March 23, 2022
On March 9 Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the city would be directing more police resources to the CTA, and doubling the number of unarmed transit security guards in response to a spike in violent crime and problematic rule-breaking, such as harassment and smoking, on buses and trains.
Continue reading Lawrence viaduct tent fire is one more sign Chicago needs to house our homelessMarch 17, 2022
:quality(85)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/2TXX7MQZ3ZAC5EO6CODVB3LJPI.jpg)
SPRINGFIELD (WGEM) – Low-income families in Illinois who receive TANF benefits could get an extra boost thanks to a proposal in Springfield.
Rep. Marcus Evans (D-Chicago) said the Illinois Department of Human Services should increase grant amounts for temporary assistance for needy families. The state currently provides 30% of the federal poverty guidelines for each family size. Evans would like to see that raised to 50%.
His bill could help a family of three currently receiving $549 per month from TANF get $915 in benefits. Evans said his plan also allows dollars for child support to go directly to parents or guardians instead of the current system where some of the money is dispersed by the state.
Continue reading WGEM: Illinois lawmakers could boost TANF benefits this yearBy Amber Drea
March 14, 2022
Last Wednesday Mayor Lori Lightfoot, along with the heads of the Chicago Police Department and the CTA, announced at a press conference that police resources would be shifted from the Bureau of Counterterrorism to the ‘L’ system in order to address the spike in violent crime on transit during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when many Chicagoans have been experiencing economic and mental health crises. The deployed officers (asked how many, police chief David Brown simply said replied, “As much as we need to send to the CTA to make it safe,”) will focus on the 24-hour Red and Blue lines, using data to target high-crime stops with an emphasis on preventing gang- and drug-related violence.
Continue reading Streets Blog Chicago: Homeless coalition hopes CTA security plan won’t “criminalize” unhoused people on the ‘L’By Amber Drea
Last Wednesday Mayor Lori Lightfoot, along with the heads of the Chicago Police Department and the CTA, announced at a press conference that police resources would be shifted from the Bureau of Counterterrorism to the ‘L’ system in order to address the spike in violent crime on transit during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when many Chicagoans have been experiencing economic and mental health crises. The deployed officers (asked how many, police chief David Brown simply said replied, “As much as we need to send to the CTA to make it safe,”) will focus on the 24-hour Red and Blue lines, using data to target high-crime stops with an emphasis on preventing gang- and drug-related violence.
By Katie Prout
March 2, 2022
I didn’t expect to be escorted off the premises of the city’s only overnight warming center on a 28-degree evening, though perhaps I should have. After all, I’d been warned. Last fall, when I learned I’d gotten this job, I asked people who live on Lower Wacker what kinds of stories they’d like to see in the Reader. Repeatedly, folks suggested I take a look at the city’s six official “warming areas” run by the Department of Family & Support Services (DFSS). “What about them?” I asked.
Continue reading Chicago Reader: Lukewarm welcome
The temperature is dropping on an already cold January morning. Still, Marcus, a client of The Night Ministry’s Health Outreach Program, has removed his coat and sweatshirt and pulled his arm out of his shirt sleeve so Stephan Koruba, The Night Ministry’s Senior Nurse Practitioner, can give him a COVID vaccination booster.
Marcus had lost his vaccination card a few months prior when the tent he lives in on the edge of downtown Chicago was ransacked. Koruba scrolls on a phone to locate Marcus’s electronic vaccination record and then issues him a new card with the date, brand, and vial number of his first vaccination, and now his booster.
Continue reading The Night Ministry: COVID Continues to Create Barriers for Chicago’s Homeless PopulationBy Max Herman
For the past 19 years, when students in Kane County have missed school, Kari Glenn has visited their homes to see what’s preventing them from attending classes.
As a truancy officer, she says this year has been the hardest.
In one of the families Glenn works with, the single parent died, leaving behind four young children. “Now they’re going to be living with a relative and that relative isn’t completely prepared to take on four little kids,“ she said.
Continue reading Chalkbeat Chicago: Illinois Students missed a lot of school last year: it’s a sign that something isn’t workingBy Neil Steinberg Jan. 23, 2022
“We’re missing an outreach worker who normally drives, answers the phone, plans the route and does needle exchange,” Koruba says. “We have a reduced presence due to COVID. We’re struggling a little bit.”
So those duties are now theirs, the missing worker one tiny twist of the vise that is slowly crushing frontline social service agencies at the beginning of the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Continue reading Chicago Suntimes: ‘The need gets larger and larger’By DAVID MASCIOTRA Jan. 21, 2022
“The bottom of the Empire,” was Reverend Jesse Jackson’s description of who Martin Luther King was seeking to serve with his politically revolutionary ministry of the 1960s. Jackson was standing in the Reverend Martin Luther King Legacy Apartments on the West Side of Chicago to give a press conference on, what would have been, King’s 93rd birthday, January 15, 2022. Joining Jackson were representatives from the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and the Illinois Union for the Homeless. The city of Chicago has transformed the lobby of the King Legacy apartment building into a small museum, showcasing the governmental-capital conspiracy that created the “ghetto.” Through decades of redlining and other discriminatory lending practices, public infrastructural programs to preserve segregation, police enforcement of residential borders, and “neighborhood covenants” among white homeowners and landlords to never sell or rent to Blacks, Northern cities became white fiefdoms.
Continue reading Counter Punch: At the Bottom of the Empire: Homelessness, Housing Injustice, and Jesse Jackson’s Call to “Eradicate Poverty”By Brenda Ruiz Jan. 21, 2022
A homeless man Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, gathers his belongings at the Chicago Transit Authority’s Clark & Dearborn bus station. On Wednesday, aldermen extended an agreement house homeless residents at a downtown hotel as the pandemic continues into the winter. Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press
People experiencing homelessness face many challenges when temperatures drop quickly like this week.
Reset hears from two advocacy groups on an upcoming homeless count and what resources they have in frigid weather.
Continue reading WBEZ Chicago: Annual homeless count aims to bring resources to Chicago area’s unhoused