LOCAL GIFTS: Home Goods

Locally-made Gift ideas Nothing about 2020 has been normal, thanks to the pandemic and its enhanced racism awareness, but StreetWise was blessed with help from its friends and so now this holiday season, we are using our city-wide platform to return the favor. StreetWise vendors are entrepreneurs, and so we are promoting other Chicago entrepreneurs of innovative products – many of them nonprofits – from varied cultures. We are all in this together.

by Suzanne Hanney

Bright endeavors

Since the pandemic began, “Home” has become more important than ever. It represents comfort, contentment, safety and security. Bright Endeavors creates soy wax candles, artfully hand-poured by young moms age 18 to 24 in its paid job training program, that ground you in those feelings, while simultaneously lighting the way toward strong families and bright futures. Bright Endeavors production assistants – 650 young moms since 2010 -- are in control of setting and pursuing their own parenting and career goals during the 12-week program. Juniper Berry and Fir is an invigorating combination of fir needle, juniper berry and cedar leaf top notes; middle notes of clove and jasmine and bottom notes of amber, vanilla and moss. Crisp and fresh, it exudes all that is best about winter. Choose 4-oz. mini glass with 20-hour burn time, $13 or 3-wick glass with 55-hour burn time, $30. Both are phthalate-free, with gold foil candle toppers. Holiday Citrus candle tin is aromatic cinnamon and clove harmonized with bright blood orange. It captures all the excitement of a bustling winter market: a cup of mulled wine held in mittened hands, carols rising to accompany shoppers as they traverse from stall to stall. 4-oz. tin with 20-hour burn time, $8; 8-oz. tin with 25- 30 hour burn time, $13; signature glass with 35-40 hour burn time, $22. Phthalate-free. December 11 is the last day to order at brightendeavors.org for guaranteed December 25 delivery. Gift cards are also available. Based in West Garfield Park on the West Side, Bright Endeavors is a social enterprise of New Moms; 100% of proceeds from the sale of candles support New Moms’ mission to empower young moms, their kids and our communities. Besides job training, New Moms provides 40 units of transitional housing at its Chicago headquarters and 18 units of permanent supportive housing in Oak Park, as well as family support. There are three periods when the brain develops most rapidly: early childhood, adolescence and upon becoming a new parent. New Moms’ work intersects all three periods to unlock new opportunities for moms and children, particularly those who have faced institutional racism, bias against adolescent moms and urban poverty. “When it comes to the multiplier effect of job creation and its impact on the sustainability of our cities, newer social enterprises like Chicago’s Bright Endeavors are carving strong footholds as leaders too…The mission – intimately connected as it is to employment – is also what makes them determined to keep much of their production handmade, despite the fact that machines help achieve efficiency. ‘It’s messy, but that’s the beauty of social enterprise,’ says CEO Laura Zumdahl, adding that, as long as intergenerational poverty is being addressed, they’re meeting their goals,” noted the newly released book, “In the Business of Change: How Social Entrepreneurs are Disrupting Business as Usual,” by Elisa Birnbaum (New Society, 2018). brightendeavors.org

Project FIRE

"Glass blowing requires communication, collaboration and trust, because 2,000-degreemolten glass can be a dangerous material to work with," says Pearl Dick, artistic director of the 501(c)(3) Firebird Community Arts. That’s what makes the art medium perfect for Project FIRE, Firebird’s artist development employment program that offers healing to youth age 14-22 who have been injured by gun violence.

“When people come in and we talk about safety and trust, it’s demonstrated really explicitly in working with the medium, which captures the attention of people who have been in high-risk environments,” Dick said. “It’s something you have to focus on. You can’t be distracted.” Working out of Firebird’s brick building at 2651 W. Lake St. in East Garfield Park, the young people use techniques you would otherwise see in Venice as they pull 20-foot rods or “canes” of molten glass swirled with colors. Some of the canes are cut into six-inch pieces to make drink stirrers (2 for $15), but there are also paperweights, sculptures, wine bottle stoppers ($20), vases starting at $25, Christmas ornaments such as glass orbs and icicles ($15-$35), all available at firebirdcommunityarts. org Participants are paid minimum wage and spend their time either fulfilling orders for the product line or working on their own pieces. Their individual works are also for sale; the artisans receive 70 percent and the rest goes to the program. Dick, who is a glass artist, co-founded the program in 2014 with Bradley Stolbach, PhD, clinical director of Healing Hurt People-Chicago (HHP-C), a trauma-informed, hospital-based violence intervention model. HHP-C is a partnership of the University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital, the trauma depar tment of John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook Count y and the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the Drexel University School of Public Health in Philadelphia, where the Healing Hurt People model was developed. Dr. Stolbach is a UChicago Medicine Urban Health Initiative faculty fellow and Project FIRE participants are recruited from both Comer Children’s Hospital and Stroger. The Healing Hurt People curriculum focuses on SELF: safety, emotion, loss and future, the four things disrupted when someone experiences acute or chronic trauma, Dick said. Project FIRE’s 26 participants learn what trauma is, its effects on the body and how to cope with it. The young artisans spend three hours working with glass and a final hour in group psychoeducation. Two groups of men meet two days a week for eight hours total; a women’s pilot group, begun this fall, meets once a week for four hours total, but is expected to expand to two days with more participants as the pandemic resolves. Project FIRE is also developing an entrepreneurship program in partnership with Harold Washington College and the City Colleges of Chicago. The intention is that participants who no longer need intensive case management or otherwise age out of the program can learn not just about artmaking but about small business development, possibly for something of their own. www.firebirdcommunityarts.org