The SportsWise team grades the Chicago Bears so far this season and looks to challenges after November 17.
Cover Story: Cleaning the Chicago River
The Chicago River has the potential to be a second waterfront, a venue for healthy, low-cost recreation for people living on the Southwest and Northwest Sides of the city. We can thank volunteer groups, which have painstakingly pulled trash from the river for more than 30 years, for the river's improved condition.
From the Streets
Chicago will merge shelters for legacy homeless people with new arrivals in a One System Initiative that will be fully operational by January 1. However, the 6,800 beds in the program are less than half the number recommended by a task force appointed to deal with the transition.
The Playground
ON THE COVER: The Wild Mile is an innovative project aimed at transforming a stretch of the Chicago River into a vibrant urban ecosystem (Dave Burk/SOM photo). THIS PAGE: A family works together to clean up the Chicago River (Friends of the Chicago River photo). DISCLAIMER: The views, opinions, positions or strategies expressed by the authors and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of StreetWise.
Dave Hamilton, Creative Director/Publisher dhamilton@streetwise.org
Amanda Jones, Director of programs ajones@streetwise.org
Julie Youngquist, Executive director jyoungquist@streetwise.org
Ph: 773-334-6600
Office: 2009 S. State St., Chicago, IL, 60616
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT RECOMMENDATIONS
Compiled by Daria Hamelin
The Music of Our City!
Sounds of Chicago
Visit the award-winning Untitled Supper Club (111 W. Kinzie St.) for an electrifying indoor music festival that brings the pulse of Chicago’s nightlife together in one unforgettable event. This ultimate party mashup will transport you through three rooms, six parties, and 12 incredible DJs. Why pick one party when you can have them all? Each space brings its own unique vibe, showcasing Chicago’s music scene with a mix of genres that will keep you dancing all night long! This festival will take place on Novmeber 10 from 5-10 p.m., with tickets ranging from $20 - $50. For more information, visit https://untitledsupperclub.com. 21+ to enter.
Sacred Art on Display!
'Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now'
This Fall, Wrightwood 659 (659 W. Wrightwood Ave.) demonstrates its commitment to Asian art—past and present—with a major exhibition pairing contemporary art from the Himalayas and its diaspora with traditional Buddhist and Hindu objects. Organized and curated by the Rubin Museum of Art, "Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now" presents new insights into the art of the global present as well as the forms, symbols, and narratives of sacred Himalayan art. This landmark exhibition is on view from Novmber 8 - February 15 during on Fridays noon - 7 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., with tickets priced at $15 at wrightwood659.org
Hard Knock Life!
'Annie'
The sun will definitely come out tomorrow as the Tony Award-winning musical "Annie" returns to Chicago for a heartwarming, limited three-week run at The Chicago Theatre (175 N. State St.) from November 12 - December 1. Directed by Jenn Thompson, a former “Pepper” from the original Broadway cast, and choreographed by Patricia Wilcox (Motown), this fresh take on "Annie" will have you smiling through all the classic songs you love. Tickets start at $39 in person or $54.50 online. For more information, visit www.msg.com/the-chicago-theatre
A Focus on Fashion!
Chicago Fashion Through a Chicago Lens
Step into NoMI, (800 N. Michigan Ave., 7th Floor) and celebrate the vibrant talent of local Chicago-based artists with Chicago Fashion Through a Chicago Lens, in partnership with The Curio and Chicago Fashion Week. This exhibition showcases five Chicago-based photographers and their unique approaches to fashion photography–some more traditional, and others more contemporary–fully encompassing the range of creative voices found in modern-day fashion. The exhibit runs through November 15, and is on display from 6:30 a.m. - 10:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.nomichicago.com. FREE.
Love is a Great Beautifier!
'Little Women'
Join the DePaul University Theatre School as it presents "Little Women," a play based on Louisa May Alcott’s novel following the four March sisters—Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy—and their journeys of self-discovery amidst the American Civil War. Marisha Chamberlain’s endearing adaptation of this literary classic celebrates the power of family, resilience, and the heartwarming bond shared by sisters growing up together. This show will run through November 9 at the DePaul Merle Reskin Theatre (60 E. Balbo Drive), with tickets ranging from $7 - $32. For more information, visit https://theatre.depaul.edu
Queer Life in Florida
'Bottle Fly'
Visit the Redtwist Theatre (1044 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) as it presents the world premiere of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s "Bottle Fly," a beautiful depiction of queer survival in the Everglades. This show captures the many layered dynamics of race, poverty, and bigotry that are baked into life in South Florida, exploring LGBTQ+ love and its social complexity in this area. Bottle Fly runs through November 24, with tickets ranging from $10 - $35. For more information, visit www.redtwisttheatre.org
Set the Table!
'Dinner with Friends' Theatre Wit (1229 W. Belmont Ave.) presents "Dinner with Friends" through November 23, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that delves deep into the complexities of love, friendship, and marriage. The story follows two couples whose relationships are thrown into turmoil when one announces their imminent divorce. Through raw emotion, revelations, and shifting loyalties, this play offers a poignant exploration of how relationships evolve over time. Tickets are priced between $20 - $30, with discounts available for students and seniors. For more information, visit www.theatrewit.org
Otherworldly Inspiration!
'The Other Witch'
Prepare to be spellbound as award-winning choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Nejla Yatkin brings her mesmerizing work, "The Other Witch," to life on stage for the first time. Inspired by the iconic Hexen Tanz, originated by German dance pioneer Mary Wigman in 1914, Yatkin reimagines this legendary performance with her own evocative twist. "The Other Witch" will make its live debut at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts (1016 N. Dearborn St.) on November 9 at 7 p.m., with tickets priced at $25. For more information, visit www.ruthpage.org
Makers on 8 Artworks Studio
Make Your Own!
Visit the Harold Washington Library Center (400 S. State St.) on November 6 at 4:30 p.m. for Makers on 8 Artworks Studio, a weekly drop-in, hands-on art studio open to all ages. This studio activity will offer a wide variety of creative and artistic supplies, and will be led by art therapists and alumni from the School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC). For more information, visit www.chipublib.org. FREE.
A Retrospective Performance!
An Evening with Flaco Navaja and Friends
If you’re craving a night brimming with passion, rhythm, and undeniable talent, don’t miss “An Evening with Flaco Navaja and Friends” at the Chicago Theatre Works (1113 W. Belmont Ave.). In celebration of 25 years in the arts, Flaco Navaja delivers an electrifying retrospective that fuses salsa music, mesmerizing storytelling, heartfelt poetry, and unexpected laughs. His soulful connection to his roots and magnetic energy promise an unforgettable experience. November 8 at 8:30 p.m. with tickets priced at $25 at www.chicagotheaterworks.com
Grading the Chicago Bears
John: What grade do you give the Chicago Bears at the midseason? The first half was a breeze, but the second half starting November 17 is going to be a struggle. They have all division opponents except San Francisco, and they play Green Bay January 5.
Kianna: They did pretty good, a comeback after so long. I would give them a B.
Allen: The Bears are really coming along. I am really proud of them and excited about this season, because they invested $38.5 million into Caleb Williams. For all those people who don’t like Black quarterbacks, get used to it. We might as well build around him, get behind him and make Chicago a good team. Every time I watch the Bears play, I see improvement, which is good for the city.
John said the Bears have played weak teams, and the best is yet to come. Nevertheless, Caleb hasn’t gotten hurt or discouraged as far as get-
ting sacked by other teams. He’s still positive and doing a great job on the field. The offense and the defense are getting behind him, doing a great job in protecting him and doing a great job of receiving passes from him.
I feel like we are on a trip. I remember when I was little and we were going to see our cousins in Washington, D.C., and it was exciting. That’s the way I feel about the Bears. I feel we are on a journey and it’s looking better and better. We are in third place in the NFC North. We have to go through some good teams: Green Bay, Minnesota, Detroit, but I really believe we can beat Green Bay this year. I give them an A.
John: I give the Chicago Bears credit for beating teams they were supposed to beat. They didn’t do that with Justin Fields, whose average pass was six yards. That’s not going to cut it if you need a first down and you’re third
and long. I give them a B only because of the teams they played.
I give them credit: they beat Jacksonville and Carolina, who were both awful, and they beat Tennessee. But they still have key games like Green Bay twice, Minnesota twice, Detroit twice and Washington.
As of October 18, their combined record versus [upcoming] opponents is 6 and 23. If the Bears can go .500 in that stretch, the playoffs look like a strong possibility. Nevertheless, you gotta enjoy the play of quarterback Caleb Williams. He has proven that the Chicago Bears can find an NFL quarterback.
Kianna: I am looking forward to the next games: Washington, Arizona, then New England.
Allen: Their schedule may get harder, but he’s getting more practice. I see Caleb adjusting to professional football. He
is a Heisman Trophy winner, but there’s stages you have to go through and he is going through them very well. I think we are seeing a return on our investment.
Another vendor and I have a bet on Green Bay. Jordan Love is a good quarterback, but if Caleb continues to progress, we can beat Green Bay.
John: The game time for the Bears/Washington Commanders October 27 was adjusted from noon to 3:25 p.m. because the two teams are doing better than expected and have the top two rookie quarterbacks. The winning quarterback will be the favorite to win Rookie of the Year. If the Bears go 3-3 or 4-2, and if they beat San Francisco, that will put a feather in Caleb Williams’ hat.
Any comments, suggestions or topic ideas for the SportsWise team? Email StreetWise Editor Suzanne Hanney at suzannestreetwise@yahoo.com
Vendors John Hagan, Kianna Drummond and A. Allen chat about the world of sports.
HOW CLEANUPS ARE IMPROVING WATER QUALITY AND ATTITUDES TOWARD THE CHICAGO RIVER
Wet leaves, branches and a Harvest Cheddar SunChips bag float along the main stem of the Chicago River. A family of ducks swims east toward the Chicago Harbor lock, and a lone paddle boarder makes his way west. Plants flourish along the Chicago Riverwalk, where mothers are pushing their babies in strollers.
It wasn't always this way.
For decades, the Chicago River was literally the city's sewer. Residential and industrial refuse were dumped in the river.
“Anything you can imagine being done to a river has been done to this river to maximize it for transportation or human use rather than healthy ecosystems,” says Maya Kelly, business operations manager for Urban Rivers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring the river habitat. “And so, because of that long history of neglect and abuse, a lot of Chicagoans still to this day think of the Chicago River as something really dirty.”
by Miranda Bucio and Leah Love
Eventually, Chicagoans grew tired of the stench and the contamination of their drinking water. In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago engineered the reversal of the river so that refuse would flow away from Lake Michigan – the city's drinking water source – and instead flow downstream to the Mississippi River.
But the same abuse of the river as a sewer persisted until 1922, when the city started treating water prior to disgorging it into the river. Over time the methods of treatment improved, leading to a significant reduction of raw sewage in the Chicago River.
Still, to this day, on heavy rain days, when the city's sewers are overwhelmed, untreated sewage flows into the river in what are known as “combined sewer overflows.”
“Those sewers just get full of water and not all that material can get to the wastewater treatment plant,” says Timothy Hoellein, an aquatic biologist at Loyola University in Chicago.
“The sewers are designed to overflow directly into the river. After it rains, there's raw sewage in the river.”
This leads to wipes and other sanitary products getting into the river alongside plastic litter from city streets and the riverbank, like a throwback to the river's past.
The results are not just unsightly; they’re bad for the health of people who recreate on the river. Raw sewage contains bacteria, viruses and parasites that can cause stomach and intestinal illnesses in people. Plastic litter that flows into the river later breaks down, releasing microplastics – debris that is less than 5 mm in size.
Hoellein’s research found that 93% of fish in the river had plastic in them. This poses a risk to people who consume fish caught in the river; microplastics are potentially carcinogenic and can affect the human endocrine system, causing reproductive, neurological and immune disorders.
Microplastics are not removed by conventional water treatment. “We know that there's microplastics still in the treated drinking water,” he says. “People can be exposed to them, our pets, our children, our gardens. Anytime that we're using our drinking water sources, we're potentially being exposed to this pollutant.”
The reversal of the river only sends this problem downstream to communities east and south of Chicago. “The communities downstream in Joliet and down the southwest – those communities are drinking that water that's ultimately coming from the Chicago River,” Hoellein says.
This means that what people in Chicago flush down toilets and wash into sewers affects the health of the river and the quality of the drinking water in other communities. For the cleanliness of the water to change, behavior has to change. “If people don't care, nothing gets done,” says Kelly. “For better or for worse, we are the biggest influence on our ecosystems and on our planet as a whole.”
Raising awareness
To both change public perception of the river and address the issue of plastic pollution in the river, organizations like Urban Rivers and Friends of the Chicago River are mobilizing volunteers with educational river clean-ups.
In 1979, Friends was formed to improve the health of the Chicago River system. The organization has spearheaded policy initiatives as well as offered education and clean-up projects to improve the health of the river.
Every year on Chicago River Day, thousands of volunteers remove litter from the river. Over the past 32 years, these cleanups have removed 1.9 million pounds of litter from the river.
This year’s Chicago River event included over 2,000 volunteers across 87 sites. “We're beginning to see people change their perceptions and their attitudes about the Chicago River, about the Calumet River, about the other canals,” says Tim Touhy, director of communications at Friends. “They're beginning to realize this is a natural resource, and we need to care for it and take care of it.”
To spread this effort downriver and beyond one day, Friends has established 15 “Litter Free Supply Stations” (see page 11) across the city and suburbs, where people can borrow trash grabbers, gloves and trash bags and conduct their own cleanups. A “Litter Free Toolkit” explains in English and Spanish how to organize an effective clean-up.
Urban Rivers, founded in 2016, also uses clean-ups as a way of encouraging people to take care of the Chicago River. The three co-founders were initially focused on growing native plants along the Chicago River to restore the habitat. This led to the creation in 2019 of the River Rangers program, a primarily kayak-based trash cleanup on the water.
The program took off in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic. “Most people couldn't go outside or do anything, but it was one of the few volunteer opportunities where you could go outside and be distanced doing cool activities,” Kelly says.
Initially, volunteers would grab a kayak from Kayak Chicago, a kayak and paddleboard outfitter that allowed River Rangers to use their kayaks for free. “Since then, it's evolved to the point where we have our own fleet of kayaks and folks can go through a safety training and then check out those kayaks,” says Sage Rossman, the community outreach and program manager of Urban Rivers.
More kayaks mean a need for space to put them, however, and there is no room for another shipping container on the property near their current launch. “I think that goes back to the infrastructure around the river,” Rossman says. “None of it's designed for recreational use.”
Cleaning and categorizing
Efforts to prevent pollution of the river benefit from knowledge of what is getting into it. So after River Rangers collect trash in five-gallon buckets, they categorize it and share that data with Hoellein.
The trash — and the data — add up. The River Ranger season lasts from April to October, with two-hour cleanup shifts running twice a day every Tuesday through Saturday. The 200 or so River Ranger volunteers collected more than 7,200 pieces of trash in 2022.
“People are really into kayaking, it turns out,” Rossman says. “So if you give them a free kayak and ask them to pick up some trash while they're out there, they'll absolutely jump on it.”
Lori Wheeles, Josh Halvorson and Kurt Hedlund are frequent volunteers. Every Tuesday morning, they go out on the river and gather as much trash as they can. “We don't come back until we literally have no more room,” Wheeles says. “It's hard to make fun out of taking garbage out of the river, but we always find something that's fun.”
The three have found all kinds of things in the river: glass bottles, toothbrushes, single shoes (“I’ve never found a pair,” Wheeles says), insulation, a table, oil paintings, a mattress, and a mysterious, phallic configuration of plastic.
The volunteers have also found additional things to appreciate about the river. “I really like being outside and the kayaking
PAGE 7: Volunteers gather at the Eleanor Boathouse. OPPOSITE PAGE: Volunteers on a dock. CENTER TOP: Kurt Hedlund, Marilou Pena and Lori Wheeles show off trash they have collected in the Chicago River. As part of Urban River’s River Rangers program, they make weekly kayak voyages down the river to mitigate litter (Joshua Halvorson photo). CENTER BOTTOM ROW: Volunteers at Rockwell on the River; Cleaning along the river in LaBagh Woods. ABOVE: Urban Rivers volunteer Lori Wheeles shows off a piece of artwork that her team found floating in the Chicago River (Joshua Halvorson photo). PAGE 10: Volunteers dump out mulch at Big Marsh Park. Collecting trash at LaBagh Woods. PAGE 11: Volunteers get ready to transport the collected trash. All photos provided by Friends of the Chicago River (unless noted).
and the business about having something important to do,” Hedlund says. “Cleaning up the river, you know, providing the habitats. The critters in a river and stuff like that. [It’s] a big win-win.”
In addition to river cleanups, volunteers also help maintain the Wild Mile, a network of floating gardens meant to provide a habitat to plants and wildlife along the North Branch Canal of the river on the east side of Goose Island. Currently, it’s 400 feet long, but will soon cover a whole mile.
This year, Urban Rivers kept this interest going over the winter by hosting social and educational events during what would typically be the off-season. “I think people really enjoy that hands-on component and they like being part of a community that's making a difference,” Rossman says.
It takes a village
Volunteers find out about Friends of the Chicago River and Urban Rivers through a variety of connections: programs in schools, community outreach events, and a tightly knit network of environmental organizations in Chicago.
Wheeles found out about river cleanups through the Shedd Aquarium, where she is a long-time volunteer scuba diver. “The Shedd sent me to do something with or volunteer with Friends of the Chicago River, and then the Friends of the Chicago River had suggested Urban Rivers. It's all this tightly knit web because we all kind of work together,” she says.
Wheeles has seen a big improvement in the river since she started volunteering five years ago. “In the early years, I would pull my kayak out of the water and have this slimy stuff on the
bottom, and it doesn't have that anymore,” she says. “That's not something most people would think about. But it's a great indication of how clean the water is there.”
Rossman says the physical transformation volunteers can observe is important. “People see the river improving right before their eyes,” she says. “The reports we've gotten from rangers, they all say like, ‘It's really cool to see my work, making a physical difference.’”
Friends of the Chicago River documents ways the Chicago River has become cleaner over the decades of its work. The river is now home to more than 70 species of fish along with snapping turtles, muskrats, beavers and mink; birds like great blue herons are found on its banks. The quality of the water has improved thanks to new water quality standards that Friends lobbied for, but also the work of innumerable volunteers who remove trash and spread awareness of the need to keep trash out of the river.
“Success for us is not only removing these from the ecosystem and kind of getting plastic out, but also really engaging the community and getting them involved with the river,” Kelly says. “Having people who are consistently coming back and getting excited about cleaning up the spaces, that's what success really looks like for us.”
Learn more about volunteer opportunities at UrbanRiv.org and chicagoriver.org.
Miranda Bucio and Leah Love are Chicago-based journalists and recent graduates of Columbia College Chicago. They reported this story as part of Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin’s Solutions Journalism course.
Friends of the chicago river litter Free Supply Stations
47th Ward Alderman
Matt Martin's Office
4243 N. Lincoln Ave.
[Hours: M - F, 9am - 5pm]
Chicago’s 35th Ward and Cook County’s 8th District County Office
2934 N. Milwaukee Ave. Unit C.
[Hours: M - F, 9am - 5pm]
Chicago Maritime Museum
1200 W. 35th St.
[Hours: Tu - Sun, 10am - 4pm]
Chicago Tool Library
4015 W. Carroll Ave., Suite 101
[Please see chicagotoollibrary.org for current hours]
Cook County Commissioner
Bridget Degnen’s Office
4253 N. Milwaukee Ave.
[Hours: M - F, 9am - 4pm]
Evanston Ecology Center
2024 McCormick Blvd., Evanston, IL
[M - F: By appointment only]
Ford Calumet Environmental Center
Big Marsh Park, 11559 S. Stony Island Ave.
[Hours: M - Sat, 10am - 4pm]
Litter Free Lawndale "Litter Box"
3733 W. 16th St.
[By appointment only] – This location is for cleanups in North Lawndale and and the neighborhoods immediately surrounding (Little Village, Garfield Park, Pilsen)
McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum
99 Chicago Riverwalk, SW Bridgetower at Michigan Ave. & Wacker Dr.
[Hours: M & F: 8am - 4:30pm, Tu - Th: 8am - 8pm, Sat: 8:30am - 1:30pm]
RiverLab at River Park
5100 N. Francisco Ave.
[Hours: Tu - Sat: By appointment only]
Urban Rivers
1440 N. Kingsbury St, Ste 005
[Tu - Sat: By appointment only]
Village
of Crestwood
13800 S. Cicero Ave., Crestwood, IL
[M - F: 9am - 4pm]
*Glenview Public Library
1930 Glenview Road, Glenview, IL
* Available to library cardholders of the Glenview Public Library only. Checkout is run through their Library of Things checkout system.
After your cleanup
Visit chicagoriver.org and add it to its Litter Free Map and take its Litter Free Survey to help track the collective impact.
Under One System Initiative, migrant shelters and merge with Chicago's established
Migrant shelters will close by yearend, and “new arrivals” will join “legacy homeless” in a single system.
Chicago “is ending its migrant mission in favor of a single and equitable shelter system for everyone experiencing homelessness,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said October 21.
The One System Initiative (OSI) will mean:
• 6,800 shelter beds for anyone in need: 2,100 funded by the city and 1,700 by the state; an addition of 3,800 beds to the 3,000 legacy beds
• Uniform access to shelters by calling 311
• Closure of the Landing Zone at Polk and Desplaines for buses from Texas. Starting November 1 through yearend, it will only be open 8 a.m.-8 p.m.
• No more 60-day limits on shelter stays, because that was not part of the legacy system.
However, the 6,800 shelter beds are less than half of what was recommended by a task force on the transition to OSI, which sought retention of 3,000 city-funded shelter beds in the existing homeless response system plus the 11,175 New Arrival shelter beds that remained as of June. Members of the task force came from 45 homeless service providers, city and state government.
The task force also suggested maintenance of one 24/7/365 physical access point for shelters; a dedicated virtual access point or phone number; neighborhood-based homeless prevention services and transition support; a landlord incentives/risk mitigation fund to encourage private sector rentals to people exiting homelessness, and more.
Johnson responded to a media question about retaining the nearly 14,000 beds by saying that passage of the Bring Chicago Home (BCH) ordinance would have reversed decades of disinvestment. During yet another mention of the proposed ordinance that failed in a March 19 referendum, Johnson said that its projected $100 million yearly revenue could have produced 4,200 shelter beds.
"Bring Chicago Home was and is focused on creating a dedicated revenue stream in Chicago to provide permanent housing and supports to people experiencing homelessness,” Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Doug Schenkelberg said later.
“The vast majority of the funding would have been allocated to long term housing and supports," Schenkelberg added. "The new arrivals surge we've experienced in the last couple of years is just one more example of why we need a funding stream like Bring Chicago Home in place to address the problem and respond to heightened moments
of crisis. Our homeless services system has never been sufficiently funded to meet the scale of the problem. That's true at every point in the system - shelter beds, permanent housing, services, homelessness prevention, and many other aspects of the system.”
Regarding the 24/7/365 shelter access point, Chief Homelessness Officer Sendy Soto said the city understood the need for cultural appropriateness and would talk to the state about funding it, along with rental assistance.
Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) Commissioner Brandi Knazze echoed Soto regarding the need for rental assistance and acknowledged that on any given night, Chicago shelters are 97-98 percent full.
One area that could be tightened up is the 1,800 people who have received one or more extensions of time in shelters, said Harley Jones, director of domestic programs for Project HOPE and on loan to the Mayor's Office since August in support of the new arrivals' mission. However, the City's 2024 Homelessness, released June 7, noted a deficiency of 119,000 affordable units into which these shelter residents could move.
The October 21 announcement of OSI came two weeks ahead of the presidential election and nine days before Johnson’s promised release of next year’s city budget. Facing a nearly $1 billion deficit, he sought a delay until October 30.
“What we appropriate in this budget is what we can do right now,” he said of homeless services.
African Americans (including StreetWise vendors) have blasted the mayor and the Democratic Party for what they have called preferential spending on migrants over existing unhoused people – 70 percent of whom are Black in Chicago. Johnson nevertheless allocated $250 million for homelessness and $150 million for migrants in last year’s budget.
Chicago’s response to the humanitarian crisis became a model for the world, he said. “We don’t cower, just because
by Suzanne Hanney
The "Landing Zone" at 800 S. Desplaines (Dave Hamilton photo).
shelters will close homeless shelters
the Republican Party has a lunatic that does not want to support comprehensive immigration reform and pits poor Black people versus poor Brown people.”
Deputy Mayor for Immigration, Migrant and Refugee Rights Beatriz Ponce de Leon said that city government balanced stewardship of public resources with liberal values to develop a “model of compassion” that saved over 50,000 lives. Just under 5,000 remain in shelters and no buses have come here since June.
Chicagoans themselves donated their "time and treasure," Ponce de Leon said. Roughly 900 volunteers helped with English as a Second Language and financial literacy. The city's Amazon wish list received $500,000 in donations as well as a million baby wipes and tens of thousands of winter coats.
The sudden influx of asylum seekers was unprecedented, and the city did not receive a lot of federal support, but it learned how to build better systems of care, she said. The two shelter systems were unequal, but going forward there will also be efforts to push the federal government for comprehensive immigration reform that includes work permits so migrants can support familiies as well as investments in the Black community that has seen decades of disinvestment.
“As the mayor says, ‘It’s not either/or. It’s both.'"
Last week's Answers
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marginalized voices and provide opportunities for individuals to earn an income and gain
ment. Anyone who wants to work has the opportunity to move themselves out of
StreetWise provides “a hand up, not a handout.”
vendors go through an orientation focusing on their rights and responsibilities as a StreetWise Magazine
How StreetWise Works
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Lincoln Park Community Services cordially invites you to Thursday 11 • 7 • 24 6:00PM - 11:00PM
Taste Fall
Help us kick off a toast to 40 years of service to the community with fabulous food & drinks from local restaurants, entertainment, whiskey tasting and fundraising to support those experiencing homelessness.
