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Volume 12, Issue 11
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Trump’s Racism Targets Mayor’s Office
In May, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it would open an investigation of the City’s hiring practices under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The announcement came after Mayor Brandon Johson said “our people hire our people” and touted his administration’s diversity during remarks at the Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn.
“It is the most diverse administration in the history of Chicago,” Johnson said during his remarks. “And here’s why I’m naming this, is because there are some detractors that will push back on me and say, you know, the only thing [the] mayor talks about is the hiring of Black people. No, what I’m saying is, when you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else. We are the most generous people on the planet.”
Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ’s civil rights division, addressed a letter to Johnson announcing the investigation on May 19 (which, coincidentally, was Malcolm X’s 100th birthday). The letter cited Johnson’s remarks, which went on to say that four Black women and two Black men are in senior positions in his administration. The letter included no allegations of actual or perceived discriminatory hiring practices.
That same day, Johnson told reporters he wouldn’t “be intimidated” by “tyranny” from the federal government. “The diversity of our city is our strength,” he added. The Mayor’s Office also released a report that showed its 105-person staff is 34.3 percent Black, 30.5 percent white, 23.8 percent Latino and 6.7 percent Asian American. Johnson’s staff is more diverse than the previous two administrations, according to reporting by The TRiiBE; former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s staff was 64 percent white in his first year, and former mayor Lori Lightfoot’s first-year staff was 50 percent white.
Black executives from Carl Stokes to Barack Obama have had to project racial neutrality even in the face of openly racist opposition. Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor, consistently projected a doctrine of fairness to all Chicagoans, Black or white, even as his campaign faced openly racist opposition and his administration weathered a war brought by white aldermen who blocked his every move.
In his remarks to the Woodlawn faithful, Johnson chose a different tack than Harold. But in practice, he’s been pretty fair. Johnson’s administration is more or less reflective of the city’s racial makeup. While the mayor was certainly playing to the crowd of churchgoers in Woodlawn in his remarks, the fact remains that having an administration with a small plurality of Black people is a positive development in a city long plagued by the effects of redlining, white flight and violence, and racist neglect or outright hostility from City Hall.
With its lawsuit, President Donald Trump’s DOJ is turning the spirit and letter of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on its head. The Act was passed after years of nonviolent resistance to decades of systemic racial discrimination, often in the face of vicious violence. Now, thanks to that movement, Americans are able to enjoy some greater freedoms, and some more reflective representation. Only a regressive, racist president would seek to undo those gains.
IN THIS ISSUE
public meetings report
A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level.
scott pemberton and documenters .... 4 making it in chicago
Detours and dead ends on the path to opportunity.
binghui huang, illinois answers project 5
‘most drivers aren’t making money’ Rideshare drivers say they feel stuck, exploited, and unsafe.
binghui huang, claire murphy, illinois answers project ...................................... 6
jobs. block clubs. investment: how chicagoans are interrupting violence at its roots
“Lack of opportunity, unemployment, those are root causes of violence.”
jim daley 8
‘we’re at the mercy of child care’
Child care has become one of the biggest line items in a family’s budget.
madison hopkins, meredith newman, illinois answers project 13 for aging chicagoans, reverse mortgages can be a lifeline…or a curse
“The elephant in the room is senior home repair right now.”
laura stewart, illinois answers project 18
sueños is a stage for rising artists and culture in all its forms
Peso Pluma made it up to Chicagoans after last year’s performance was cut short by storms. jocelyn martinez-rosales 22
sueños es un escenario para artistas emergentes y cultura en todas sus formas
Peso Pluma deleitó a los habitantes de Chicago luego de que su actuación del año pasado se viera interrumpida por las tormentas. por jocelyn martinez-rosales traducido por jacqueline serrato ..... 24 who cares for the caregivers?
Free Root Operation is connecting Black women caregivers with resources and helping break generational cycles of violence.
layla brown-clark 25
Cover photo by Akilah Townsend for Illinois Answers Project
Chicago will remain in Trump’s crosshairs for the duration. He despises us because we produced Obama and for countless other slights. But the president will find that Chicago is a city—“stormy, husky, brawling”—that squares its broad shoulders to lay tyrants low.
Public Meetings Report
A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level.
BY SCOTT PEMBERTON AND DOCUMENTERS
May 12
At its quarterly meeting, the Chicago Council on Mental Health Equity (CCMHE) heard from the Chicago Department of Public Health’s Jenny Hua that the difference in average life expectancy between Black and non-Black Chicagoans stands at 11.4 years and is increasing. Black Chicagoans average a 69.8 year life expectancy; non-Black Chicagoans average 81.2 years, according to a Healthy Chicago 2025 Strategic Plan Report. The plan itself is designed to help close that gap. Hua reported that “mental illness is really a driver of life expectancy differences, and we as a health department think this is where our role is.” The life expectancy gap is driven by chronic disease, homicide, and opioid overdoses, she noted, but mental health issues are a root cause. The plan grew out of community health assessments that collected and analyzed health data of Chicago residents. Consequently, the plan seeks to lower barriers and expand access to all health care, but especially those for mental health. Measures are to emphasize improving follow-ups to hospital discharges, reducing schizophrenia hospitalizations, and increasing the number of mental health calls that lead to appointments for care. Smart911 is a free app allowing individuals to provide detailed safety profiles dispatchers see when a user calls 911, CCMHE members learned from Office of Emergency Management & Communications (OEMC) representatives. A text-to-911 option for emergencies can be used when calling might be unsafe. Council members suggested privacy safeguards should be communicated clearly. The information is private, not searchable, and can be seen only during emergencies. Profiles can include information for multiple family members, medical conditions, building access, and mental health needs.
May 14
“Don’t be a backbiting snake,” City Council Member David Moore (17th Ward) told the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Board at its regular meeting after urging the Board to “work with the mayor that put you here.” Moore, who is not a member of the CTA Board, was encouraging the board to support Mayor Brandon Johnson in the search for a new transit president. Board Member Rosa Y. Ortiz questioned the appropriateness of Moore’s comments, implying that he had spoken out of turn because he was not listed on the agenda. A public commenter encouraged the Board to conduct a “thorough nationwide search for the next leader of the CTA.” Other public commenters called for “a focus on accessibility as a core value from day one,” help from the Board to move a stalled pilot Narcan program forward, and addressing late night violence in Rogers Park by “shifting the security force to be a presence later at night.” During the meeting, the board also learned from a CTA representative that March revenue totaled $38.4 million, an increase of $2.9 million over March of last year. Fare and pass revenue for the month was $29.8 million.
May 15
Illinois lawmakers are reportedly nearing a deal to save Chicagoland’s transit services, at least for the time being, the Regional Transportation Authority Board of Directors
learned at its meeting. Without $771 million in new funding for the 2026 fiscal year, the RTA has warned that one in five Chicago workers—twenty percent of the city’s workforce—could lose access to the buses and trains they rely on daily to get to their jobs. Such cuts could include partial or complete suspension of service for at least four of the eight CTA train lines, closing or reducing services to more than fifty stations, and eliminating up to seventy-four off 127 bus routes, the City Bureau Newswire reported. That could leave five hundred thousand CTA riders without a convenient bus stop, officials said. Nearly three thousand transit workers could be laid off. Reduced mobility, increased congestion, and job losses could lead to $2.6 billion in lost wages annually across the region, with $1 billion in Chicago itself, the board learned. The RTA’s effort to alert the public to the agency’s funding needs—“Save Transit Now”—has resulted in twenty-five thousand website visits, nine thousand letters sent to legislators as well as strong legislative and senior leadership support, RTA officials said.
May 19
The reduced number of students being vaccinated in Chicago Public Schools reflects a nationwide trend, TaShunda Green told the Local School Council (LSC) Advisory Board at its meeting. Green is deputy chief of the Office of Student Health and Wellness for CPS. She explained that the decline in vaccine compliance was spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though CPS policy requires compliance, less than half of CPS students have herd immunity against measles, the Chicago Sun-Times recently reported. At least six measles cases in Illinois have been confirmed, Green said, and noted increasing community concerns about measles and health requirements. Pediatricians and their patients are on alert, she said. Measles is a highly contagious disease that can cause serious health complications, especially in children younger than five, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One person infected with measles, mumps, or rubella (MMR) can infect up to nine out of ten unvaccinated individuals. The MMR vaccine can provide long-lasting protection against all strains of the disease. CPS has implemented several measures to address the problem, including vaccination drives. Officials are strongly encouraging LSC members to encourage their community members to comply with the medical requirements, Green said.
May 20
At its meeting, the City Council Committee on Public Safety approved a draft of a controversial “snap curfew” ordinance by a vote of ten to seven. Twenty legal aid, civil rights and community organizations, including the ACLU of Illinois, have written an open letter opposing the ordinance. They have raised significant legal and social concerns over the proposed ordinance and how it would be enforced. A last-minute update gave sole authority to declare such a curfew to the CPD’s superintendent, removing a requirement that the deputy mayor of community safety also sign off before a curfew could be imposed. The trigger for calling a curfew could be a “mass gathering” of twenty or more people in a public space and deemed likely to cause “an unreasonable risk to public health, safety and welfare.” A Council member opposed to the ordinance in its present form, Desmon Yancy (5th Ward), said, “It does create prohibitions for young people to be young in this city…I’m not sure if it’s designed to protect property or to keep young people safe.” The City Council is unlikely to vote on the proposal until later this month. Check out our last issue and website for extensive coverage of the curfew proposal and reactions to it.
Documenters’ work “really matters,” says report
City Bureau has released a report—How We Record Public Meetings Matters—that explains how its Documenters program works and why it’s valuable. Prepared by Nina Kelly, a Ph.D. candidate at Wayne State University, the report focuses on how Documenters cover public meetings in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “By comparing official minutes from forty-six public meetings to notes taken by Documenters,” Kelly’s research “uncovers some powerful insights,” City Bureau reports, notably “who takes the notes really matters.” Kelly’s paper appeared in the March issue of the Journal of Civic Information.
This information was collected and curated by the Weekly in large part using reporting from City Bureau’s Documenters at documenters.org.
illustration by Holley Appold/South Side Weekly
Making It In Chicago
Detours and dead ends on the path to opportunity
BY BINGHUI HUANG, ILLINOIS ANSWERS PROJECT
This series was originally published by the Illinois Answers Project.
Around 1938, Marshall Hatch’s father hopped on a train in Mississippi to follow his older sister to Chicago, a city that promised a better life with opportunities that could benefit generations after him.
“They used to say ‘if you can’t find a job in Chicago, you can’t find a job anywhere,’” Hatch said. “It really was like a promiseland.”
He was raised in public housing with seven sisters on his father’s meatpacking salary before going to college, earning multiple advanced degrees, becoming a senior pastor and raising similarly successful children.
His father’s bet on the American Dream paid off big time for the Hatch family.
“It’s an upward mobility story for my family personally,” he said. But he recognizes that kind of opportunity hasn’t been the case for many others, especially those who emigrated to Chicago decades after his father in the 1930s.
“I’ve seen the American Dream, for migrating families, go from a dream to a nightmare,” he said. “There’s a lot of poverty and dysfunction.”
Nearly a century later, Chicago continues to be a place of refuge for migrants from further-flung places like Venezuela, Ukraine, the Caribbean and countries throughout the world. But is it still the land of economic opportunity and possibility? A place where children raised in public housing on a meatpacking salary can go on to become homeowners with good jobs?
The path to upward mobility, studies show, is paved by affordable and quality education, housing, health care as well as safe neighborhoods and good-paying
jobs. But access to those cornerstones is becoming out of reach for more and more Chicago families as the cost of living skyrockets. For example, an individual spent on average $353 a year on health care in 1970. That number is $14,570 in 2023, according to a Peterson-KFF analysis. Even when accounting for inflation, that increase is still more than six times as much.
Between 1991 and 2024, child care costs rose at nearly twice the pace of inflation, according to KPMG. And tuition for college has grown at three to five times the rate of inflation in the last forty years, according to the Chicago Bar Association.
But there are some efforts to help families that could be part of a roadmap to upwards economic mobility.
In one neighborhood, a collection of violence interruption programs may be a key to bringing economic life back to the
A proposal to allow for more coach houses and basement units may offer more options to people looking for affordable housing. And a state program that forgives student loans for people who are buying homes offers families saddled with debt an opportunity to build wealth.
But many of the programs that aim to fix cost of living burdens are limited and underfunded, especially as median salaries are often not enough for basic life needs.
Making ends meet is not only harder due to rising costs, but also due to a lack of well paying job opportunities.
Unlike Hatch’s father, many recent immigrants to Chicago are working as
landscapers, nail salon technicians and child care providers, said Lilia Fernández, a history professor at University of Illinois Chicago. National data shows that immigrants make up an outsized portion of the service industry. More than 20 percent of working immigrants were in the service industry in 2023, compared to some 15 percent of U.S.-born working people, according to the bureau of labor statistics.
These jobs are far less stable and wellpaying compared to the manufacturing and production jobs of the early to mid1900s, she said. As industrial jobs moved abroad or disappeared with technological advancement, they were replaced by service, hospitality and retail jobs that are often seasonal, low-wage and part of the gig economy.
“The work may not be as steady and stable,” Fernández said.
The data shows that the gap between Chicago’s wealthiest families and neighborhoods and its poorest has been steadily growing . And where you are born, in a wealthy or struggling neighborhood, has a significant bearing on your success in later life.
The city’s own analysis of census data shows that low-income neighborhoods are also among the least able to advance economically.
Cook County’s wealthiest communities, comprising mostly of the city’s white residents, have more than 200 times more wealth than the city’s poorest communities, which are largely made up of residents of color, according to The Urban Institute, a think tank based in Washington D.C. This wasn’t always the case. Income inequality has accelerated since the 1980s and is growing faster than the federal income gap, according to a study led by a University of Illinois Chicago researcher. From 1980 to 2015, the measurement of
Pastor Marshall Hatch Sr. poses for a portrait at his home in Chicago, IL.
Photo by Akilah Townsend for Illinois Answers Project
inequality grew by 36 percent, compared to 19 percent nationwide.
Hatch remembers when government resources, like public housing, were for middle and working class families and not just the poorest Chicago residents. That helped families like his advance.
“The housing development I grew up in was originally built for Italian immigrants and then Jewish immigrants. “My takeaway is that when European immigrant families needed public housing, public schools, land grants, colleges, FHA loans and so on, we had a government committed to what I call ‘family-friendly public policy.’ We invested in all of those things,” he said.
That all changed as a growing Black Chicago population needed these programs, he said.
Public housing and many other programs became stigmatized and available only to the poorest of Chicago residents.
Today, in Chicago and across the U.S., the rising cost of living means that more middle class families are in need of government financial assistance but don’t qualify for it, sometimes due to narrow income restrictions. Lower-income families face mounting challenges in the pursuit of economic advancement compared to generations that came before them.
While people in the mid-1900s were able to support large families on factory jobs, Calvin Pierce, a Chicago resident who works for a food logistics company at O’Hare International Airport, said his salary isn’t enough to take care of himself.
At $18.65 an hour, just a few dollars above the state minimum wage, he is aware that he couldn’t afford to get seriously sick.
“I’ve never been that sick thankfully. My coverage isn’t that good so I’d really want to wait it out instead of bringing a bill into the house” he said. “Then we’d have to deal with billing.”
Like so many families in Chicago, he is stuck in that spot where he makes too much to rely on government programs but too little to have financial stability and freedom to pursue goals beyond living paycheck to paycheck.
“I’m not eligible for medicaid because I make too much, but what I’m making
isn’t enough.”
Like Pierce, many look to reliable government programs to help them bridge the gap between what they need and can’t afford.
While major changes in the economy over the last century have driven much of the income gap and cost of living in cities like Chicago, policy decisions by federal and local leaders have helped and hurt families as they aim to achieve economic success.
“Economic mobility has become more challenging to achieve for many families. There are so many factors here,” Fernández said. “We can’t just point to one thing.”
Historically, different political regimes have variously expanded and shrunk the social safety net that helped families get ahead. During President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, government programs for struggling families to get health care, education and food expanded with programs like Medicaid, Head Start and food stamps. Decades later, President Ronald Reagan’s cut many of these programs.
Since President Donald Trump won his second election in 2024, he’s prioritized cutting government spending, including financial assistance programs for struggling families.
But Illinois and Chicago lawmakers have their own priorities for addressing the social problems that come out of a rising cost of living.
In this project, we investigate the complicated roots of economic mobility in Chicago and Illinois as well as the successes, failures and limitations of some of the government efforts to solve them ¬
‘Most
Drivers Aren’t Making Money’
App-based gig work, like Uber and Lyft, was supposed to be a lucrative side hustle offering workers freedom and flexibility. Now, drivers say they feel stuck, exploited and unsafe.
BY
BINGHUI
HUANG, CLAIRE MURPHY, ILLINOIS ANSWERS
This story was originally published by the Illinois Answers Project as part of their series Making it in Chicago: Detours and Dead Ends on the Path to Opportunity.
JoeNegrau has been a rideshare driver for Uber and Lyft for nearly ten years, but he has not been rewarded for his years of experience.
“In that time, I’ve seen pay drop year after year, without fail.”
When he started driving around 2015, rideshare companies took about 20 percent of his earnings, he recalled. Now, the app is using an algorithm to determine the driver and app split, and he’s getting half of passenger fares.
“I have to drive twice as long to make the same money.”
The gig economy, where people pick up work on an as needed basis, has grown over the past decade to become a significant part of the low-wage service economy and a major point of conflict in the labor rights movement.
Gig work has been around for a long time in different forms: babysitters, handymen, artists, street vendors, writers and designers. But around the turn of the millennium, tech companies accelerated the trend by turning anyone with a smartphone into a potential gig worker. The trend of converting jobs into gig work, researchers say, is expected to grow, and with it some of the questions around fair pay and job security.
PROJECT
As gig work like rideshare apps has become facilitated by tech companies that set terms for pay and job security through control of the phone applications used to connect workers to clients, some workers say they’re being exploited and kept in unstable and low-paying jobs that prevent them from getting ahead in life.
In Chicago, this tension is most prominently playing out in the fight for worker protections at rideshare companies, most notably Uber and Lyft, where labor rights organizers are calling for due process for termination, minimum pay, safety protocols and even negotiating power.
Drivers say that tech companies are using algorithms to depress their pay— with some workers saying they are making less than Chicago’s minimum wage—and to kick them off the app without any due process. Both are labor rights that many workers rely on to feel secure in their jobs. Drivers are demanding the city intervene and set standards for pay, safety and stability for tens of thousands of people working in the rideshare industry.
A representative for Lyft said the company has addressed safety and pay concerns through its rider verification program, improved deactivation appeals process and commitment to paying drivers at least 70 percent of weekly fares after fees. The ordinance, the company spokesperson said, would increase fares for riders and make it harder to keep
unsafe drivers off the road.
Uber and City officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Because gig work is informal and there’s limited to no tracking of the industry. There’s limited information about the demographics, wages and working conditions of this economy. The city doesn’t collect demographic data on who works rideshare jobs. But residential data shows that some of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods, like Rogers Park, North Park, Near West Side, Belmont Cragin and Auburn Gresham, have the highest number of drivers.
A survey of 502 drivers from 2021 to 2022 by University of Illinois Urbana Champaign gave more insight into the work. Researchers found that most drivers work full time and depend on their earnings for basic expenses, like rent and utilities. Yet, some four in ten drivers earn less than Chicago’s minimum wage of $15 an hour, with the average driver making less than $13 an hour.
The survey also revealed key problems with the current rideshare model. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said they feel unsafe at least once a month while driving. Some 40 percent have experienced sexual harassment on the job. In fact, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health named Uber and Lyft among the most unsafe employers last year, alongside certain meatpacking, industrial farm and lumber mill companies.
issue. It impacts riders too.
Despite such issues with these jobs, drivers say they depend on them because they need a flexible schedule, Negrau said. As more work becomes temporary, seasonal or part time, there are fewer options for well-paying stable jobs that don’t require degrees or specific skills.
“There are drivers who are stuck, either for health reasons or they’re taking care of somebody and they have to have flexibility in their work, ” Negrau said.
“Most drivers aren’t making money”
Camila Hudson, who drives Uber and Lyft in Chicago occasionally since 2016, doesn’t think the algorithm—which determines the fares, fees and driverapp splits of the profits—is just a driver’s
Two people who need to go from the same place to the same location often have different fares depending on how much they’re willing to pay, which is information the rideshare companies can figure out from personal data, such as when you’re likely to need a ride and how reliant you are on rideshare.
The same goes for drivers. Two different drivers might have the same route but earn different pay depending on the fare they’re willing to accept, she said.
Hudson is picky about what rides she accepts, only driving routes that she finds lucrative.
“I’ve rejected and said hell no to 85 percent of the rides offered to me because they’re trash,” she said.
But not everyone has that luxury. And, drivers say they’ve noticed the more low-paying trips they accept, the more
low-paying trips they are sent by the algorithm.
“Most drivers aren’t making money. They are just not. And they’re killing their cars,” she said.
Drivers and others have sued rideshare companies for misclassifying employees as freelancers and used that legal threat to negotiate for higher pay and more stability for workers, but with limited success.
In many states, such as California and Pennsylvania, Uber and Lyft have successfully won legislative fights, court battles or had the cases dismissed to maintain drivers as independent contractors.
A number of states used the lawsuits to force rideshare companies to negotiate with them on pay and benefits for drivers. In Massachusetts, lawmakers negotiated with Uber and Lyft for a $32.50 per hour
minimum pay for a driver’s “engaged time”, sick leave, accident insurance and health care stipends.
According to the settlement, a driver’s “engaged time” is the period between when a driver accepts a ride and drops off the rider.
The agreement also includes $148 million from Uber and $27 million from Lyft in backpay to current and former drivers who were underpaid.
“For years, these companies have underpaid their drivers and denied them basic benefits,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell. “This agreement holds Uber and Lyft accountable,” she said.
Campbell credited labor allies and rideshare drivers in Massachusetts for being instrumental in achieving a settlement.
“[Uber and Lyft] saw the wave
Rideshare driver Camila Hudson poses for a portrait at the Lakefront on the North Side of Chicago, IL.
Photo Akilah Townsend for Illinois Answers Project
coming,” said Franswa Jan-Ena de Vertières, an Uber Black driver in Massachusetts who supported the settlement. “They monitored [drivers] around the state and saw what was going on. They decided to get out in front of it,” he said.
Vertières said social media advocacy and outspoken organization helped avoid a trial.
Voters in the state also approved a proposal allowing rideshare drivers to unionize.
“We have the opportunity to continue organizing, I believe we should push on,” he said.
Seattle workers pushed for protections from unjust deactivations. There, app-based delivery and rideshare companies have to provide notice of deactivations, and in some cases allow for workers to appeal the decision.
A Lyft spokesman said in an email that the app has been updated for “deactivated drivers to display why they were deactivated, applicable next steps and common questions on how to get their deactivation resolved or appealed.”
In Chicago, drivers are hoping to come to an agreement with Uber and Lyft about setting standards for work in the city before putting it to a vote among city lawmakers.
Will Tanzman, executive director of The People’s Lobby, a Chicago-based organization that helped launch the Gig Workers Alliance, committed to fighting for fair labor and working conditions, said drivers are actively pushing for their own approach to collective bargaining by fighting to establish a pay floor and pass a living living wage and safety ordinance.
The ordinance is backed by dozens of human rights organizations and hundreds of rideshare drivers in the city.
Tanzman said the draft resulted from years of organizing and a negotiation with the city to establish a prospective pay floor for drivers.
“Earlier this year, we got to a version [of the ordinance] that the city agencies in charge of implementing believe is implementable, and preserves the key elements that the drivers wanted to make sure was in this ordinance,” said Tanzman. “We shared that draft with
the [rideshare] companies, and have had some conversations over the past couple of months with the companies,” he said.
The People’s Lobby is hoping to pass the ordinance before July 1, when Chicago's minimum wage inflation adjustment goes into effect.
“It’s a great victory for the city that thousands of low wage workers are going to get a raise and sadly, tens of thousands of rideshare drivers are going to be excluded from that raise,” said Tanzman.
If the ordinance is passed before the wage increase goes into effect, “we can make sure the rideshare drivers at least know they're in the pipeline for a raise,” he said.
Hiding behind the algorithm
When Uber first emerged in American cities in the 2010s, they offered lowercost rides compared to taxis and offered more competitive pay because it was flushed with investor money.
That financial backing helped to push out taxi companies across the country.
Lori Simmons, a gig work organizer and rideshare driver, remembers making as much as $60 to $70 an hour when she drove Uber in 2014.
Now, her net hourly earning looks more like $20-$25 an hour.
“They had a lot of promotions back then because they were trying to lure people to work during busy times,” she
settle these claims.
“They view themselves as tech companies who create algorithms and computer programs to do jobs, which, of course, ignores the actual human beings doing vast proportions of the work,” said Tanzman.
Tech companies created a “veneer of direction connection between a worker and a consumer,” Hatton said.
“They can effectively hide behind the platform, behind the algorithm and they can therefore claim that ‘we’re just a platform company, we’re just an app.”
said.
But those wages started to decrease. The first wave of drivers were replaced by drivers willing to take lower pay, said Simmons.
This trend of converting full time jobs into gig work, and depressing pay, is expected to grow, claiming more jobs in industries like health care, said Jen Sherer, the acting deputy director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Economic Analysis and Research Network.
For example, to squeeze more profit and cut costs, some health systems are considering hiring nurses for just the days they are needed.
Apps like CareRev and Shiftkey connect health care workers with hospitals, but like rideshare drivers, nurses have expressed similar concerns over poor pay and safety issues, as reported by Stat News.
While Silicon Valley tech companies accelerated the growth of low-wage selfemployment jobs, the destabilization of full time work started before then, said Erin Hatton, professor of sociology at the University of Buffalo College of Arts & Sciences and author of the 2020 journal article “Gig Work: All Hustle and Little Gain.” In the 2000s, Fedex, like Uber and Lyft, faced lawsuits when they classified their drivers as independent contractors, which would have required them to buy the provided trucks and uniforms. The company paid hundreds of millions to
Lack of protections and benefits is becoming increasingly common as the gig economy grows and employers are distancing themselves from workers to avoid the cost and responsibility of ensuring safety, said Sherer. It’s not just people who are self employed in the informal economy who face these problems. Part of the way employers are increasingly engaging in the gig economy is also by outsourcing work and using more seasonal and temporary workers.
The use of outsourcing for jobs like janitors and security guards, not just abroad but to smaller and lesser known staffing companies, is another way companies sometimes skirt responsibility and lower pay.
Such workarounds are a reversal of the decades spent by workers fighting for labor protections and rights.
“In that long historical arc, we created that system [of labor rights] to avoid the rampant types of precarity and abuses and instability that went along with informal economies, where lots of work across all sectors was often, ‘gig work’ or ‘piece work’, or ‘day labor’, or whatever you want to call it,” she said.
But workers are pushing back, hoping to claw back some of those standards. Negrau hopes that once Chicago passes an ordinance establishing pay, disciplinary due process and safety standards, they can try to expand those wins to the state.
“That's what happened in Minneapolis. That's what happened in Boston and Massachusetts. And so we're expecting that to be the next fight,” he said. ¬
Rideshare driver Camila Hudson poses for a portrait at the Lakefront on the North Side of Chicago, IL
Photo Akilah Townsend for Illinois Answers Project
How Chicagoans Are Interrupting Violence At Its Roots
The causes and solutions to gun violence are difficult to quantify—or control. One thing is clear: gun violence is highest in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.
BY JIM DALEY
This story was produced in partnership with the Illinois Answers Project as part of their series Making it in Chicago: Detours and Dead Ends on the Path to Opportunity.
Cfood pantry that shares a building with the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago (INVC). The long line was a stark reminder of the connections between poverty and violence cited by researchers and advocates, and a major part of why INVC and similar organizations include workforce development in their programming.
dozen young Black men tumbled out of an elevator on their way home from a jobs-training program, joking with one another and offering polite greetings to visitors. The program is unique in that it combines workforce development with behavioral-health training to address trauma, which many of these young men have experienced firsthand due to the high rates of violence in their West Side neighborhood. Since 2016, nearly 3,500 people have gone through the paid twelve-week program, where they learn relationship building and social skills along with resume writing and interviewing.
Some program participants have even been hired by INVC as community violence intervention (CVI) workers. One of the nonprofit’s staffers was in its orbit for years even as he remained in the streets, where he narrowly survived after being shot. Now, he’s among a
legion of CVI workers who come to the streets, alleys, and hospital rooms night after night to talk people down from committing violent acts.
Mayor Brandon Johnson is taking a cue from organizations like INVC. The mayor’s ambitious plan to tackle gun violence emphasizes “root causes” such as poverty, institutional divestment,
and unemployment in neighborhoods hardest hit by shootings. Last year, his administration began addressing them with a combination of place-based outreach efforts, jobs programs, and violence interruption techniques long used by nonprofits. Along with these approaches, Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker have pledged millions to more direct
violence-prevention and victim-services
While Johnson has attributed recent declines in shootings to these efforts, the true impact of anti-violence work is hard to measure. Gun violence in Chicago ebbs and flows as a result of myriad factors, many of which are impossible to quantify—or control, such as predictable upticks that come with warmer weather each summer. In the hardest-hit communities such as Garfield Park, shootings remain aboveaverage even when violence declines citywide. The approaches of Johnson’s administration and West Side organizers aim to permanently reduce violence by tackling both its immediate causes and addressing the entrenched poverty they say is the only way to create a sustainable
The West Side has grappled with gangs, drugs and violence for decades.
The Eisenhower Expressway, which runs through it, has long been known as the “Heroin Highway” because of the volume of narcotics sold along it. Decades of divestment following the 1968 riots, coupled with the spread of heroin and the crack epidemic in the 1980s, cratered the local economy.
The confluence of such factors can make the promise of a better life seem out of reach. Cycles of poverty, trauma and violence are deeply enmeshed. While violence interrupters and elected officials in Chicago have taken different approaches to the problem — from direct outreach that addresses violence head-on to place-based strategies like block clubs — they all agree that the lack of economic
Bryan Ramson poses for a portrait near his home on the West Side of Chicago.
Photo by Akilah Townsend for Illinois Answers Project
opportunity is a root cause.
“When all of those things combine together, you build the perfect recipe for hopelessness,” said 11th Police District Councilor Alees Edwards. “And then people will begin to think differently about themselves, what they can accomplish, what is possible for them.”
While it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of any of these efforts, violence has declined across the city in recent years (and has seen a downward trend nationwide since the 1990s). Poverty on the West Side, however, has persisted. Whether gang-related or due to interpersonal conflicts, myriad factors influence every shooting.
One thing is clear: gun violence is highest in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.
Decades of divestment
Divestment and poverty have gripped the West Side for decades. But the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King marked a major turning point for the area.
On April 5, 1968, the area exploded in grief and rage as uprisings plunged the area into two nights of looting and arson in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis the previous day. Firefighters, protected by phalanxes of police, battled blazes that would consume twenty-eight blocks and destroy hundreds of buildings. Before the rioting abated, eleven people were killed and thousands more were injured. Garfield Park’s business district never fully recovered.
Martin Coffer, the director of community relations and violence prevention at the faith-based nonprofit Breakthrough, grew up in Garfield Park. “When I was younger, we played outside,” said Coffer, who was born in 1965. “We knew everyone; there was a community connectedness.”
The crack epidemic in the 1980s and the proliferation of heroin that followed shattered that, he added. Parents grew fearful of letting their kids off the front stoop; the local playground became a noman’s-land. Jobs grew scarce.
As a youth, Coffer worked at a shoe store on Madison and Pulaski. Now,
young people don’t see such jobs in the community, he said.
“If we could change those opportunities, increase those opportunities and increase the investments in our community, I think that would definitely be a turn in the right direction,” he said, “because lack of opportunity, unemployment, those are root causes of violence.”
Research tends to agree. Studies have long shown strong links between poverty, joblessness, and violence. A 2022 University of Chicago Law Review analysis that looked at nearly a halfcentury of data in Chicago found that when violent crime increased overall between the 1960s and 1990s, the poorest parts of the city saw the highest jumps.
Like other violence-prevention organizations, Breakthrough incorporates job development into its programming; last year it provided employment services to 220 people, fifty-four of whom were placed in jobs.
The West Side has some of the most enduring and extreme poverty in the United States. Areas in which more than 20 percent of residents are below the federal poverty line for more than three decades are considered to have “persistent poverty” by the U.S. Census. Nearly all the Census tracts in Garfield Park have poverty rates above 20 percent. In some cases, more than half of residents are below the poverty line.
Unemployment has also been linked to gang affiliation and violence, and young people in impoverished communities face a catch-22: the lack of viable jobs drives some to join gangs and participate in illicit economies, which in turn heightens their exposure to violence and arrest, making jobs even harder to get.
In the Chicago area unemployment is about 5 percent overall, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics.
Unemployment disproportionately impacts Black and Latino communities like those on the West Side; in the first quarter of 2025, Black men were nearly 1.7 times (up from 1.5 in 2024) as likely to be unemployed than Latino men and almost twice as likely as white men.
For those who can find entry-level employment Chicago’s $16.40 minimum
wage is not quite enough to keep up with average monthly expenses, according to the data aggregator LivingCost.org. “The jobs [don’t pay] enough money, especially right now,” said Patty Carrillo, a West Humboldt Park block club captain. “We go to the grocery store and [buy] nothing and it’s $100 already.”
On the front lines
Breakthrough, INVC, CRED and other violence interruption organizers include workforce development, behavioral health counseling and job placement to enhance their direct outreach to people involved in violent altercations. That outreach attempts to prevent retaliatory shootings, set up non-aggression agreements among gangs, and pull people off the street. By combining these approaches with workforce development, they hope to break cycles of violence, one person at a time, for good.
Like Breakthrough, which is staffed by neighborhood residents, INVC provides paid training to people who have been enmeshed in violence to become outreach workers and break those cycles as outreach workers.
“There’s a measure of accountability, a measure of wanting to restore what you might have been contributing to in the past,” said Shunda Collins, INVC’s vice president of development and communications.
The direct-outreach model, now called “community violence intervention” or “CVI” by practitioners, was invented in the 1990s in Boston as Operation Ceasefire. It came to Chicago in 2000, originally as an initiative called CeaseFire Chicago, and has since been renamed Cure Violence. Cure Violence outreach workers have often been involved in violence themselves, are embedded in the communities they serve, and strictly refuse to share incriminating information with police even as they coordinate their efforts. The techniques developed by its creators have since been adopted by dozens of organizations in Chicago and across the country.
Samuel Castro, INVC’s director of strategic initiatives and partnerships, started out as an outreach worker.
Castro, who spent a dozen years in prison on federal charges, was told about community violence intervention by his co-defendant. Outgoing and charismatic, he was a natural for the work.
“I think for most of us that’s in this space, sad to say that we were the ones who messed up these places, and then we see the outcomes now,” he said. “So that’s my personal fight.”
Castro’s nineteen-year-old son “lives that life” currently, he said, making his work doubly personal.
Frederick Seaton, an outreach supervisor at INVC, has done this work for eighteen years, beginning at CeaseFire. Keeping his four sons out of violence was part of what has made Seaton passionate about his work. “So I go out there on a daily basis, and me and my team continue to build relationships with individuals within the community,” he said.
Exposure to violence and other forms of trauma at a young age doesn’t always predict later involvement with gangs, but some studies have found links between them. When people are exposed to violence in their youth, there can be adverse impacts on their mental health. To combat this, INVC offers behavioral health services to both clients and outreach workers.
Understanding those impacts is part of what makes those who were formerly perpetrators of violence well-suited to reach those still embroiled in violent activities.
Antonio Daniels, a former gang member who got involved in violence prevention after finding God, is now the director of volunteer and church engagement at Breakthrough. He said building relationships is key. “I got a neighbor on my block that says, ‘Before you correct, you must connect,” he said. “Really just getting to know people on their own terms.”
Block clubs connect neighbors
Block clubs, a staple of Black communities in Chicago since the Great Migration, are one way neighbors connect. They’re free to organize and register with the city, giving residents a way to interface with city departments. They often beautify
their blocks, and can even push illicit activity away. Since 2008, Chicagoans have founded nearly 700 block clubs—a quarter of them on the West Side.
In 2019, Bryan Ramson purchased a four-flat in Garfield Park. The building needed significant renovations, and he rehabbed it himself; renters moved in the following year. Ramson, a thirty-sevenyear-old neutrino physicist at Fermilab, grew up in “grinding poverty” in New Orleans’ Ninth and Seventh Wards and has lived in Washington D.C. and Detroit.
The neighborhood was one of the few places he could afford property. “Because of how wealth inequality works, it’s harder and harder to afford a house,” he said. “Neighborhoods like Garfield Park are going to be extremely valuable and extremely relevant towards the young people who are trying to find ways to grab their version of the American Dream.”
Before he closed on the property, Ramson saw a couple of young men standing outside of it, but didn’t immediately realize they were selling drugs.
“What we found is that there was basically lawlessness in front of our house,” he said. “The owners of this overnight drug market were just uninterested in trying to work with the people who lived on the block.” Ramson, who was elected to the 11th Police District Council in 2023, organized a block club to reclaim the street. It took months of work and a confrontation that sent Ramson to the hospital—but they saw success. The block has been clear for the last couple of years.
“There seems to be folks trying to come back in and sort of reclaim the space for open-air drug markets” recently, Ramson said. But thanks to the block club, “we already have a game plan and a playbook by which to start really trying to prevent that from happening.”
Nonprofits take similar place-based approaches to curbing violence. In 2010, Breakthrough workers began reclaiming a playground a few blocks east of the Garfield Park Conservatory, from gang members.
“Families couldn’t go to the playground,” Coffer said. “What we did
was institute what we call a ‘home court.’ It’s like a block club on steroids.”
Every summer Friday, Breakthrough workers host a basketball tournament, bring in a bounce house and pass out food. “With that consistency, right now, if you go over there, the park is clear,” Coffer said.
“Consistency has been one of those things that our community struggles with,” added Damien Morris, Breakthrough’s chief program officer for violence prevention. “You get temporary funding; you start to gain momentum. And then next year, the funding isn’t there.”
Coffer lives near the intersection of Pulaski and Jackson in West Garfield Park.
“At one time we just thought we were all alone,” he said. “But when you’re able to engage in a block club or something like that, we find out that you're not by yourself. There’s organizations; there’s other neighbors who want a safe space. So then they feel empowered.”
Ramson said making his street safer wasn’t easy. It took communication with 28th Ward Ald. Jason Ervin and West Side Block Club Association founder Talei Thompson to make something happen, but the block club eventually got the city to install speed bumps and surveillance cameras. Tensions between Ramson and the dealers came to a head when he decided to sit in the street in a lawn chair to interrupt their activity.
“Eventually one of them assaulted me,” he said. He was left bloodied, but came back.
The confrontation changed the dynamic on the block: the men saw that Ramson wasn’t going to back down, and the attack got the attention of the police. By working with Thompson, violence interrupters, police and the community, the block club saw results.
As a police district councilor, “I have a much better understanding of how to apply pressure to the situation without putting myself directly in harm’s way,” he said. “It really is paying attention, being active, and being consistent in the application of pressure to your goals. And then having a group of people to do that with you, that’s going to be the
main strategy.”
Carrillo, the block club captain in West Humboldt Park, took a similar approach. She has lived on Monticello near Grand Avenue for twenty-two years, and founded the block club in 2019 after a group of young men took over the corner to sell drugs. In its first year, her club organized a block party that was so successful, she said the dealers called the cops to complain that the club had shut down the block.
“We stopped, literally, we stopped business for them,” she said.
On a recent Sunday morning in May, a half a dozen volunteers in bright pink vests walked down both sides of Monticello, pausing here and there to pick up trash. At the end of the block, they chatted in a garden, one of three the local block club had planted in vacant lots. The gardens, along with community events like this and block parties are all strategies the block club has used to build connections with one another and
to push drug dealing off the block.
A few high-end new homes stick out from the block’s otherwise modest midcentury two-flats. Carillo said they’d been built on vacant lots since the block club began beautifying the street. With them came higher property values— part of a citywide trend, and also driven by gentrification in Humboldt Park pushing farther west—but the increase has squeezed long-time homeowners like her.
“We don't like these kinds of houses here, because, yes, it's getting expensive,” Carillo said. “I just, I don't know. I mean, it's good and not.”
Crime has also recently returned. Carillo shared a video of two men, one of whom held what looked like a gun, stealing a catalytic converter from a car on Monticello earlier that morning. She said the block club planned to attend an upcoming community meeting with the police commander to try to get answers.
The People’s Plan
Johnson’s “People’s Plan for Community Safety,” which triages communities most impacted by violence and aims to address root causes such as poverty, food insecurity, and unemployment, is novel on a citywide level. His administration is the first to have an Office for Community Safety, and Garien Gatewood, Johnson’s first-ever deputy mayor for community safety, comes from the nonprofit sector.
Like Gatewood, the approaches of the People’s Plan are rooted in nonprofits. Its centerpiece is a massive summer jobs program, which is set to hire 29,000 youth ages fourteen to twenty-four for seven weeks this summer—an increase of 1,000 from 2024. Johnson’s administration is also piloting a hiring program that places high school graduates in jobs with the Department of Streets and Sanitation. Together, the state, county and city have committed more than $100 million to violence-prevention initiatives in 2025.
In a recent midterm interview with the Weekly, Johnson wouldn’t take direct credit for this year’s drop in violent crime (shootings citywide are thus far down 25 percent from last year). But it’s clear that he thinks the People’s Plan is working.
“One of the things that we did, we looked at thirty-five of the most violent beats in Chicago,” he said. “We saw some similarities within those beats. These are places where schools were closed, where public housing was shuttered, where disinvestment was the prevailing form of governance. And what my theory was: if we can reduce violence in the most violent sections of the city of Chicago, we could take that citywide. And that is starting to play out.”
Separately, the mayor’s “Take Back the Block” program is similar to Breakthrough’s place-based “home court” approach. The program targeted half a dozen violence-prone spots on the South and West Sides last year, flooded them with resources from multiple city agencies, and held three-day events at each.
“I think the work that we did with Take Back the Block, if you really broke it down, would be a mini-version of the People’s Plan for Community Safety, where you flood this area with resources
and support and you literally have the entire [mayoral] cabinet coming out,” Gatewood said.
At the events, city officials listened to residents’ concerns. The primary resource neighborhood residents said they needed? “Jobs.”
To meet that need, the Mayor’s Office brought in the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, which administers federal funding for jobs training. At one Take Back the Block event, more than forty people were hired on the spot.
It’s too early to tell if the events will have the same lasting impact that Breakthrough achieved at West Side playgrounds, but an Illinois Answers/ South Side Weekly analysis found four of the six police beats Take Back the Block targeted had fewer shootings in 2024 than the previous year, while one had the same number in both years. Only one, in Roosevelt Square, a public housing development near Little Italy, had more. That beat is in a Census tract where more than half of the residents are below the poverty line.
The uneven results present “an opportunity for growth,” Gatewood said.
Edwards said she appreciated that the Mayor’s Office reached out to community members to shape the Plan. But she added that it’s not nearly enough to address the centuries of systemic harm wrought on Black communities.
“There is zero reason that the government is not looking into an immediate strategy and coming up with reparations,” she said.
The challenge of tracking impact
Violence prevention is challenging work. There are more than 100 gang-affiliated cliques on the West Side, and navigating that landscape makes outreach efforts and nonaggression pacts a complex and difficult task. Furthermore, not all gun violence stems from gangs, and it’s harder to prevent shootings that arise from organic interpersonal conflict, robberies, and other unknown factors. Seaton and Castro described incredulously watching a recent news report about a shooting that was tagged as gang-related; the outreach workers knew full well it hadn’t been.
Measuring the impact of outreach, job training and other interventions is even more difficult.
The causes of violence are myriad, and even harder to grasp are the factors influencing recent declines in violence.
“Data shows how many people got shot, how many people were killed. There’s no way for me to capture how many lives were saved by deescalating,” Castro said. “When we are in those gangways and the alleys at night, and calming people down from going to retaliate, there’s no number on that. I can’t tell you how many lives were affected because we have that relationship.”
INVC’s Shunda Collins noted that last year, INVC had hundreds of conflict mediations. “We likely prevented a shooting, at least from what we know, 955 times,” Collins said. “And then [with] the skills and training people are getting…the number’s even higher.”
It’s also unclear how best to measure impact. Part of the problem is trying to measure outreach efforts with traditional criminal-justice metrics, said Chicago CRED staffer Jalon Arthur at an event with the City Club of Chicago in April.
“When you think about metrics to actually gauge success for CVI [community violence interruption], we’re talking about things like mediations, non-aggression agreements, the number of individuals and groups receiving services,” he said.
Conversely, police gauge success by looking at gun recoveries, arrests, and clearance rates. “You will always run into problems when you look at CVI through a criminal-justice lens,” he added. “It needs to be looked at through a publichealth lens.”
Outreach workers are certainly having an impact, however—and research is starting to catch on. A study published in April by researchers at Northwestern University found that outreach efforts are contributing to recent declines in gun violence in hundreds of “hotspots” across Chicago’s South and West Sides. The study found a 41 percent drop in shootings at locations where outreach workers with the Peacekeepers Program maintained a presence.
By comparing years when the program operated only in the summer to those where it was year-round, the
study was able to more directly correlate Peacekeeper activity to shooting declines. Importantly, the study also assessed how long “peace intervals,” or periods without shootings, persisted, in addition to the average shooting victimization rates. Still, the study acknowledges that declines in hotspots “align with broader citywide reductions in gun violence.”
While the Peacekeeper Program, like other outreach programs, uses a variety of interventions in their work, its primary function is to quite literally have people on the streets, ready to safely de-escalate conflict. The state has invested $34.5 million in the Peacekeepers this year.
In a recent interview, Gatewood pointed to April’s historic low in homicides citywide. In the next breath he noted that at the time of the interview, thirteen people had been fatally shot (seven more would be killed before the month ended). “Those are…at least thirteen families whose lives have been changed drastically forever,” he said. “So how do we, on one hand, celebrate the lives that we’re saving, hold people accountable for the lives that are being taken, and make sure we support the families who are struggling through some of the worst times of their lives?”
For violence-prevention workers like Castro, it’s done one person at a time. When the young man who’d been shot told him he was ready for a job, Castro asked him why.
“‘Well, you stood in my life no matter what,’” he recalled the man saying. “You didn’t let me down, no judgement. And now I have a son—I have to make a change.” He’s now a staff member at INVC.
Castro attended the baby shower. ¬
‘We’re
At The Mercy Of Child Care’
While the state infuses hundreds of millions a year into child care programs, the strict eligibility requirements and limitations for its largest child care subsidy exclude tens of thousands of families.
BY MADISON HOPKINS, MEREDITH NEWMAN, ILLINOIS ANSWERS PROJECT
This story was originally published by the Illinois Answers Project as part of their series Making it in Chicago: Detours and Dead Ends on the Path to Opportunity.
Asingle mother in Kenwood changed jobs in order to find child care— even though it meant possibly working fewer hours and less pay.
A couple in Park Ridge has paid so much for care they haven’t been able to start a college fund for their toddler.
A family in Lemont delayed buying a home and decided against having as many children as they once hoped for.
Child care has become one of the biggest line items in a family's budget, with its costs growing faster than any other household expense in recent decades.
[[ Chart: Child care costs increasing faster than other major household expenses ]]
It forces parents to make tough decisions—ultimately stalling the chance for families to advance financially and professionally, according to dozens of interviews and responses to an Illinois Answers Project survey of child care workers and families.
“We're at the mercy of child care,” said one working mother, who is pregnant with her third child and expects she and her husband will pay $54,000 for child care in the coming year. It’s roughly a quarter of their annual income.
The financial health of the child care industry is inextricably linked to the larger economy, with both short- and long-term impacts. Access to affordable, reliable child care has the immediate benefit of allowing parents to work or attend school, providing a stable workforce for businesses and putting more cash in the pockets of young families.
The Child Care Assistance Program, also known as CCAP, is the
largest government child care subsidy. It significantly reduces monthly costs for families and it can be an essential source of income for child care businesses, particularly in Cook County.
Yet it doesn’t provide enough relief for many families and providers, an Illinois Answers Project investigation found.
Illinois continues to put limits on CCAP far stricter than federal recommendations. These restrictions exclude up to 130,000 children, who could be eligible under national guidelines, from receiving support, according to the most recent estimates of Illinois’ program.
The state also caps payments for some child care providers at rates that are near the lowest in the nation.
These restrictions, studies show, can impact a family’s ability to provide stability, pursue higher paying jobs and set up their children for lifelong success.
The number of child care providers that participate in CCAP has also plummeted in recent years, the investigation found.
Gov. JB Pritzker has sought to make Illinois a leader in providing accessible early childhood services, investing hundreds of millions of dollars a year into programs to improve provider pay, grow child care availability and expand access to public preschool.
Since taking office in 2019, the Pritzker administration has instituted some changes to expand access to the CCAP subsidy.
“Looking ahead, the state will continue to work diligently to equitably expand and improve our child care system for Illinois’ families,” Summer Griffith, a public information officer for the Illinois Department of Human Services—the state agency that oversees CCAP—wrote in an email to Illinois Answers.
But these improvements are still far from offsetting effects of the drastic cuts
to the program made a decade ago. And the new rules instituted by Pritzker for qualifying for the program are still stricter than those in many other states, limiting program access primarily to families that earn below an income threshold that some say is far too low – particularly in expensive areas like Chicago.
Depending on the type of care for their infant, parents spend between a median of $900 to $1,200 each month on child care—which can be up to 15 percent of the median family income in Cook County. Parents told Illinois Answers they spend more.
And there is no guarantee child care spots will be available, even in Chicago where there are many more providers than in most rural areas in the state. One 2023 estimate found there were only enough formal child care slots, at places like centers and licensed home care, in Cook County to care for about 25 percent of the children who need them.
“Searching, navigating, and finding childcare is a nightmare,” said Breann Cornell, a mother of three in northern Cook County.
“It really is something affecting whether people decide to have children or not because it’s not just if we want one, it’s if we can afford one.”
The struggle to qualify
This spring, Tasia Powell gave birth to a baby girl, Jai. She started looking for affordable child care before her daughter was even born, but wasn’t able to find many realistic options.
Powell works at a Chicago nonprofit that provides homelessness services, where she said she earns a few hundred dollars over the limit to qualify for subsidized child care, including CCAP. Yet without any help, Powell said the financial burden
will be significant.
“You want people to work … but then you work too much. And if you work less, then you can't afford your actual other bills,” she said.
“That puts a lot of people in a bad circumstance.”
Powell’s situation is not unique.
Parents navigating today’s child care options, and the programs to help pay for them, face a complicated landscape of differing eligibility rules, which can sometimes lock them out of much-needed assistance.
CCAP, for example, is one of the most widely used child care support programs across the country.
Federal rules state that a family can earn no more than 85 percent of their state’s median income in order to initially qualify for CCAP. But states are allowed to set their own lower thresholds, an option Illinois officials have taken advantage of for years.
Pritzker has increased CCAP initial eligibility twice during his tenure as governor, most recently in 2022. The state also expanded eligibility in other ways by including families with parents deployed in the military—regardless of income— and excluding other sources of income like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, child support and social security payments, among other programs.
But it still falls far short of federal recommendations, excluding tens of thousands of potentially eligible Illinois children from receiving support.
Today, an Illinois family of three can only earn up to $4,841 a month, or about 61 percent of the state’s median income to be initially accepted to the program. Under the maximum federal rules, that number would be $6,704.
Many families, providers and advocates argue that the current income limit is still far too low, pointing out that the rules don't take into account where a family is located in the state. Families living downstate have the same income cutoffs as those in Cook County, where the cost of living is up to 30 percent higher.
An IDHS spokeswoman pointed to how Illinois’ CCAP income limit as a percent of the state’s median income is higher than some neighboring Midwest states.
Among all states, Illinois ranks 25th in the country for its income eligibility level for a family of three.
The spokeswoman also said that if Illinois were to expand eligibility rules beyond what the budget could currently accommodate, the state would need to institute a waitlist for families to receive the subsidy—which could “inject inequity.”
Without a waitlist, “all eligible families can receive the help they need when they need it,” the spokeswoman said.
Many other states also refrain from using wait lists for CCAP services, which can create more administrative burdens for government agencies to track and keep upto-date. States that do use wait lists often guarantee services for certain families or prioritize which families receive services faster.
But the current income restrictions still leave families feeling trapped.
One parent wrote to IDHS in 2021 about how their family was “barely making it.” It was one among the dozens of emails Illinois Answers obtained through a public records request that showed the difficulties families and providers face with the subsidy.
“Being part of the lower middle class is really affecting us,” they wrote, “I just started working and because they use our gross income they say we make too much for daycare help.
“We are barely staying afloat and can’t afford for me to quit or afford for me to stay working.”
Pritzker’s increases to the CCAP initial income eligibility levels have created a positive, though moderate, impact. Total enrollment has increased each year after the income threshold increase in 2022, when the state began recovering from the pandemic.
A March 2025 report by Chapin Hall, a research group at the University of
Chicago, found that in 2023, 42 percent of eligible Illinois children below the age of two and 48 percent of children ages three to five were enrolled in CCAP.
However, the total number of children enrolled in CCAP in fiscal year 2024 was still down roughly 18 percent compared to 2015, when the total number of children served was at its highest in the last decade, according to Illinois Answers analysis.
IDHS officials, in response, said their internal data of certificate payments shows that CCAP participation has returned to 2015 levels—in terms of the monthly averages of children served by the subsidy. There was a monthly average of 137,968 for the calendar year 2015. As of January to April 2025, the monthly average of CCAP enrollment has been 143,006, according to
parents to receive CCAP services for up to three months while they searched for a job or educational opportunity.
The initiative was widely praised as a success. One survey of participating Cook County parents found two-thirds of respondents reported getting a job during their three-month windows and another 10 percent enrolled in school.
But in July 2024, the state chose to end the special allowance, citing the expiration of federal COVID funding. State officials estimated 8,400 families used this service from October 2021 to June 2024.
A Mason City foster mother, who cares for her young relatives in central Illinois, has been out of work as a waitress. She said it has been frustrating to be told she needs to get a job to qualify for CCAP—without first getting the child care she desperately needs.
“You get pre-approved for a home loan,” she said. “Why can’t you get preapproved for child care?”
Falling off an economic cliff
Once a family is enrolled in CCAP, they must follow strict rules to remain in the program, including keeping their income level below the state’s redetermination limit—a figure slightly higher than the maximum income they could earn to first qualify for the program.
For some families this means that getting a raise—even a small one—could leave them financially worse-off than before.
IDHS officials.
Former Gov. Bruce Rauner made drastic cuts to Illinois’ income limit in July 2015, in which it was estimated at the time that only 10 percent of once eligible families could qualify. The program lost about onethird of its participating children from 2015 to fall 2018
Another common problem cited by parents is looking for a job—but needing child care in order to do so.
Parents need to work or attend school in order to be eligible for CCAP. But many parents report struggling to find the time to interview or search for jobs without already having reliable child care.
During the pandemic, Illinois temporarily waived these rules, allowing
“One penny over the amount, and you fall off—so it’s like falling off a cliff,” said Kimberly Bianchini, owner at Advance Preschool in Hoffman Estates.
The University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab found a small increase in earnings could cost families access to CCAP, leaving them with less money overall and making it nearly impossible to afford child care while also paying for other basic life necessities.
Researchers studied CCAP to understand the barriers to economic mobility, using a Cook County family of three—one adult with two young children—as an example.
A small raise from $54,000 to $55,000 could mean this hypothetical family loses access to CCAP, according to the analysis,
resulting in a net loss of about $25,000 per year.
Eligibility restrictions, researchers found, often make it more difficult for participants to increase their salaries or have enough in savings to make “meaningful investments in upward mobility.”
In Cook County, a family with a two-year-old in a child care center spends nearly 15 percent of their income on child care costs. This is more than double what the federal government says is an affordable amount.
According to one estimate, it isn’t until a Cook County family begins to earn close to $200,000 a year—or 900 percent of the federal poverty level—that the percentage of their income dedicated to child care starts to reach a level the federal government deems affordable.
But those families say otherwise.
Interviews with Cook County parents who make that much or more said child care costs have become so burdensome that they are held at economic standstills and it impacts their ability to secure their kids’ financial futures.
These parents, some of whom now
out earn the middle class families they were raised in, said the cost of child care for multiple children can be upwards of $55,000 a year. They said they were unable to stow away money for their children’s futures and have no disposable income.
“My wife’s parents and my parents, because they grew up so differently, they’re consistently looking at us like: ‘You guys are doing great, you don’t need help,’” said one Evanston mother of two young children.
“We’re not though,” she said. “This isn’t the world you grew up in.”
A system that runs ‘on the backs’ of child care providers
Each school day, as owner of Imani Children’s Academy, Marianne Powell dressed up professionally.
“I dress up because this is my job,” she would tell parents when she took over the center from her late mother. “This is my career. I want you to take me seriously.”
Running the business was a challenge. Historically, a majority of the center's Roseland families were below the poverty level, Powell said, estimating that 75 percent
to 80 percent of the business’ funding came from CCAP.
It all took a “nosedive” during the pandemic, she said. Kids didn’t return.
Enrollment dropped from about thirty students to just five. Staff quit.
Powell closed the center in 2023 after
three decades in business. She enrolled in school to become an esthetician.
“I love kids, but I’m a business,” she said. “I need to get paid.”
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former Cook County providers, many like Powell remarked on
how difficult it is to maintain a business when the child care industry’s economic model is fundamentally flawed. The costs parents pay—though exorbitant—often still fail to offset how expensive it is to provide quality care in line with important health and safety standards.
Providers, in turn, are forced to keep their rates artificially low in order to maintain enough clients to stay in business, even if that means they take home littleto-no wages. For example, to keep costs
Brand
down, home-based providers sometimes forgo paying themselves set salaries, instead adjusting their take-home pay month by month when operation costs are too high and tuition payments too low.
“They’re not funded for the true cost of care,” Marcia Stoll, assistant director of research for Illinois Action for Children, said about child care businesses. “It's the child care workers that are being punished. It's like we're running this system on their backs because they're so underpaid and
because you can't charge parents more because they just can't afford any more."
An Illinois Answers’ analysis of state child care data found the total number of providers that accept CCAP payments dropped by more than 60 percent in the past decade.
The state determines how much CCAP subsidizes the amount parents pay by completing a study of current child care prices and availability across different age groups and areas.
Federal guidelines recommend states use that information to set payment amounts that would reasonably allow a parent to afford 75 percent of the available child care options in their area. The goal is to give CCAP parents the same ability as parents without subsidies to choose a high-quality option that fits their particular needs.
Illinois is among the bottom 15 states when it comes to the number of choices the CCAP subsidy provides families in terms center-based care. The state’s CCAP payments to center-based care providers can reportedly only cover 50 percent or less
of available options across all age groups. For preschoolers specifically, the subsidy rate can only cover 41 percent of the tuition for center-based providers—a rate so low it violates federal equal access provisions.
Illinois is within the top ten in the nation for licensed family child care for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.
An IDHS spokeswoman said centerbased care tends to be more expensive, adding that a majority of CCAP providers are license-exempt family child care providers. This category cares for three or less children.
In Cook County, the subsidy amount fails to meet the 75 percent goal for all types of providers and age groups and the numbers are even lower in some northern Illinois suburbs, according to the state’s most recent survey.
However, an IDHS spokeswoman said family child care homes in Illinois have received rate increases since the most recent market rate survey.
In some rural areas of Illinois, where child care is typically harder to find but much cheaper, CCAP subsidies are
reportedly high enough to purchase nearly all child care options in the market.
Some providers complained of payment delays, which they said put their businesses at even greater financial jeopardy. While new federal rules require states to change the way they pay providers to create more stability, Illinois requested a waiver to allow the state until 2026 to comply.
“I can’t wait so long” one person wrote to the state in January about delayed payments, “my bills will get shut off and my landlord will make me move so please help me.”
Within the overall decline of CCAP providers, there is also a change in the type of providers available for families, as the number of home-based providers dropped significantly while the number of larger child care centers remained relatively stable.
Some families may prefer familyhome providers over centers, which typically care for smaller groups of children in more personal settings and tend to offer flexible schedules, such as late-night, earlymorning or overnight care. Forty percent of Cook County CCAP parents potentially need such options, according to an Illinois Action for Children survey. In contrast, other families may prefer larger centers with more resources and more structured environments.
This decline in home-based CCAP providers means fewer options for parents to select the best type of provider for their needs.
This was the case for Denika Berry, a Kenwood mom to two children with
childcare workforce shortage by offering new grants to providers in hopes of increasing wages.
Nearly every child care service owner interviewed by Illinois Answers was complimentary about Pritzker—in part because they felt he was the first governor in recent history to prioritize early childhood services.
These grants, they said, are a welcome infusion for those who are able to get it but they also noted that the eligibility restrictions make it difficult for Chicago providers in particular to access them.
transparent.” These business owners didn’t want to receive the grant one year and then lose it the next year.
Providers also suggested that the grants should be “prioritized for child care programs with limited access to additional resources.” This is why the grants are targeted only toward providers who receive CCAP funding, the spokesperson said.
For those who don’t qualify, the hit is compounded by the exodus of four-yearolds from private child care facilities, which created a massive disruption to a common business model among Chicago providers,
special needs. She had difficulty finding CCAP providers that could cover her overnight shift at a fast food restaurant. It forced Berry to change shifts, which meant fewer hours and less income.
Berry said she relied on a patchwork of providers, at times being forced to pay out of pocket for a non-CCAP provider. She said she often had to leave work early to pick up her children for alleged behavior reasons or short staffing. She worried she could lose her job.
“With me constantly leaving work,” she said, “just imagine—my check is shorter.”
‘I can’t wait to be liberated from child care costs’
Last June, at a Rogers Park child care center called Eyes on the Future Childhood Development Center, Pritzker signed legislation that he said would usher in a new era for the state—the creation of the new Department of Early Childhood.
In recent years, the city expanded its public school system to create enough slots for every four-year-old to attend free preschool. But while this creates a clear financial benefit to parents, child care providers outside of the public school system say it is a devastating blow to their
Caring for preschool-aged children is generally much less expensive than infants and toddlers, who have lower adult-tochild ratio requirements and therefore incur bigger staffing costs. Many providers have traditionally taken on larger numbers of three- and four-year olds to offset these
For parents, the change alleviates the cost of an entire year of child care, but if providers don’t find a way to recoup the loss, it could mean more closures and fewer options for families with younger children.
Natalie Reillo, an Austin mother of two, is considering sending her three-yearold son to a CPS preschool in the next year. She has been on CCAP for the past decade, first for her almost ten -year-old daughter and now for her three-year-old son.
Life, the governor said, will become “simpler, better and fairer” for families with the new department. CCAP will be housed there, in addition to other early childhood programs that were once dispersed at three different agencies.
It’s all part of Pritzker’s efforts to make Illinois first in the country for childhood services through Smart Start Illinois, which the administration says will improve child care provider pay and expand access to accessible, high-quality options for families.
Smart Start aims to address the
choice: drop their other forms of public assistance in favor of Smart Start grants, which are dependent on annual budget renewals by the state legislature, or forgo the new funds altogether.
An IDHS spokesperson said the state “continues to gather feedback and adapt the program to best serve providers and families.” The feedback IDHS said they received included offering a wage of $17$19 per hour to recruit and retain staff, and making the grants “stable, predictable, and
Reillo has had a positive experience with the government subsidy. She estimates child care would take up nearly all of her $3,400 monthly salary without it. But with the subsidy, she pays about $240 a month, allowing her to better afford her other bills and household expenses.
Still, the idea of moving to free child care when her son turns four is just too appealing, she said.
“I can't wait to be liberated from daycare costs,” she said. ¬
Mother Tasia Powell poses for portrait with her 1 month year old newborn at her home in Merrillville, IN.
Photo by Akilah Townsend for Illinois Answers Project
For Aging Chicagoans, Reverse Mortgages Can Be a Lifeline…or a Curse
Home repair is at the root of the ability of senior Chicagoans to stay in their homes as they age. Local organizations are trying to provide relief without depriving seniors of the ability to pass their homes down to the next generation.
BY LAURA STEWART
This story was originally published by the Illinois Answers Project as part of their series Making it in Chicago: Detours and Dead Ends on the Path to Opportunity.
LaShon Minter Williams is waiting for a letter that could arrive any day now—one that may force her to leave the home her family has owned for generations.
She can’t afford to pay off the mortgage on the West Side home all at once. But she shouldn’t have to. Ten years ago, her grandmother, Louise Minter, was tricked into a reverse mortgage scheme on the premise of home repairs. But the repairs never came, and the equity in the home is now gone, stolen by now convicted scammer Mark Diamond.
Eight months after her grandmother’s passing, the total amount of the loan is due. Williams is waiting to see what will happen to the Austin home where she has lived since she was two years old. She doesn’t know where she and her husband will go next, she said.
“He totally destroyed our life,” Williams, fifty-three, said of Diamond, who was sentenced to more than seventeen years in prison in January for a reverse mortgage fraud scheme that lasted nearly fifteen years.
He targeted senior homeowners in the South and West Sides of Chicago because they are the ones most in need of home repairs, said Rev. Robin Hood, a longtime community organizer who worked with community members, lawyers and the federal government to stop Diamond.
The “elephant in the room is senior home repair right now,” Hood said.
Some senior homeowners turn to reverse mortgages when they need extra income to repair their homes. A reverse mortgage is a loan that lets homeowners over sixty-two years old borrow money using their home’s value, without having to sell the house or make monthly payments.
Reverse mortgages are a hail mary for some seniors, but they come with complications. Because the mortgage is due when the homeowner passes or moves, a home with a reverse mortgage on it can’t be passed down unless the heir can afford to pay off the mortgage. In most cases, the home has to be sold. This can cut off an opportunity to build generational wealth, especially for families whose wealth is concentrated in their home.
While reverse mortgage loans have declined in Cook County, there are few viable solutions to the issue that draws some of the most vulnerable seniors to them in the first place—maintaining their homes for themselves and their descendants. And the trend still holds with most reverse mortgages in the past ten years occuring on the south and west sides of the city.
“In low-income families, it prevents the possible transfer of wealth,” said Ainat Margalit, director of the consumer practice group at Legal Aid Chicago. “It’s not just wealth. It’s security, it's the neighborhood. There’s a lot that can be lost.”
Inheriting a home can help someone build wealth, but it can be a financial burden if the home is in poor condition or burdened by debt.
Reverse mortgages can also lead to foreclosure while the homeowner still resides there, if the homeowner doesn't understand the terms. The borrower still has to pay for property taxes, insurance and home repair. If they fall behind on any of those, that can trigger a default. Most of the time, lenders give the homeowner a chance to make up for a missed payment or other violation. But once a mortgage is in default, the lender can begin the foreclosure process, which means they can legally try to take ownership of the home to recover the money they’re owed.
What is a reverse mortgage loan?
Reverse mortgages are a type of loan for homeowners aged sixty-two or older that allows them to convert part of their home equity into cash without selling their home or making monthly mortgage payments. Instead of the homeowner making monthly payments to a lender, like in a usual mortgage loan, the reverse mortgage lender pays the homeowner a lump sum, monthly payments or line of credit. But the amount the homeowner owes the lender goes up over time, and the entire loan is due when the homeowner moves out, sells the home or dies.
Reverse mortgages aren’t “inherently good or bad,” Margalit said. They can help people with a very limited income maintain their homes and stay in their homes for much longer than they would have, she said. “That can be life saving.”
But for those who come after them, reverse mortgages effectively close the door to inheritance.
How reverse mortgages started
The first reverse mortgage in the United States originated in 1961, when a local bank in Maine issued a reverse mortgage to the widow of a high school football coach to help her stay in her home after her husband’s death.
Over the next few decades,
policymakers at the state level looked for ways to help seniors living on a fixed income from Social Security or retirement savings access their home equity. In 1983, Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania brought the concept to the federal level, with a proposal to have reverse mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Congress eventually passed the bill, and in 1988, President Reagan signed the Housing and Community Development Act, which established a pilot program for the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program, the most widely used reverse mortgage product.
Ten years later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Appropriations Act made the program permanent and set the modern standards. To qualify for a reverse mortgage today, borrowers must be sixty-two or older, own the property, live there as their primary residence and undergo housing counseling by a federally-approved HECM counselor before they can take on the mortgage.
Reverse mortgage use spiked around The Great Recession but has declined since. In 2009, the number of loan originations peaked at 115,000, according to a report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2024, only 26,501 HECMs originated in the United States, per the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In Cook County, there were 3,906 reverse mortgages from 2014 to 2024, according to data from HUD. Cook County has followed the national trend of declining reverse mortgage use. In 2014 there were 805 reverse mortgages, and in 2024 there were only 133 in Cook County.
Almost half of the nearly 4,000 reverse mortgages that originated in Cook County from 2014 to 2024 were in Chicago. Most of them were on the South and West sides of the city.
As reverse mortgages have declined, so have fraud cases, experts say. “There are definitely some bad actors out there,” Margalit said. But “we’re not seeing a lot of people coming in now and saying ‘I didn’t know what I was getting into.’”
Over the years, Illinois has taken steps to protect seniors from reverse mortgage fraud. In 2004, former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich signed a law intended to
protect seniors from deceptive sales and marketing strategies.
More comprehensive legislation passed in 2015, when former Gov. Bruce Rauner signed the Reverse Mortgage Act. The Reverse Mortgage Act consolidated state laws regarding reverse mortgages, said Bob Palmer, policy director at Housing Action Illinois. To address “high pressure loan tactics,” it created a three day “cooling off period” after the lender provides a written commitment to make a reverse mortgage, during which the borrower cannot be forced to close or move forward with the loan, Palmer said.
Although fewer homeowners are falling victim to reverse mortgage fraud and are largely avoiding reverse mortgages altogether, the issue of maintaining a home persists for aging residents, and rising costs threaten their ability to age in place and keep their homes for the next generation.
The cost burden of homeownership
For elderly, low-income homeowners on a fixed budget, keeping up with property taxes, insurance payments and home maintenance can be a challenge.
While nationally reverse mortgage borrowers tend to be predominantly white, in Chicago most reverse mortgages in the last ten years have been on the South and West Sides, where residents are predominantly Black and Latino.
Many Black homeowners in the South and West Sides of Chicago have lived in their homes for many years and struggle to maintain an aging home as the cost of living rises, said Geoff Smith, executive director of the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University.
The cost burden of owning a home has become heavier, as property taxes, utilities, insurance and home maintenance costs continue to increase, Smith said. Chicago property taxes have doubled in the last decade, according to data from the city’s Office of Budget and Management. From 2014 to 2024, the city’s property tax levy increased from $860 million to $1.7 billion.
These rising charges on top of home maintenance costs can be a significant financial burden for senior homeowners on a fixed income, especially in Chicago, which has an older housing stock, Smith
said. “As a person ages, a property does too.” If the homeowner is thinking about the home as an asset to pass on to heirs, it needs to be maintained to keep its value, he added. And if senior homeowners want to stay in their homes as they age, rather than moving to senior living centers or other alternatives, sometimes they will need extra income or modifications for that to happen, Smith said.
In some cases, reverse mortgages can help senior homeowners stay in their home in the short-term.
In February, Raul Delgado took out a reverse mortgage for his father, Raul Delgado Sr., a retired doctor who celebrated his 100th birthday last year. The younger Delgado, a realtor based in Wheaton, is trustee of his father’s estate and has power of attorney for Delgado Sr., who suffers from dementia and needs a caregiver. His father's care can cost up to $6,500 per month, said Delgado.
His father saved a lot of money over the years, but “money doesn’t last forever,” Delgado, sixty-one, said. “Nobody saves to be 100.”
When he realized his father’s money was running low, Delgado looked into options to take equity out of his father’s townhome in Tinley Park, where Delgado’s older sister lives with their father. They want to keep their father in his own home, where he’s more comfortable, rather than moving him into assisted living. “He’s a creature of habit,” Delgado said. “We’ve seen it before, when a routine is disrupted for him, it becomes more challenging.”
Delgado weighed the options and ultimately decided on a reverse mortgage. He contacted a reverse mortgage company, which did an appraisal on his father’s house and referred the family to counseling before originating the mortgage. “Counseling is really important,” he said. “It allows you to talk through your rationale and reason behind doing it.”
The money the family receives from the reverse mortgage has allowed Delgado Sr. to age in place, Delgado said. “It’s a blessing to be able to do that,” he said. “Not a lot of people can.”
Delgado said he thinks they will have to sell his father’s home eventually, but the reverse mortgage helped buy them some time.
Vicki Buresh, a certified HECM counselor, administered counseling for the Delgado family. Buresh, who has been a reverse mortgage counselor since 2010, said she’s seen how life-changing reverse mortgages have been for some people. One client was able to take out a reverse mortgage to give himself more time to get out of over $100,000 in credit card debt, she said. And she’s seen reverse mortgages help widows who can’t live off of one social security check after their spouse passes. “The stories are remarkable,” Buresh said. While reverse mortgages can help with more immediate issues, the long-term prospects are more bleak, and can have a detrimental impact on a family’s ability to pass down generational wealth.
Risking the loss of generational wealth
When adult children are not involved in their parents’ finances, reverse mortgages can get complicated, experts say. If an adult child lives at home, or did not know
that their parent signed up for a reverse mortgage, they can be burdened with the fallout when the homeowner passes.
When someone inherits a home with a reverse mortgage on it, “foreclosure is almost certainly going to go through,” said Gerald Nordgren, an attorney who focuses on family law and estate planning in Chicago. When the Cook County Chancery Court forecloses on a home in the county, it appoints people like Nordgren to serve as Special Representatives, who track down family members who may have a claim on the house.
Sometimes people are shocked to find out that the home they inherited has a reverse mortgage on it, Nordgren said. “In the case of reverse mortgage, unfortunately I’m the bearer of bad news,” he said. “Unless you won the lottery recently and you’ve got that kind of money, you’re not going to be able to do anything about it.”
Even if the heir decides to sell the home, the costs associated with selling a home can be too much, and their only
choice is to walk away and let a foreclosure happen, Nordgren said.
When a home is foreclosed on, lenders take ownership of the property, and that asset is lost to the family, along with any equity the family has built up over years of ownership. A foreclosed home disrupts inheritance, as it can’t be passed onto children or other heirs. Without that property, future generations miss out on the financial stability that homeownership can provide.
Foreclosures also impact neighborhood wealth. If many homes in a neighborhood are foreclosed on, it can drag down property values, which reduces wealth-building potential for homeowners nearby – an issue that disproportionately impacts communities of color due to historic patterns of predatory lending and disinvestment.
In Chicago, foreclosure filings are higher in predominantly Black communities, according to the Urban Institute. Since 2005, nearly 21 percent
Equity
Equity is the current market value of your home minus the amount of any existing mortgage on your property.
Foreclosure is a legal process through which a lender seizes and sells a property when the borrower fails to meet their mortgage payment obligations.
Property value refers to the estimated monetary value of a real estate asset, determined by factors such as location, condition and market demand.
of residential properties in Chicago were associated with at least one foreclosure filing. In predominantly Black census tracts, that number is nearly 40 percent, almost twice the citywide rate. Foreclosures are also more common in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, where almost
28 percent of properties have at least one foreclosure filing.
In addition to being associated with more vacancies and decreased home values, the social costs of foreclosures are high for individuals as well, Stanford researchers found. In a study of foreclosures in Cook County, the researchers found that foreclosures lead to housing instability, financial distress and reduced homeownership.
In neighborhoods like North Lawndale, on Chicago’s West Side, the foreclosure rates are well above the citywide average. Over the years, rows of twostory homes in the predominantly Black neighborhood have fallen into disrepair.
David Herron’s North Lawndale home has been in his family since the 1960s. His mother always kept it for her family, Herron, seventy-two, said. “Coming up, we always had somewhere to go, no matter what was going on in our lives.”
Herron’s mother, Effie Herron, was a victim of Mark Diamond’s reverse mortgage scheme. Diamond convinced Effie Herron, now deceased, that he would help repair her home on South Hamlin Street. Diamond’s crew started doing the repair work, but then never came back, Herron said.
Herron’s house still has plumbing issues, electrical problems and roof damage, among other issues. It is facing multiple code violations from the city, but Herron is struggling to pay for the repairs on a fixed income, he said.
Herron said he is glad that Diamond was finally sentenced for his reverse mortgage scheme, but the sentencing will not help him save his house. “The condition of the house and what it did to my mom and what it is doing to my family, that was the issue with it,” he said. “It’s a sad situation.”
Sam Tenenbaum, a lawyer and professor of law at Northwestern University who represented multiple victims in Mark Diamond’s lawsuits over the years, said Diamond’s sentencing did not help victims from a financial point of view, in terms of their ownership of the property.
In all of the legal proceedings, the mortgage lenders were not investigated or held accountable, Tenenbaum said. “There was no real relief, because real relief would
sign a reverse mortgage, there are a lot of economic risks, Tenenbaum said. “It's hard for me to see what the exact sweet spot is where a reverse mortgage is justified, in terms of a person’s income level, stage of life, equity in the home. When is it justified, as opposed to doing something else?”
And if the goal is to pass the home on to family, Tenenbaum said, “it’s just not a good idea.”
Finding ways to keep seniors at home
Several programs have identified home repair as the root of the problem of seniors’ ability to stay in their homes as they age, and, ideally, maintain the home for the next generation.
To address the need for home repair, some states have turned to legislation that funnels state funding into programs that help homeowners keep their homes safe and habitable.
In 2022, Pennsylvania lawmakers created the Whole-Home Repairs Program, a landmark bipartisan initiative funded with $125 million in federal pandemic aid. There was overwhelming demand for the program, which helped eligible homeowners with problems like unsafe electrical wires and broken furnaces.
While attempts to continue the program with state funding have been unsuccessful thus far, federal lawmakers
halls and meetings to educate residents on housing issues.
While some have looked to funding for home repairs, others have touted proactive design solutions like accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as a housing option to help older adults stay in their communities. ADUs—sometimes called “granny flats”— can exist as an attachment to an existing home, a detached unit, an apartment in a basement or on top of a garage.
One of the biggest benefits of ADUs is they can allow an older adult to live with their family or someone else who can provide care as they age, Smith said. “Making intergenerational living more possible is where an ADU can help aging
Pennsylvania’s program last year. A group of bipartisan senators reintroduced the bill in January this year.
Federal funding to help low-income homeowners with home repairs is desperately needed at a time when the U.S. housing stock is older than at any time in history, according to researchers at the Joint Institute for Housing Studies at Harvard University. The researchers found that, due to a history of disinvestment, lower-income households and households of color are disproportionately exposed to housing hazards like pest infestations, lead-based paint, mold and dysfunctional heating and cooling.
Home repair programs at the state and federal level could help improve outcomes for both low-income homeowners and neighborhoods, the researchers found.
The city of Chicago has some home repair programs, like those that help with roof and porch repair and emergency heating, but they fall short of meeting the full demand for housing repairs citywide.
Some community groups like Light Up Lawndale, run by longtime community organizer Princess Shaw, have stepped up to fill the gaps. Shaw also founded West Side Long-Term Recovery Group to help West Side residents repair their homes after major disasters.
Rev. Robin Hood, who founded the Illinois Anti-Foreclosure Coalition, also helps at a community level by holding town
In December 2020, Chicago passed an ordinance allowing ADUs, which reversed a 1957 ban on the units and launched a pilot program. The program has developed unevenly across the city, with most of the units popping up in the North and Northwest pilot zones and the West, South and Southeast zones facing stricter regulations.
One hindrance to development is the cost of building ADUs. “They’re definitely not cheap, so I think it may not be an answer for modest income older adults,” Smith said. “That is definitely a consideration in terms of scalability.”
And in a place like Chicago, where city lots are small, the opportunities to build new structures on existing lots may be limited, Smith said.
As policymakers look to expand the ADU program and find other ways to help existing homeowners in Chicago, Rev. Hood is pushing for legislation that could help homeowners like Herron with repair costs.
The Senior Home Preservation Act would require the Department of Human Services to provide grants to low-income, legacy homeowners for minor rehabilitation services to preserve their homes. HB5506, the Senior Home Preservation Program Act, was introduced in the Illinois General Assembly last year but stalled in session. The bill has not been reintroduced this legislative session.
David Herron said he hopes legislators pass a home repair bill in Illinois. “It’s sorely needed.” ¬
Rev. Robin Hood, who founded the Illinois Anti-Foreclosure Coalition, also helps seniors at a community level by holding town halls and meetings to educate residents on housing issues. His aunt was a victim of Mark Diamond's reverse mortgage scam. Photo by Akilah Townsend
Sueños is a Stage for Rising Artists and Culture in All Its Forms
Peso Pluma made it up to Chicagoans after last year’s performance was cut short by storms.
BY JOCELYN MARTINEZ-ROSALES
The largest Midwest Latinx music festival took over Grant Park on Memorial Day weekend as Sueños returned for its fourth year. The two-day festival attracted thousands of festival goers with a heavyweight lineup featuring the likes of Shakira, Don Omar, El Alfa, Wisin and the return of Peso Pluma.
Last year’s festivities came to an abrupt end when Peso Pluma’s performance was canceled due to weather conditions that prompted the city to evacuate tens of thousands of attendees. This year, while temperatures were on the cooler side, they didn’t stop attendees from showing up in their best western and urban fits.
The traditional single-stage setup was reimagined into three distinct stages: the main Sueños stage, a more intimate Buckingham Fountain-side setup dubbed La Fuente, and a town square-inspired space called La Plaza. La Fuente primarily hosted DJ sets, while La Plaza shined a spotlight on regional Mexican talent, including local bands like Vanguardia, Grupo Sekta, and Los K-Bros.
DJ sets to the La Fuente stage, like Mexican trio 3BallMTY and followed by Mexican American DJ Deorro, who surprised the crowd by bringing out rapper Santa Fe Klan to perform their new track “La Bandera.”
On day one, Peso Pluma made it up to Chicagoans with a long-awaited performance, even bringing out Tito Double P as a special guest. Fans were also treated to a two-hour set by Shakira, who brought her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran tour to the Sueños main stage, serving up a tasting menu of modern hits alongside nostalgic favorites like “Hips Don’t Lie” and “She Wolf.”
Throughout the weekend, genres seamlessly blended from tribal, cumbia, reggaetón, and corridos pulsed through the grounds in a celebration of Latin American roots.
Sunday brought back-to-back iconic
The festival came to a powerful close with the reggaeton King of Kings, Don Omar, who reminded everyone that his catalog is nothing short of timeless bangers like “Ella y Yo,” “Danza Kuduro,” and “Virtual Diva.”
Chicago’s own “diva virtual,” Karenoid, took over the Corona Lime Lounge with DJ sets on both days. The South Sider took the opportunity to tease the audience by mixing some of her original tracks from her upcoming Digitona EP. “My EP is inspired by digital maximalism and also perreo del nasty, del bueno,” Kareniod said as she licked a bright red lollipop.
The Mexican American artist says
her frequent DJ sets in Mexico City have been a major source of inspiration for her latest musical ventures. Drawing from reggaetón mexa, Mexico’s homegrown take on the genre, and neo perreo, a subgenre shaped by digital culture and internet aesthetics, Kareniod believes it’s time for Chicago to tap in and she’s ready to lead the way.
“Reggaeton mexa has been going on since 2013, 2014. People don’t realize that Mexico has been grinding and creating and carving their own flavor of reggaeton,” Kareniod said to the Weekly. “My goal is to put a flag down in Chicago, South Side Chicago. There’s a new neoperro queen— that’s me.”
Reggaeton mexa has been catapulting and Sueños brought two pioneers to the main stage with El Malilla and Bellakath. And while Kareniod was DJing this time, she is planting the seed to come back as a performer on the stage rather than
behind the decks.
Kareniod is intentional down to her look. Her custom outfits, microchip broaches, and colorful wigs play tribute to her music. The fifth track, “MARiPOSA MSN,” off her upcoming EP set to drop June 13 is a seamless blend of coquette aesthetics and cyber-era references.
Sueños festival organizers leveled up by incorporating smaller activations and lounge areas across the grounds, giving rising talent more space to shine. The Toyota Music Den also spotlighted emerging artists with intimate sets, including San Diego Chicano artist Eddie Zuko.
Zuko delivered a dynamic thirtyminute set, blending tracks from his 2024 album Abajo Del Sol with fan favorites like “Made” and “La Flor” from his 2017 EP. His sound is anchored in rap with melodic undertones and subtle touches of reggae. Rooted in his Mexican American identity, Zuko’s lyrics resonate deeply as he weaves in themes of love, struggle, and everyday life with a universal appeal.
“ I live right there. I could just walk across [the Mexico-US] border and then learning, ‘Oh no, there’s Mexicans in Chicago. Actually, there’s a lot of Mexicans!’ There’s a lot of other different Latinos too,” Zuko told the Weekly, referencing the first time he visited Chicago. This is Zuko’s second time in the Chi but seeing fans sing along and relate to lyrics makes him feel like he’s not that far away from San Diego.
“ Coming and doing the shows and you see the people out the crowd. It feels like home,” Zuko said. He’s expecting a baby girl and is also working on new music that continues to harness his individual style.
Another artist that teased new music
Eddie Zuko.
Photo by Mateo Zapata
organized, and project managed so many different things, but this, I think, was the
Calvin sees the invitation to be a part of the festival’s Mercadito vendor section as a blessing and something that came from her work rooted in positivity and
“From the moment that you open your eyes, how you speak into life, and how you move through life and connect with others, that is a spell in itself,” Calvin
This positivity radiated in other vendor stands like the Sin Titulo shop. Sin Titulo was co-founded by sisters Irais, Diana and Itzel Elizarraraz as an apparel shop but has grown into a bigger project with mental health awareness campaigns and events centered around personal growth.
One item that they intentionally made sure to bring to the festival was their immigrant angel design. “That is the intention of switching the script of where [immigrants are] seen in a negative light and how we can depict ourselves in a positive light,” Irais said.
“The festival is called Sueños and we believe that everyone has the right to have their dreams be accomplished wherever, regardless of a border wall.”
That sentiment echoed across the park all weekend, where dreams weren’t just performed on stage. A dynamic festival like Sueños reflects the many layers of Latinx identity, expression and ambition. The festival offers a space where music, tradition and dreams coexist. In a city like Chicago with deep Latinx roots, it’s imperative to have spaces like Sueños that carve out spaces and affirm our experiences. ¬
Jocelyn Martinez-Rosales is a Mexican American independent journalist from Belmont Cragin who is passionate about covering communities of color through a social justice lens. She is a senior editor at the Weekly.
Bellakath.
Don Omar.
Photo by Mateo Zapata Peso Pluma.
Photo by Mateo Zapata
Kareniod. Photo by Mateo Zapata Lilith’s Side.
Photo by Mateo Zapata Mexican folkloric dancer.
Photo by Mateo Zapata
Sueños es un escenario para artistas emergentes y cultura en todas sus formas
Peso Pluma deleitó a los habitantes de Chicago luego de que su actuación del año pasado se viera interrumpida por las tormentas.
POR JOCELYN MARTINEZ-ROSALES TRADUCIDO POR JACQUELINE SERRATO
El festival de música latina más grande del Medio Oeste se apoderó de Grant Park el fin de semana del Día de los Caídos con el regreso de Sueños en su cuarto año. El festival de dos días atrajo a miles de asistentes con una cartelera de lujo que incluyó a figuras de la talla de Shakira, Don Omar, El Alfa, Wisin y el regreso de Peso Pluma.
Las festividades del año pasado terminaron de repente cuando la presentación de Peso Pluma se canceló debido a las condiciones climáticas que obligaron a la Municipalidad a evacuar a decenas de miles de asistentes. Este año, aunque las temperaturas estuvieron frescas, no impidieron que los asistentes se presentaran con sus mejores atuendos estilo vaquero y urbano.
Se amplió el escenario único a tres escenarios distintos: el escenario principal de Sueños, un espacio más pequeño junto a la Fuente de Buckingham que llamaron La Fuente, y un espacio inspirado en una plaza de pueblo que llamaron La Plaza. En La Fuente hubo principalmente sesiones de DJs, mientras que La Plaza destacó el talento regional mexicano, incluyendo grupos locales como Vanguardia, Grupo Sekta y Los K-Bros.
El primer día, Peso Pluma deleitó a los habitantes de Chicago con una presentación muy esperada, e incluso llevó a Tito Double P como invitado especial. Los fans también disfrutaron de una sesión de dos horas de Shakira, quien llevó su gira "Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran" al escenario principal de Sueños, ofreciendo una variedad de éxitos modernos junto con clásicos nostálgicos como "Hips Don't Lie" y "She Wolf".
Durante el fin de semana, una fusión perfecta de géneros como el tribal, la cumbia, el reggaeton y los corridos resonaron en el escenario como una celebración de raíces latinoamericanas.
El domingo trajo dos sesiones icónicas consecutivas de DJ a La Fuente, como la del trío mexicano 3BallMTY, seguidas por el DJ mexicoamericano Deorro, quien sorprendió al público al traer al rapero Santa Fe Klan para interpretar su nuevo tema "La Bandera".
El festival cerró con fuerza con el Rey de Reyes del reggaeton, Don Omar, quien les recordó a todos que su catálogo está repleto de éxitos como "Ella y Yo", "Danza Kuduro" y "Virtual Diva".
La "diva virtual" de Chicago, Karenoid, se apoderó del Corona Lime Lounge con sus sesiones de DJ ambos días. La artista del lado sur de Chicago aprovechó la oportunidad para deleitar al público mezclando algunos de sus temas originales de su próximo mini álbum (EP), Digitona. "Mi EP está inspirado en el maximalismo digital y también en el perreo del 'nasty', del bueno", dijo Kareniod mientras lamía una paleta roja.
La artista mexicoamericana afirma que sus frecuentes sesiones de DJ en la Ciudad de México han sido una gran fuente de inspiración para sus últimos proyectos musicales. Inspirándose en el reggaeton mexa, la versión mexicana del género, y el neo perreo, un subgénero moldeado por la cultura digital y la estética de internet, Kareniod cree que es hora de que Chicago se sume a la tendencia y está lista para liderar el camino.
“El reggaetón mexa se ha estado dando desde 2013 o 2014. La gente no se da cuenta de que México ha estado creando y forjando su propio estilo de reggaeton”, declaró Kareniod al Weekly. “Mi objetivo es dejar huella en Chicago, en el South Side de Chicago. Hay una nueva reina de neoperreo: soy yo”.
El reggaetón mexicano se ha catapultado y Sueños trajo a dos pioneros al escenario principal, El Malilla y Bellakath. Y aunque Kareniod fue DJ esta vez, está sembrando la semilla para regresar como artista en el escenario en lugar de detrás de la cabina.
Kareniod es intencional hasta en su apariencia. Sus atuendos personalizados, broches con diseño de microchip y pelucas coloridas rinden homenaje a su música. El quinto tema, "MARiPOSA MSN", de su próximo EP, que lanzará el 13 de junio, es una mezcla perfecta de estética "coquette" y referencias a la era cibernética.
Los organizadores del festival Sueños se pusieron a tono con la incorporación de activaciones más pequeñas y zonas de descanso en todo el recinto, brindándole a los talentos emergentes más espacio para
brillar. El Toyota Music Den también destacó a artistas emergentes con sets más íntimos, incluyendo al artista chicano de San Diego, Eddie Zuko.
Zuko ofreció un set dinámico de treinta minutos, combinando temas de su álbum de 2024, Abajo Del Sol, con favoritos del público como "Made" y "La Flor" de su EP de 2017. Su sonido se basa en el rap con matices melódicos y toques de reggae. Con raíces en su identidad mexicoamericana, las letras de Zuko resuenan profundamente al entrelazar temas de amor, lucha y vida cotidiana con un atractivo universal.
“Vivo justo allá. Podría cruzar la frontera [entre México y Estados Unidos] y darme cuenta de que hay mexicanos en Chicago. ¡De hecho, hay muchísimos mexicanos! También hay muchos otros latinos”, declaró Zuko al Weekly, refiriéndose a su primera visita a Chicago. Esta es la segunda vez que Zuko visita Chicago, pero ver a los fans cantar y conectar con la letra le hace sentir como si estuviera cerca de San Diego.
“Venir a hacer los shows y ves a la gente entre el público. Se siente como en casa”, dijo Zuko. Está esperando una bebé y también está trabajando en nueva música con su estilo personal.
Otro artista que adelantó nueva música es Deorro, quien dijo que no se trata de este próximo álbum, sino de que sigue, el cual será una oda al rock en español. Atribuye su motivación e inspiración a festivales como Sueños.
"Chicago nunca me decepciona. Es un lugar tan hermoso. Mira la cartelera", le dijo Deorro al Weekly. "Es como un recordatorio: 'Mira, esto es lo que pasa cuando te esfuerzas más'".
Ser parte de Sueños es como un sueño hecho realidad para muchos de los que participan. El festival no solo es una forma de experimentar y conectar con nuevos artistas, sino que también les permite a los negocios locales darse a conocer.
Lilith's Side es una tienda holística que vende de todo, desde aerosoles corporales hasta hierbas y raíces para la sanación. Fundada por la afromexicana Jetziba Calvin, Lilith's Side no solo vendía sus productos
curativos caseros, sino que también ofrecía lecturas de cartas del tarot e impresiones de la fotografía personal de Calvin.
“He organizado muchísimos eventos y gestionado proyectos de todo tipo, pero creo que este fue el de mayor escala”, dijo Calvin.
Calvin considera la invitación a formar parte de la sección de vendedores del Mercadito del festival como una bendición, fruto de su trabajo basado en la positividad y el poder transformador.
“Desde el momento en que abres los ojos, cómo le hablas a la vida, cómo te mueves por la vida y cómo conectas con los demás, es un encanto en sí”, dijo Calvin.
Esta positividad se reflejaba en otros puestos de vendedores, como la tienda Sin Título. Sin Título fue cofundada por las hermanas Irais, Diana e Itzel Elizarraraz como una tienda de ropa, pero se ha convertido en un proyecto más grande con campañas de concienciación sobre la salud mental y eventos centrados en la superación personal.
Un artículo que se aseguraron de traer al festival fue su diseño de ángel inmigrante. “Esa es la intención de cambiar la perspectiva negativa que tenemos los inmigrantes y cómo podemos presentarnos a nosotros mismos de forma positiva”, dijo Irais.
“El festival se llama Sueños y creemos que todos tienen derecho a que sus sueños se hagan realidad donde sea, sin importar un muro fronterizo”.
Ese sentimiento resonó en el parque durante todo el fin de semana, donde los sueños no solo se representaron en el escenario. Un festival dinámico como Sueños refleja las múltiples capas de la identidad, la expresión y la ambición latina. El festival ofrece un espacio donde la música, la tradición y los sueños conviven. En una ciudad como Chicago, con profundas raíces latinas, es importante contar con espacios como Sueños que forjen espacios y reafirmen nuestras experiencias. ¬
Jocelyn Martínez-Rosales es una periodista independiente mexicoamericana de Belmont Cragin y le apasiona cubrir las comunidades de color con una perspectiva de justicia social. Es una editora principal del Weekly.
Who Cares for the Caregivers?
Free Root Operation is connecting Black women caregivers with resources and helping break generational cycles of violence.
BY LAYLA BROWN-CLARK
Holding safe spaces for Black women to process their trauma is imperative, especially for those women suffering from violence in their communities. Free Root Operation, a violence prevention initiative based in Bronzeville, offers therapy and other means of healing trauma while introducing the aspect of sisterhood to the healing process.
“Our whole idea is that when these women are cared for, then the children in their care and the other adults in their environment will also experience care, and that is how we will break those generational cycles,” said Eva Maria Lewis, Free Root Operation’s founder and executive director.
Free Root Operation was started by Lewis as a way to address what she refers to as the poverty-induced gun violence epidemic. Lewis has been working on behalf of Southeast Side communities, particularly advocating for South Shore and Woodlawn, since she became an activist at sixteen.
people what they need. It led to this focal point of women within gun violence spaces and thinking about intersectional experiences related to violence for Black women as well,” Lewis said.
“When I was in high school, [many] things came to a head,” she said. “I became privy to classism, racism, and also the lack of equitable resources between the North Side of Chicago and the South Side as a result of going to a well-resourced school on the North Side and coming back here.”
The project started as a blog in 2015, an independent study assignment during Lewis’s junior year of high school. The initiative evolved into what’s now Free Root Operation in 2020 and has been active in addressing the root causes of gun violence using critical care encompassing wellness, economic justice, and education for Black women caretakers.
“What we have done over the years is community work, research, and asking
Murders and non-fatal shootings in the city declined in 2024 from the recent peak in 2020 and 2021, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s analysis. Still, Chicago continues to grapple with inequities tied to race and geography: Black residents remain disproportionately impacted by gun violence and are twenty-two times more likely to be killed.
The cornerstone of Free Root Operation is the BLOOM Network, a fleet of programs centering Black women caregivers in violence prevention. Currently, 2,000 women are part of the network, with numbers growing with each cohort.
“These women come from the South
and West Sides of Chicago, [and] they are caregivers [and] heads of households. Our whole idea is that when these women are cared for, then the children in their care and the other adults in their environment will experience care, and that is how we break generational cycles.” Lewis said.
While in the network, the women have access to field trips to touring Broadway shows, yoga, gardening classes, and other resources that encourage wellness, financial literacy, and budgeting.
“All of these things that are thinking about social determinants of health and increasing someone’s livelihood so they can be well, so that other people in their ecosystems can be well,” Lewis said.
Once part of the network, women can become a part of Free Root Operation’s BLOOM cohort, a five-month program for women who are prepared to take the next step of breaking cycles in their families.
In these five months, women gain access to wellness and peer support, get individual and family counseling, go on field trips, and engage in Free Root’s curriculum rooted in wellness, education, and economic justice. The women in this program graduate with a certificate in professional leadership development and learn how to set and obtain SMART goals that work towards leveling up in their families.
Lyntrina Broadnax is one of the several women in the BLOOM Network who accepted and graduated from the BLOOM cohort programming in 2023. Broadnax found out about Free Root Operation through a program called Sista Afya that offered therapy and mental wellness programs.
“I started seeking therapy in 2022, and they encouraged me to check out this program called Free Root Operation,” said Broadnax. “I looked at their website and went from there with the application. I didn’t know what to expect when I filled out the application, but I knew I had to start making changes because I was experiencing a lot of trauma, postpartum depression, and things of that nature.”
Broadnax was inspired to join the 2023 BLOOM cohort after reading what the program offered, impressed by the peer-to-peer learning and sisterhood shown within the program. She had never run across a program like it.
“I was shocked that I got in over 100 to 200 applicants and [went] with the flow mentally,” she said. “I was in a place where I knew I needed better, but didn’t know how to get there. BLOOM helped me tap into my emotions and identify that [issue]. When I first started, I was a mess and didn’t have any feelings.”
Members of the BLOOM network.
Photo by Layla Brown-Clark
organization was run out of Lewis’s home, and all materials for programming were stored in her car to take to and from different partner sites.
“It wasn’t sustainable, but it shows you how committed we were to getting the work done. It became a running joke [of how] my car was always messy because the organization’s inventory was in it,” Lewis said.
Eventually, though, it became clear that they needed a real home base. Through Cook County Health’s Stronger Together Initiative, Free Root Operation
obtained the funding for a brick-andmortar space. The initiative aims to address behavioral health inequities across the region’s care system through increased systems alignment, enhanced system quality, and the expansion of access to early intervention and prevention, treatment, support, recovery, and crisis assessment and care. Free Root Operation was one of the fifty-three organizations chosen for the grant to maximize the potential of their work.
The true task, however, was finding a location on the South Side that would be open to supporting the work Free Root Operation was doing. After looking around for a bit, she found a space in
“The owner resonated with what we were doing,” she said. “Bronzeville was not the goal, but in a lineage of the Black Metropolis, thinking of Black folk building up from nothing, [and] having come from down South Mississippi around the Great Migration, [it] makes so much sense for us because we are building new systems of care and wellness for Black communities. At the end of the day, it’s the perfect spot for us,” Lewis
With the stability of a physical space, Lewis looks forward to increasing the number of programs offered through the BLOOM network, hosting weekly classes for women, and continuing to
“We are not just people who grieve when our babies are taken from us. We are not just folks who clean up messes and provide care to no end. We are assets. Women have so much potential in the community as influencers and stakeholders, so we want folks to see these women as beacons of hope.” Lewis said. “We also want to help South and West side Chicagoans operate in their communities as active stakeholders to feel like where they live is theirs, their families are theirs, and their futures are theirs.”
To learn more about Free Root Operation and its programs, see freerootoperation.com ¬
Layla Brown-Clark is a contributor at the Weekly.
2023 BLOOM cohort member Lyntrina Broadnax. Photo by Layla Brown-Clark
