development has several active projects and some new irons in the fire as government agencies and others seek comprehensive, sustainable approaches to community improvement. He speaks with his typical enthusiasm about activities in Cincinnati and Indiana and downstate Illinois, and leaves no doubt that more work on foreign soil would be of interest.

But he’d like to scale back a little, too, passing the baton to the next generation. “What I want to do now is to get out of the way of the people I’ve worked with," he said, "so that they can do the work themselves.”

Planting Seeds Toward a 'Healthy Chicago'

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Too many folks with acute mental health problems are spending long hours, sometimes days, in the Swedish Covenant Hospital emergency room waiting for admission to a state facility.

Meanwhile, the North River neighborhood’s network of community gardens is prohibited by city ordinance from transporting essential organic compost from one site to another.

And cutbacks in funding for CeaseFire and other violence prevention programs are crimping reach-out-to-youth activities in the neighborhood.

Commissioner Bechara Choucair, M.D., of the Chicago Department of Public Health, has held a series of meetings this fall and winter with leaders of LISC Chicago's New Communities network.

Gordon Walek

Public health problems – they come in all shapes and sizes in the North River/Albany Park neighborhood. And until recently, it was difficult for community leaders here – or in any neighborhood – to explain their public health challenges to city officials in a calm, collegial setting.

But that’s exactly what’s happening this fall and winter at a series of meetings between leaders of LISC Chicago’s New Communities network and Commissioner Bechara Choucair, M.D., of the Chicago Department of Public Health.

“It’s about starting a relationship … opening the door,” said Dominique Williams, the health fellow with LISC Chicago who is coordinating the meetings. All told, some 15 sit-downs with Dr. Choucair are being scheduled, she said, and the agendas are as diverse as the neighborhoods that host them.

“Cascade” in the ER
At the Nov. 5 session held in the boardroom at Swedish Covenant, for instance, the commissioner listened intently as hospital CEO Mark Newton explained what’s happened to his emergency room following government cuts to mental health services, including the city’s recent closing of several mental health clinics.

“There’s been a cascade of events,” said Newton. He explained that state and city budget cuts for mental health have caused a spike in mentally disturbed and uninsured individuals being dropped off at the ER, where they’ve been bedded down for as long as nine days waiting for an opening at a state mental health facility. “That’s a question of morality, as to how they’re being cared for,” said Newton.

“It’s about starting a relationship … opening the door,” said Dominique Williams (center), health fellow with LISC Chicago, who is coordinating the 15 meetings in a panoply of communities around the city.

Gordon Walek

Tensions have mounted, he said, among police who pick up disturbed people on the street, ambulance drivers who are not being reimbursed for delivering them and hospital personnel struggling to provide humane care. “This is our single, most-critical issue,” Newton said.

Dr. Choucair responded that “maybe we can figure out a way” to route the uninsured to the remaining city clinics … and those on Medicaid to private, non-profit mental health centers.

Healthy Chicago partners
All the while, Dr. Choucair took notes on his slim, white digital notepad.

He explained that the LISC-organized neighborhood sessions are an integral part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Healthy Chicago initiative launched in late summer 2011. The plan targets a dozen public health priorities – ranging from tobacco, to obesity, to teen pregnancy to HIV—and advances some 200 problem-solving strategies.

“We cannot move the needle on our own as a government agency,” Choucair said. “We have to be working with community partners, and a key strategy is working with the LISC New Communities.”

Perry Gunn, executive director of the North River Commission, a New Communities affiliate, hosted a meeting with Dr. Choucair on Nov. 5.

Gordon Walek

The LISC neighborhood network’s initial contribution to Healthy Chicago was a list of community-centered health recommendations devised by 70 local leaders from 30 organizations. The list, which included eight key strategies for healthier neighborhoods, was presented in June at a plenary meeting with Dr. Choucair and his senior staff.

He promised then to follow-up with a neighborhood-by-neighborhood tour … and has kept that promise with logistical help from Dominique Williams and the LISC network.

“The intersection between public health and community development is so critical,” Dr. Choucair said at the Swedish Covenant session. “We’ve made a commitment to LISC and its partners to move them [the report’s eight strategies] along. … But different communities have different needs, ... and these smaller meetings will help us better understand those needs and how can we be more helpful … how can we can partner better.”

Food equity
Linda Seyler, manager of the Global Gardens refugee training farm, where immigrants this past growing season raised more than 5,000 pounds of fresh vegetables, described the psychic as well as physical health benefits when new Americans are able to grow and cook foods they enjoyed in their native lands.

When Dr. Choucair asked what the city could do to help, Seyler pointed to municipal regulations that prohibit the transport of organic waste materials from home to garden or from garden to garden.

“The intersection between public health and community development is so critical,” Dr. Choucair said.

Gordon Walek

“You’re not allowed to take your kitchen waste to your community garden to compost it on site,” Seyler said. “If we’re going to do [organic] urban agriculture, … we have to keep feeding that soil.”

“Let me know the specifics,” said Dr. Choucair, “and we’ll work with the mayor’s office and the City Council.”

He said Mayor Emanuel is determined to keep his campaign promise to eliminate so-called urban “food deserts.” This involves not just attracting chain supermarkets to underserved neighborhoods, he said, but promoting community gardens, farmers’ markets and kiosks, and mobile delivery such as Fresh Moves, which is adding a second converted CTA bus and, with city help, may add a third and fourth.

Crime-fighting $
Harold Rice, executive director of the Albany Park Community Center, said his organization has had success cutting the rate of gang-related violence, but lately funding for that activity has grown scarce.

“We got our [CeaseFire] funds cut from $60,000 to $30,000,” said Rice. Although the funding was later restored, Rice’s organization and others face funding insecurity due to the loss of now-expired federal stimulus grants and other grants.

“From a safety umbrella standpoint,” Rice said, “it’s been hard to try to manage that. … We have strong relationships with some of the gang members, … but when we ask them what it would take to get them out of gangs, to stem the tide of crime, it often comes down to jobs.”

So the Center takes pride, he said, in recently placing 87 young men and women in jobs with the Garrett Popcorn chain.

Dr. Choucair congratulated that, then asked the gathered North River leaders to convey to their aldermen, who must approve the next city budget, their thoughts on the city’s CeaseFire pilot. This input will be valuable as the city considers future funding levels for CeaseFire and other public safety initiatives.

“Thank you for hosting,” said Dr. Choucair at meeting’s end to Perry Gunn, executive director of the North River Commission, a New Communities affiliate. “These meetings have been tremendously helpful.”

Another round of community meetings is being scheduled for January.

More information: Dominique Williams, LISC Chicago, 312-422-9571

To see the city's Healthy Chicago Agenda, please click here.

LISC Chicago's health work is funded in part by The Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute.

New South Side Plan: From Vacant Land to “Productive Landscapes”

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:00:00 -0600

The Mid-South Side’s abundance of vacant land, considered by some a sign of abandonment and neglect, could be converted to all manner of attractive and productive uses under a concept plan drawn by city and regional planners with help from LISC Chicago and its New Communities Program lead agencies Washington Park Consortium and Teamwork Englewood.

That concept plan - scheduled to be submitted to Chicago's City Council in early 2013 - calls for a constellation of community gardens of many shapes and sizes, for conversion of an unused railroad embankment into 30-block east-west hiking trail, for an assortment of “pocket” parks and athletic fields as well as rain-absorbing grassy areas to relieve the area’s overloaded sewers.

A series of renderings has captured the vision of citizens and planners, including such features as community gardens and a 30-block walking trail.

A working assumption behind the Green Healthy Neighborhoods Land Use Plan is that population among the eight neighborhoods, down by half over the past four decades, will grow hardly at all over the next 30 years.

“We have a lot of available land in these community areas, and we project only a little bit of population increase by 2040,” explained Kathy Dickhut of the city’s Department of Housing and Economic Development (DHED). She spoke to 50 community residents who gathered on Nov. 10 to give a progress report … and suggest some changes.

“The implication,” said Dickhut of the no-growth forecast, “is that there is enough available housing stock in the general area, though some of it has to be rehabbed.” About 30 percent of the 12-square-mile area can be converted, she said, to “productive landscapes.” Envisioned is “a new kind of public open space, but space that has a job – generating food.”

Growing Commercial?
A lively discussion ensued over whether some of the larger gardens could become jobs-generating commercial enterprises … or whether they should be traditional school- and neighborhood-centric gardens. Dickhut suggested the latter, what with all the bureaucratic and logistical difficulties of producing for mass distribution.

Pocket parks and athletic fields are among the proposals for productive use of vacant land in the eight South Side neighborhoods.

“We don’t see urban ag as an economic driver,” said Dickhut. “It’s more of a community development and job training tool. It’s always going to be cheaper to grow lots of food on farmland.”

This disappointed some gathered in the community room of Coppin A.M.E. Church at 5627 S. Michigan Ave. Several said it was up to government – city, state and federal – to loosen regulations governing production and sale of fresh food so commercial-scale urban farming could evolve … with all the employment opportunities that might bring.

But one audience member, Richard Dobbins, a trained horticulturalist who has overseen development of several gardens in the area, supported the plan’s premise. “In the inner-city, you’re not going to create a wealth of ag-focused employment,” he said, although he added that gardens are well worth doing as an educational and job-training tool.

Rail-to-Trail
Another dynamic feature of the draft plan is a refined version of the 30-block-long New Era Trail first proposed by the group Openlands. (See their version here.)

Running just north of 59^th Street from the Dan Ryan Expressway westward past Ashland Avenue, the old elevated railroad right-of-way would overlook gardens, wetlands and ball fields.

The soon-to-be-finalized plan envisions commercial development concentrated around certain heavy-traffic nodes rather than strung out along marginal spots on arterial streets.

“It will be like walking through a long forest flanked on both sides by productive landscapes,” said Dickhut, adding that it could even evolve into a spine of commercial and residential renewal. It’s an example, she said, of the new plan’s “building off the ideas that the community has already put out there.”

Along with Dickhut’s presentation on land use, Eleanor Gorski of DHED described the city’s effort to identify and preserve historic structures in the study area, noting that “the greenest building is the one already built.” Some of the area’s 16,000-plus vacant buildings will have to be demolished, she conceded, but the plan envisions creating “conservation districts” wherein clusters of well-crafted homes add indispensible character to the neighborhood.

DHED’s Michael Berkshire showed how low-lying areas could be landscaped into storm-water retention areas and double as visually appealing bird habitats. They could also function as catchment basins for irrigating neighborhood gardens, as could rain barrels fed by downspouts.

Other parts of the plan call for concentrating retail activity around “nodes,” especially near transit stops, and for converting to residential use marginal stores now strung out along arterial streets. Manufacturing, meanwhile, would be encouraged near the area’s still-mighty collection of intermodal rail yards, such as Norfolk Southern’s soon-to-expand facility in Englewood.

Getting Real
The Nov. 10 gathering was the last in a series of public hearings before the plan is finalized and presented at an “open house” event in early 2013, according to Kendra Smith of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), which is co-authoring the plan with the city. The final version will then be submitted to the City Council, which is expected to incorporate many of its features into the city’s official comprehensive plan and zoning ordinance.

The Green Healthy Neighborhoods plan's final draft will be presented in early 2013 and then sent to Chicago's City Council.

The months-long series of public hearings, held throughout the South Side, were designed to solicit comments from residents, businesses and others regarding the role of housing, commercial development, manufacturing, transportation, arts and culture, and urban agriculture in the area’s future.

“Now it starts getting real,” said Sandra Womack, the LISC Chicago senior program officer who, for more than a year, has helped shepherd public participation in the Green Healthy project. She said the LISC New Communities Program groups that are active in the plan’s preparation – Teamwork Englewood and the Washington Park Consortium – had considerable input into the draft.

The Mid-South neighborhoods embraced by Green Healthy are Englewood, West Englewood, Greater Grand Crossing, Woodlawn, Washington Park and the southern reaches of New City, Fuller Park and Grand Boulevard.

For more information: Sandra Womack, swomack@lisc.org

To see additional documents about Green Healthy Neighborhoods: http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/moving-forward/livable-communities-in-detail/

Setting Anchors in Pullman, Roseland

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Successful community redevelopment often gets started with a succession of small victories – a few abandoned homes rehabbed here, some vacant storefronts rejuvenated there.

Eke out enough singles and sacrifice bunts, this theory goes, until the neighborhood is considered sufficiently “safe” for the big hitters from the private sector to step up and hit home runs.

Dave Doig, president of Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, is leading the agency's commercial redevelopment efforts in Pullman, anchored by an under construction, 150,000-square-foot Super Walmart.

John McCarron

Then there’s Pullman-Roseland-West Pullman approach on Chicago’s Far South Side.

Sure, there are small victories being won here every day: historic row houses rehabbed for resale, an organic garden planted, a problem liquor store closed.

But the larger strategy now unfolding is one based on major investments capable of anchoring many more investments to come.

“We’re taking on projects that result in place-based transformations,” explained David Doig, president of Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives (CNI). Now emerging from under the protective wing of U.S. Bank, which inherited the nonprofit from other banks forced under by the Great Recession, CNI is helping restore life to neighborhoods left for dead after decades of de-industrialization and disinvestment.

Walmart to the rescue
The easternmost anchor is rising just below CNI’s office on the 10^th floor of the U.S. Bank building just off I-94 at 111^th Street. It’s a Super Walmart that, at 150,000 square feet, will begin turning acres of derelict industrial brownfields into a $350 million mixed-use Pullman Park.

Doig credits Ald. Anthony Beale (9^th) with sticking his neck out for Walmart when some factions of organized labor tried to ban its entry to Chicago because the Big W’s non-union stores sell too few American-made goods.

The unions have since bowed to the realities of modern American retailing … but now will benefit from hundreds of skilled-trade construction jobs, not just at the Walmart site, but soon from Phases II and III as Pullman Park’s smaller stores and apartment complexes build out. Nearby, a portion of the vast-but-vacant Ryerson Steel plant is being converted to an indoor soccer/softball rec center.

Built with $110 million from the foundation created by the founders of McDonald's Corp., The Salvation Army Ray & Joan Kroc Corps Community Center is drawing rave reviews in West Pullman.

Gordon Walek

“We’ve done $35 million in site prep on Phase I,” Doig told a visitor on a windshield tour of the joint venture between CNI and U.S. Bank.

The city, using unspent federal funds it won for “Hurricane Ike” flood mitigation, is pushing a wide, truck-friendly, north-south connector road through the development from 103^rd to 111^th. Both tie into the I-94/Cottage Grove Avenue interchange, so Doig figures his Walmart and surrounding stores will draw not just from the city but from northwest Indiana and the Near South suburbs. All of which will, cha-ching, feed the local tax base and enable, along with additional federal New Markets tax credits, successive stages of redevelopment.

Kroc Center spectacular
Twenty blocks to the west, a very different kind of mega-anchor was set this past summer and it’s already drawing rave reviews from its West Pullman neighbors. The Salvation Army Ray & Joan Kroc Corps Community Center, at 1250 W. 119th St., is a spectacular multi-use family recreation and cultural facility. The charitable foundation created by the founders of McDonalds Corp gave $110 million to the Salvation Army for what has to be one of the most elaborate facilities of its kind anywhere.

Elaborate? The building contains several swimming pools and a mini-water park, a massive multi-court/multi-sport gymnasium looped by a balcony jogging track, an equipment-packed fitness room, separate lounges for seniors and teenagers, music and craft rooms, and a recording studio plus a 400-seat auditorium/chapel. Outside on the 32-acre campus are athletic fields for several sports – including an artificial turf baseball field where the White Sox have installed a U.S. Cellular-type scoreboard – and a three-hole pitch-and-putt golf course.

Kroc Center recreation manager Larry Butler (right) and gym attendant Jordan Arrington have hosted Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose's summer basketball camp and both summer and after-school basketball leagues.

John McCarron

“We’re doing some good things here,” said Larry Butler, the Center’s indoor recreation manager. “[Chicago Bulls star] Derrick Rose had his basketball camp here. In August, we had 300 for the playoff of our in-house summer basketball league for all of our area kids. Now we have our co-ed grade school league. We’ll have 200 kids this weekend for the start of that.”

CNI conveyed $12 million worth of New Markets Tax Credits to the project, freeing up other funds to defray operations and programming going forward.

Doig has high hopes for what the Kroc Center will do for the surrounding blocks of West Pullman. There CNI and the Far South Community Development Corp. are overseeing purchase and rehab of foreclosed homes using the city’s Micro-Market Recovery and Neighborhood Stabilization programs, of which LISC Chicago is a fiscal agent. And LISC Chicago has made a $20,000 project initiation loan to help CNI develop live and work space for artists in Pullman.

“That’s the thinking,” Doig said, “that an anchor like the Kroc Center will create more demand for the homes around it.”

Historic Pullman in the middle
Midway between the emerging Pullman Park and newly opened Kroc Center is the third – and certainly the oldest – leg of the Far South redevelopment effort. The historic town of Pullman was developed in the 1880s by industrialist George Pullman so that workers at his Pullman Palace (Railroad) Car Company would be able to live within walking distance.

But the red brick enclave once hailed as “the world’s most perfect town” was not spared the post-World War II vagaries of plant closings, credit redlining and racial change. Groups of preservationists, such as the Historic Pullman Foundation, have managed – with the help of government and non-profit partners – to save many of the workers’ row houses, the old Hotel Florence, the central clock tower building and the Greenstone Church. But the Great Recession has brought setbacks, especially among the row houses just north of the factory where once lived the African-American porters who staffed the fancy Pullman cars.

Mike Shymanski's Historic Pullman Foundation has helped save gems like Greenstone Church.

John McCarron

There, as in West Pullman, CNI is working with the city to rehab and remarket 11 foreclosed houses. But unlike tonier South Pullman, where rehabbers are able to recoup their costs, North Pullman row houses are selling for little more than half what it costs to repair them.

That situation will change, Doig predicted, if the many plans surrounding Historic Pullman come to fruition. Congress, for instance, is poised to approve the nomination of Pullman as a national historic park. Mercy Housing Lakefront, meanwhile, has redeveloped the old Pullman Wheelworks at the campus’ east end into 210 units of affordable housing.

More recently, CNI and LISC Chicago stepped up to fund a feasibility study to determine if one or more of Pullman’s empty car-assembly buildings can be turned into an artists’ colony of work-live studios. Pullman already has about 20 resident-artists, many of whom have outgrown their row house studios or need bigger space to create larger works … such as welded metal sculptures.

“That early money, the ‘seed’ money, is what’s hardest to get, so LISC’s $20,000 was critical,” said Arthur Pearson, who chairs the Pullman Civic Organization’s Art Space Committee. “All over the country we’re seeing art-related development used as a building block to regenerate entire communities.”

An uphill push
Make no mistake, this new east-west vector of Far South Side redevelopment is no Wrigleyville or River North in the making. The 2010 Census found that Pullman, West Pullman and Roseland – all predominantly African-American – lost, respectively, 18 percent, 19 percdent and 15 percent of their population during the past decade. Within the two South Side ZIP codes that embrace the three communities, a staggering 9,095 dwellings are listed by RealtyTrac.com as either bank-owned, being foreclosed, or so in arrears they’ll likely be foreclosed.

Crime is a serious challenge. It was in Roseland that a Fenger High School student namedDerrion Albert was beaten to death in September 2009 in an after-school gang melee. An eyewitness video of the killing made network newscasts and shocked the nation, even prompting President Obama to dispatch cabinet officers to Chicago on an anti-violence fact-funding mission. Roseland-Pullman’s 5^th Police District, where 26 homicides were recorded in 2011, remains one of the city’s most crime-ridden.

Yet there is a growing sense that corners are being turned. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gov. Pat Quinn have jointly announced creation of a $40 million College to Careers Transportation, Distribution and Logistics (TDL) Center at Olive-Harvey College. It makes sense. The Far South Side is one of the world’s most active inter-modal shipping hubs. The potential for freight-oriented development – and jobs, jobs, jobs – is enormous.

Where there are jobs there is disposable income. Exactly how much and where that income is being spent soon will be pinpointed by a LISC MetroEdge market study of the neighborhoods surrounding Roseland’s sleepy Halsted Street retail district.

And so it goes: a retail feasibility study here, a rehabbed row house there. All anchored at both ends – and in its historic middle – by three substantial investments that are beginning to pay “infill” dividends.

“For the first time in years,” said Joel Bookman, LISC Chicago’s director of programs, “neighbors are seeing glimmers of hope, optimism and investment.”

More information: David Doig, CNI, 773-341-2066, ddoig@cnigroup.org

Strategizing to Fight Crime

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Along commercial corridors, even nonviolent crimes like panhandling and loitering can deter customers. Merchants often blame the police or shrinking city budgets for neglect of the problem.

Those criticisms may be valid, but community groups can often do more than they realize to prevent crime, insisted Julia Ryan, national program director for the New York-based LISC Community Safety Initiative who, with her colleague Jason Cooper, joined more than 20 community developers at a recent meeting at LISC Chicago as part of the Commercial Corridor Brown Bag Luncheon Series. “If we rely on the police alone we’re really missing the boat,” she said.

A crime requires three things, she explained: an offender, a victim and a suitable location. Intervening at any point along this “crime triangle,” such as by altering the space or educating potential victims, can prevent the crime, she said.

To devise a safety strategy, Ryan and Cooper advised beginning with a small group of partners who have influence over the three points of the triangle, and then honing in on one section of your commercial corridor, or on the worst hot spots and perpetrators. One Rhode Island team in a community with a prostitution problem listed the main offenders and realized that there were only seven women, said Ryan. “They focused on offering services to that small group.”

Jason Cooper of the LISC Community Safety Initiative, who appeared with colleague Julia Ryan, talks with a police officer about community safety.

Ryan and Cooper gave a brief overview of a strategy called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), an approach born in the 1970s that focuses on altering a space with changes such as lights, locks and fences. Because of poor implementation and a narrow focus on the physical environment, however, CPTED “got a poor rap in many cities,” Ryan noted.

In more recent years, they said, CPTED has evolved to look not just at the physical space, but the economic and social factors that influence criminal behavior.

Basic principles of CPTED include creating unobstructed sightlines from the street or nearby buildings, maintaining an appearance of order such as by fixing broken windows and removing weeds, and “territoriality,” which could mean common flags along a business corridor. “It sends the message that the people care about this space, and they are organized and it may not be the best place if you’re looking to offend,” Cooper said.

“Second generation” CPTED also looks at building social relationships within a neighborhood to work on solving problems together. Ryan and Cooper suggested beginning with a safety audit. For a commercial corridor that might mean organizing a team of business owners, their employees, local police, and residents of both genders to survey the area for features that contribute to crime using a CPTED checklist (click to download).

Gloster Mahon, violence prevention business consultant at the South Shore Chamber of Commerce, said his neighborhood has involved chronic loiterers in community planning rather than trying to get rid of them, since they live nearby and just come right back.

Gordon Walek

Creative problem solving is the next step, said Ryan. In one neighborhood, a police officer helped recruit a business that would stay open late and keep eyes on the street during the evening hours.

Changing the physical environment can make a big difference, but alone it’s usually not enough, Cooper noted. “We find we’re most able to sustain a decrease in crime when we’re able to knock out two [points], so we’re not just looking at a place, we’re changing the behavior of potential victims.”

Liz Griffiths DeChant, economic development director at the North River Commission in Albany Park, wondered how to deal with repeat offenders. “In our neighborhood, it’s these three homeless guys. How do you work on that piece of the triangle?”

Gloster Mahon, violence prevention business consultant at the South Shore Chamber of Commerce, said he’s done focus groups with loiterers in his neighborhood’s business district. “For people who are unemployed and aren’t in school, that commercial strip is where they get up and go to in the morning to see if they can get something to eat, to see if they can get small amounts of marijuana, to hang with their guys.” They can’t be run out of the area because they live just blocks away, he explained. Instead, he insisted, they need to be included in community safety planning.

James Kenady, program manager for the Southeast Chicago Commission, said a strategy that worked in West Garfield Park was to make it harder for drug dealers and buyers to do business—while at the same time offering them social services. “A lot of people aren’t aware of resources available in the city,” he said. “I’ve seen people, once they get motivated to turn their lives around, access those services.”

James Kenady, program manager for the Southeast Chicago Commission, recommended simultaneously making it harder for drug dealers and buyers to do business while also offering them social services.

Gordon Walek

Cooper agreed that strengthening the social safety net needs to be part of any community’s safety plan, but that it doesn’t always happen. “When we talk about crime, it can become ‘us versus them; us versus the gang members, or the dropouts.’ ”

Several participants mentioned the challenge of recruiting police for community safety planning given the staff turnover in most districts.

“That’s a pervasive challenge, and there’s no easy solution,” Ryan acknowledged. One idea, she said, is to have ready an introductory letter to the next district commander. “See if you can get current one to sign it [explaining], ‘Here’s what’s important to me about this relationship.’ ” If you can get the old commander to introduce you to the new one, even better, she said.

And if the police are reluctant to work with you on quality-of-life crimes like loitering, you might try to strike a deal with a prosecutor to step-up prosecution of those crimes for a limited time period, she continued. Then see if the police will agree to a crackdown, also for a limited time.

Keri Blackwell, deputy director for programs at LISC, said that she’s seen some New Communities Program groups contact their transferred commanders and encourage them to work with similar groups in their new neighborhoods.

Keri Blackwell (left), deputy director of programs for LISC Chicago, said New Communities Program groups try to introduce departed commanders to community groups in their new districts; Liz Griffiths DeChant (center), economic development director at the North River Commission in Albany Park, came looking for answers on how best to handle the chronically homeless.

Gordon Walek

Mahon said he works closely with detectives in his community. “I let them know I have resources; I’m trying to employ young men. Guys have come to me with my card [and say], ‘Officer so-and-so sent me.’ ”

Kenady said that one group he worked for promoted relationships with the police both by laying on the pressure—“when we didn’t get the response we needed, we flooded the office with calls”—but also by giving them plenty of credit for any success. “Try to include the commander and officers in press conferences,” he advised. “Rewarding them for the work that they do really was effective for us.”

This luncheon was sponsored by First Eagle Bank. LISC/Chicago holds brown-bag luncheons for commercial corridor managers every other month on a range of topics at 135 S. LaSalle St., 22nd floor. For more information about future brown bags and to RSVP to the events, contact Maria Hernandez at mhernandez@lisc.org, or (312) 422-9567.

Moving Closer to Unity in Near North

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 12:00:00 -0600

They have laid out strategic goals, core principles and an overall vision for the fast-changing community emerging from where the Cabrini-Green high-rises once stood.

They have set up a website and coordinated an ambitious series of neighborhood events – from Friday afternoon youth basketball to twilight jazz concerts in Seward Park.

Charles Woodyard, CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority, speaks to a meeting of 75 participants in the Near North Unity Program on Oct. 29.

John McCarron

But to gauge the depth of progress made by stakeholders working on the Near North Unity Program, it’s best to set aside the list of projects and listen carefully to what’s being said at NNUP’s monthly community meetings.

People are talking to, not past, one another. In particular, public housing tenants and tenant-leaders are sharing their hopes and anxieties with their more affluent neighbors who own condos in the mixed-income buildings that have replaced the high-rises. And vice-versa.

The conversations can be edgy, even painful, but they are happening … and ever so gradually, the different factions are moving onto common ground.

Woodyard’s being there
This coming together was evident at NNUP’s October meeting, which featured a presentation by Charles Woodyard, CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), followed by a freewheeling “open mic” with CHA tenants, condo owners and others.

Woodyard is barely a year into taking over the huge task of integrating what had been one of America’s largest and most isolated public housing systems into the social and economic fabric of the city. The mere fact he was there says not a little about NNUP’s ability to engage on real issues.

Then again, the two-year-old effort has strong backing from Ald. Walter Burnett (27^th) and continuing financial support from the MacArthur Foundation, a longtime contributor to public housing transformation in Chicago.

After an introduction by the Rev. Randall Blakey, chair of NNUP’s guiding core group, Woodyard looked over the diverse gathering and said, “I see an eclectic community that has come together.

"Let you be the vehicle that represents the entire neighborhood," Keri Blackwell, deputy director of programs for LISC Chicago, encouraged NNUP attendees.

John McCarron

“In a way, this is what we are trying to accomplish with our Plan for Transformation,” he said, not just to—but about—the 75 who gathered Oct. 29 in the activity room of the Cornerstone Center, 1111 N. Wells St.

He then opened by placing a finger squarely on what most bothers the area’s CHA tenants ever since demolition began on Cabrini’s thicket of 16-story high-rises.

“Our [CHA] residents are our top priority,” said Woodyard, “but I have to listen to and think about the larger community. … And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because those who lived in the buildings we tore down appropriately view this as their community, their homes. CHA came in and destroyed their community. I understand that feeling.”

Row house row
Woodyard even touched gingerly on the hottest of the area’s hot-button issues: What’s to become of the 440 Cabrini row houses that have been emptied of tenants but whose fate has yet to be determined?

“We’ll hold a community meeting in the near future to get input and ideas on how to move forward,” said Woodyard. He vowed that, when completed, the entire Near North area will have 700 dwellings leased to public housing tenants –counting 146 already rehabbed row houses, another 288 within mixed-income developments such as Parkside of Old Town, and those yet to be built.

But during the Q&A, condo owners and upscale renters worried out loud about what’s coming next; specifically, that too many public housing units will be added to the mix now that the market for condominiums has gone slack.

Charles Smith, an architect and NNUP regular, encouraged those in attendance to push past their differences.

Gordon Walek

“We’re feeling left out and that we have no representation,” said Melissa Howard, an owner in the mixed-income Domain Lofts, one of the old Montgomery Ward warehouses along the North Branch of the Chicago River. “We can’t address the issues unless we have all stakeholders at the table.”

Charles Price of the CHA’s tenant advisory council rose to counter those newcomers who complain they lack representation on the court-ordered CHA “working group” that is evaluating how to proceed.

“How many CHA residents are represented on your condo associations?” Price challenged the condo owners in the room.

Living it
But Charles Smith, an African-American architect and NNUP regular who’s lived in the neighborhood for more than 60 years, struck a more conciliatory chord: “I live it. I suffer everything everyone else suffers. I choose to do that. … I know what some of you are talking about, but it’s all about people getting along with people.”

Woodyard admitted that, in the past, “We [CHA] haven’t done a very good job, once we build a mixed-income community, of providing the kind of support we need for all three income groups.”

The back-and-forth went on for an hour, with condo owners concerned about crime, safety, drug dealing and underperforming local schools. CHA tenants and leaders countered that newer, more affluent neighbors are too quick to brand street vendors as “drug dealers” … and too careless about where they park their cars.

Tenant leader Carol Steele (seated) said public housing residents share others' concerns about crime and drug dealing--but sometimes feel looked down upon.

Gordon Walek

Tenant leader Carol Steele summed it by saying: “Ninety-nine percent of the people who live in public housing are good people. There’s a percentage of bad people everywhere. But just like y’all, we want a safer neighborhood. We want the drug dealers off the streets. … We’ve got to start looking forward … and stop looking down … on people.”

Next up for NNUP: An all-invited celebration of community achievement, 6-9 p.m., Thursday, December 6, at Cornerstone Center.

Before adjournment, Keri Blackwell, LISC Chicago’s deputy director of programs, challenged the assembled to use the Near North Unity Program as their vehicle to advance the community’s agenda, especially on public safety and on the nature of new developments still in the planning stage.

“You be the voice,” Blackwell concluded. “You put forth our recommendations. You be the vehicle that represents the entire neighborhood.”

More information:
Keri Blackwell kblackwell@LISC.org
Rev. Randall Blakey info@lasallestreetchurch.org