(Claire Zhou)

“Census count, twen-ty-ten!” they shout. “This is for everyone to be in!”

The kids are instructed to place fliers in every mailbox, except those belonging to houses that are boarded up or vacant (of which there are many). Every so often the cheers of these young activists are drowned out by the sound of police sirens just a few blocks away—indirect reminders of why the 2010 Census is so important to these Englewood residents, and why community organizations have taken such an active interest in the census this year.

“March to the Mailbox” day, which took place last Saturday, was the joint effort of New Birth Church of God In Christ and Teamwork Englewood’s “Complete Count” committee to remind residents to return their census forms. Since autumn of last year, Teamwork Englewood has launched an aggressive campaign to disseminate accurate information about the census and to prevent Englewood from being undercounted.

In 2000, only between 32 and 45 percent of Englewood households returned their census forms by mail, a figure even lower than the alarming 58 percent overall return rate of the city of Chicago.

“We saw the numbers after 2000 and recognized that in our community, the response was less than 50 percent. So when you equate the amount of money that was lost, the amount of resources that we did not have available in the last ten years, the condition of the neighborhood and what a difference that money could have made, it’s just common sense,” said Pastor Willard Payton of New Birth Church. “We have to get involved. We’ve got to make it better for the future, for this community.”

The census, which is taken every ten years by the U.S. Census Bureau, is used to determine how over $400 billion of federal funding is allocated among state and city governments. Moreover, it gauges a neighborhood’s need for community centers, roads, schools, and other public facilities and services, helping the local government to make important planning decisions.

In order to counter the misconceptions and fears surrounding the census, a citywide grassroots movement of volunteers has arisen to assist the regional census bureau. In Englewood, as in much of the city, some people simply are not aware of the importance of the census to public services and aid; others in the community fear that giving their information to the government will lead to their arrest for past criminal offenses. In Englewood, a predominantly African-American community, some residents also refuse to participate because they are offended by one of the census’s designations of their race as “Negro.” For these reasons, Payton believes those who already live in the neighborhood are best equipped to help residents overcome their mistrust of the census and to reassure them of its confidentiality.

With the help of organizations like Teamwork Englewood, an accurate census has the potential to change the landscape of the community by bringing in resources to reestablish a stable workforce. According to Payton, once the need for better infrastructure, security, and education is met, the community will once again draw in “stakeholder” residents—people who are not just there to live, but also to invest and further revitalize the area.

Community members hope that the census will address the immediate need for community centers and afterschool programs for children. Increased funding for such facilities and services can go a long way in keeping kids off the streets and reducing violent crimes, especially during the summertime.

“[The census is about] giving back to the community, helping others to make our environment a better place,” says ten-year-old Shawnah Ewing. “I want it to be safe and nice, and I don’t want any of our alleys messed up. This is where I live.”

(Mehveş Konuk)

The housing crisis is responsible for much of the movement in Woodlawn, according to Mattie Butler, executive director of Woodlawn East Community and Neighbors (WECAN). “People are moving because they lost one place, so they move in with relatives or friends and in about a month they have to move out because their friends start to have a problem [paying their rent or mortgage]. They keep on moving within Woodlawn till they exhaust their options.” WECAN provides affordable housing and supportive services to Woodlawn residents, like those displaced by the 557 foreclosures that occurred in the neighborhood this past January. With many cases still pending, Butler predicts that the worst of the foreclosures is yet to come.

Woodlawn is also one of many neighborhoods in Chicago undergoing gentrification—or, at least, it was before the housing market collapsed. “We have more affluent people who have moved to Woodlawn, but now they’re not moving that often because the housing market has got a great big hole in the bottom of it,” Butler says. But this hasn’t prevented the displacement of low-income residents. “We were having a problem with poor people being pushed out because rental housing was used for condo conversion, but it didn’t stop fast enough to keep people from being moved,” explains Butler. Developers were hit by the foreclosures too, and now, at the same time as many struggle to afford housing, “there’s a lot of new construction sitting on the ground, vacant and boarded-up.”

The foreclosure crisis is also driving an increase in movement throughout the South Side. According to Carlos Nelson, executive director of the Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation, people in his neighborhood “are typically moving around just for additional housing.” They tend to stay within about a five-mile radius that includes Englewood and Grand Crossing. Jacques Conway, a member of the community organization Teamwork Englewood, adds, “People move frequently based on how many times they run out of money to stay in a particular apartment. Often, when they know they have to move or they will be evicted, instead of paying their landlord back – which they know they can’t do – they use it as a security deposit to rent at another place. They usually stay in the community, but either move when they get behind on rent, or when the building is in such disrepair that they don’t want to rent there anymore.”

This process can quickly become a self-perpetuating cycle, as each move leads to greater instability. In a November 2009 report, researchers at D.C.-based think tank the Urban Institute dubbed this process “residential churning.” “Churning movers,” or people who move frequently without improving their situations, made up nearly half of all moving families in ten U.S. cities surveyed in the study (Chicago was not among them). These families tend to be young and low-income, and dissatisfied and disconnected from their neighborhoods, though they rarely move far outside them.

One woman who fits the profile of a churning mover is Cheryl*, a 38-year-old mother of three. She has moved around a lot in her lifetime, twice due to evictions. “I had to start over once, then I got divorced and I had to start over after that. Now I’m at a place in my life where I’m starting over again.”

One eviction followed her divorce. With her husband gone and without a job, “I didn’t have the means to care for the apartment or pay the rent,” she says. The second happened because, she says, “I was living a life at that time where I was reckless—I wasn’t too smart. Today I’m a different person. I think more about the consequences of my actions.”

Cheryl currently lives in Englewood with her children and partner, and she wants to move. “There’s a lot of open [criminal] activity here,” she explains. She would like to live in a more culturally and economically diverse neighborhood such as Oak Lawn, where she lived several years ago, or Hyde Park. In the latter, she says, “everything’s convenient. It’s a thriving area. There are lots of different places that my children can become a part of—a wealth of things going on in the area.”

Cheryl’s evictions pose an obstacle—she has “horrible credit,” she says, and her partner has none. But as she tries to start over this time, she’s in a much better position. “I have a different team of people with me. I have a companion now who helps me with everything, which makes it a lot easier. I have resources now.” She’s also working with an organization in Hyde Park to try to find an affordable apartment there.

Cheryl may have been a churning mover in the past, but she’s in a good position to become what the Urban Institute calls an “up-and-out mover” if she relocates to a higher-income community with more opportunities. The very fact that she knows about neighborhoods like Oak Lawn and Hyde Park puts her at a significant advantage.

Chicagoans tend to be familiar with neighborhoods in which their own racial group predominates, according to the 2008 study “Racial Blind Spots: Black-White-Latino Differences in Community Knowledge.” The study, led by University of Illinois-Chicago professor Maria Krysan, found that people decide where to move based primarily on information from social networks and realtors, two sources that usually resemble them racially, thus reinforcing the already extreme segregation of Chicago’s neighborhoods.

But as Krysan and her colleagues found—and Cheryl attests—people want to live in more diverse neighborhoods than they actually do. The fact that African-Americans, for example, tend to congregate in particular neighborhoods has more to do with the fear of discrimination elsewhere, plus the aforementioned “blind spots,” than with an innate preference to be around people of the same race.

A new nonprofit called MoveSmart is trying to remedy these racial blind spots by providing movers with easy access to housing-related information. Their “Neighborhood Finder” allows users to plug in their priorities—low density or high, good schools, banks, farmers markets, libraries—and see which areas fit them best.

According to Executive Director Justin Massa, the idea for MoveSmart was born over coffee with two other fair housing advocates in Chicago. “We started realizing that lots of housing counselors don’t have access to all the rich information that’s out there.” After a lot of brainstorming, he says, “We finally got around to the concept of taking lots of data that’s complex and honing it down into a system where average people can address their own needs.”

(courtesy of Zol87/Flickr)

Now, an agency called Housing Choice Partners (HCP) has a contract with the CHA to counsel former public housing residents with Section 8 vouchers (federal rental subsidies). “We work with them pretty intensively,” says Executive Director Christine Klepper. “We lead tours so they can see what we call ‘opportunity areas,’ which are areas with a lower poverty rate and a lower [minority] population. We talk about considering the quality of schools, researching the crime rate, what kind of amenities are nearby.”

“So often, low-income people, don’t necessarily think about those things, because they’ve never had a choice,” Klepper explains. “They just kind of look around them and make decisions based on what’s nearby.” HCP’s counseling has measurable success: the average participant moves from a census tract with 60 percent poverty to one with 30 percent. But, Klepper says, “A neighborhood that has 30 percent of its residents in poverty is still a pretty distressed neighborhood. [The first move] is just a stopping point.”

Although most people don’t want to move far from the communities they know, Klepper says that “families that move to opportunity areas are always more satisfied. They like their neighborhoods better, their landlords better, their units better.”

Sometimes, we need a big move in order to get a fresh start. In economic hard times, and across the intensely divided geography of Chicago, the services that organizations like MoveSmart and HCP provide to residents can mean, at the very least, a move in the right direction.

Harvard Elementary teacher Devondra Barrett (Sam Feldman)

Harvard Elementary School in Englewood was a teacher’s worst nightmare. Kids ran in and out of classrooms in the middle of class, started fights, and swore at faculty. Principals cycled through without making any impact. In 2007, less than a third of Harvard students passed the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), putting the school in the bottom ranks of Illinois public schools.

Then everything changed. One Friday afternoon in March of 2007, children came home from Harvard bearing notes for their parents. The news was drastic: the school was going to be handed over to a nonprofit organization, the Academy for Urban School Leadership, to be turned around. All the adults at the school—everyone from teachers to janitors—would be replaced, and when the kids returned the following fall it would be to a newly renovated building with an entirely new staff.

AUSL had received its first “turnaround” school, Sherman Elementary, the year before. Now renamed the Sherman School of Excellence, it was still in its first year of AUSL operation and no test scores were yet available to measure the school’s progress. AUSL’s skeptics, including the Chicago Teachers Union and some Harvard families, argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to justify handing another school over to AUSL, but Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan believed in the organization. As President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Duncan has made turnaround a centerpiece of his agenda and held up AUSL as an example, and his successor as schools chief, Ron Huberman, has maintained his legacy. AUSL’s portfolio this year includes eight schools, and CPS plans to hand over four more next fall.

AUSL was founded in 2001 by Martin Koldyke, a retired venture capitalist who had been involved in several other education initiatives. Koldyke’s original idea for AUSL was a resident teacher training program, where residents would be apprenticed to experienced mentor teachers in a real-world setting. He sought out a team of educators and managed to obtain the old Wright Junior College building in Portage Park, and in September 2001 AUSL opened the Chicago Academy Elementary School. Koldyke recruited Donald Feinstein, a veteran West Side educator who spent eighteen years in charge of Dett Elementary, to be the school’s first principal. “We just created a school from scratch,” says Feinstein, who is now AUSL’s executive director. “And we knew when we created the school that we wanted it to be a dual-mission school, not only educating children but training future teachers for the school district.”

Koldyke was pleased with Chicago Academy’s success, and since then AUSL has opened or taken over five more training academies. The six academies combined have graduated more than 240 teachers, over 80 percent of whom are still teaching in Chicago public schools. “We were putting them out one there, two over here, one over there, three over here,” Koldyke says, “with the predictable result that, by and large, the majority of the classrooms that these residents were put into got better. But the schools didn’t get better, because the culture didn’t change.”

Koldyke approached Duncan with his idea for turning around the lowest-performing schools in the district. “The kids stay, the adults leave, and we would train this cadre of residents and put them in en masse into a school with new leadership,” Koldyke says. Duncan, meanwhile, was launching CPS’s Renaissance 2010 initiative, which aimed to close failing schools and open one hundred new ones by 2010, a goal CPS is on track to meet. Although CPS counts AUSL’s turnaround schools toward that total, Feinstein makes clear that “to me, it was never about Renaissance 2010 with our program.” Unlike many Renaissance 2010 schools, AUSL’s turnaround schools aren’t charter schools, don’t receive Renaissance 2010 funding, and are staffed by unionized teachers.

In 2006, AUSL got their first opportunity to test out the turnaround model with Sherman Elementary. The following year Harvard was added to their portfolio. Harvard teacher Devondra Barrett remembers the reaction among the faculty when the turnaround was announced: “Sad. Chaotic. Of course there was a lot of crying. Teachers were upset, parents were upset. I felt sorry for the teachers who were about to retire, who only had one year left, a couple years left. Everybody was really close-knit because everybody had been here for so long.”

Barrett herself had strong community ties; she had grown up nearby in Englewood, gotten a Master’s degree, and then returned to teach at her old elementary school seventeen years ago. She chose to apply for a job at the new Harvard School of Excellence, although she had her doubts about AUSL. After meeting some of the new teachers, more than half of whom had just graduated from one of AUSL’s teacher academies, she says, “I would sit back and I would say, ‘Some of these teachers are not going to make it,’ because they were so nice and sweet.” But AUSL accepted her, along with two other faculty members from the old Harvard, and Barrett decided to give the organization a chance. She started to get “a good feeling,” in particular after meeting the new principal, Andre Cowling. “It was just certain things he would say that the other principals didn’t say,” she says.

Barrett’s instinct was right. “They came in and they just changed this school from bad to excellent,” she says. “I was shocked, because being here so long I didn’t think anyone could change it.” Between 2007 and 2009, while the average composite score on the ISAT in both the city and state crept up a few points, Harvard’s score nearly doubled, from 32 to 56 percent. Today, students at Harvard arrive in uniforms, walk quietly in the halls, and treat teachers with respect. “At the old Harvard, you would tell them they would suffer the consequences, but the children who wouldn’t listen knew they were going to get out of it,” says Barrett, who says their attitude was, “Well, go ahead, tell the teacher, go ahead tell the principal, what they gonna do?” “You don’t hear nobody here saying, ‘Well, go ahead, tell Mr. Cowling, what he gonna do?’ They don’t say that here.”

Of course, the sudden departure of almost all of Harvard’s adults took its toll. Barrett remembers that kids old enough to understand what was happening were upset at the loss of the teachers they’d known for years. The Chicago Teachers Union agrees. “We have concerns that when you break up relations between students and teachers, kids are affected by that,” says CTU spokeswoman Rosemaria Genova. “Look at Fenger.”

Fenger High School, which attracted national attention last September when junior Derion Albert was beaten to death in a gang fight, was just beginning its first year of in-house turnaround under CPS’s own Office of School Turnaround. In a column on the Fenger tragedy published in the Chicago Sun-Times last October, former CTU president Deborah Lynch wrote, “School turnarounds have turned out to be the deadliest reform of all. How could anyone expect that completely eliminating all the professionals and staff of a tough high-poverty high school could be a good thing?”

AUSL tries to reach out to parents as soon as a school is assigned to it, including bussing them to other turnaround schools so they can see how the model works. Barrett reports that parents have become much more involved in the past two years, in part due to AUSL’s continuing efforts to bring them in; recently Koldyke took a group of principals and parents to dinner at Maggiano’s with Mayor Daley. And many parents have become supportive, even contributing testimonials for the AUSL website. “Many of the most harsh critics of the district now are our greatest fans, and they’re our most vocal,” says Feinstein.

CPS under Ron Huberman appears set to continue sending a stream of turnaround schools to AUSL, and the organization couldn’t be happier. According to Koldyke, AUSL hopes to grow to more than fifty elementary schools over the next eight years, as well as a smaller number of high schools. Feinstein predicts that if AUSL’s expansion continues, it could become a sort of “district within a district.” Although the turnaround process itself should only last three to five years, he says that’s only the first stage of school improvement, and AUSL plans to keep managing its schools as long as CPS keeps renewing its five-year contracts. “Let the district worry about the 640 other schools,” he says. “I don’t think there’s a dearth of need.”

Correction: This article originally stated that “Unlike many Renaissance 2010 schools, AUSL’s turnaround schools aren’t charter schools, don’t receive CPS funding, and are staffed by unionized teachers.” In fact the schools do receive CPS funding via AUSL; however, they do not receive any funding through the Renaissance 2010 program.

Chicago’s Englewood community could be described as a “food desert” due to its lack of grocery stores, particularly those that carry fresh produce. This term is usually applied to poor communities where junk food-stocking corner stores are the only source of groceries for miles. But a self-described “urban goddess, a hip hop head, an activist, and a Christian” have come up with a creative approach to a healthy food store hoping not only to eradicate the food desert, but to transform healthy living into an integral part of urban minority culture. Their project, the Graffiti and Grub market, opened on June 19 at 59th and Wentworth.

LaDonna Redmond was first confronted with the true consequences of the food desert in her West Side neighborhood 12 years ago, when she became a mother. Her son had food allergies, but she could not find healthy food for him. Soon after her initial frustration with the food desert, Redmond met Orrin Williams, an activist and the director of training at Grown Homes, an organization that works to help the homeless acquire job skills in agriculture. Williams’s knowledge inspired the beginnings of Redmond’s education in food environmentalism, sustainability, and environmental justice. Soon after, Redmond and her husband founded the Institute for Community Development, an organization dedicated to converting vacant lots into urban farm sites, setting up farmers’ markets, formulating public policy, and working with legislators to distribute local food systems to urban communities.

Redmond and Williams envisioned and began to plan a healthy food market for Chicago’s West Side very early on in their work together. But they dreamed of something they saw as very different from the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s traditions: They imagined a market that would be tailored specifically to urban neighborhoods. They have been fundraising for that vision for the past 10 years, beginning with a donation from the Kellogg Foundation and gradually collecting and investing more.

In addition to raising funds, the two activists conducted market-based community-level research on how to fit the supermarket model into urban landscapes, working with researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago State University, Loyola University, and DePaul University. Their research revealed that the majority of people shopping at grocery stores are mothers in the age range of 18 to 35. These women constitute a large part of the so-called “hip-hop generation.” At Chicago’s African Festival of the Arts a few years ago, Redmond met William Seegars, an expert in hip-hop culture. Seegars had created a hip-hop-themed board game that he presented at the festival. The idea of a hip-hop theme fit perfectly with the idea of a specifically urban market, and the combination of Seegars’s background and Redmond’s and Williams’s knowledge and research led to the conception of Graffiti and Grub.

Redmond found another inspiration for the market in a vegan restaurant called “Gratitude,” which she discovered on a trip to Berkeley, California. The restaurant is designed around a board game and has a parlor-like atmosphere, combining healthy food with game-playing and socializing, thus melding health of body with health of spirit. Redmond immediately imagined creating a food market around Seegars’s board game, a food market with a healthy approach to urban living and sustainability.

The group recently found the space that enabled them to realize their vision. The landlord of the building at 5923 South Wentworth Avenue that formerly housed Englewood’s Good Food Market was renovating the space, and Redmond and her partners were able to lease it. They are working this summer with 150 youth from the surrounding community to put the finishing touches on the market, which opened last Friday. They have hired these young people in collaboration with the Mayor’s summer youth program and, over the course of the summer, will provide them with green job training and education in the areas of entrepreneurship, food, agriculture, environmentalism, and sustainability.

The idea that healthy living is for the wealthy only is a marketing ploy, a tool used effectively by chains such as Whole Foods, according to Redmond. She believes that, in reality, food is cheaper when it’s locally grown. Despite its current character as a status symbol, she says, there is no reason that healthy food should be limited to the rich. In working with youth and appealing to young hip-hop culture, the founders of Graffiti and Grub hope to catch a generation before it has fully ingested the notion that health is for the affluent. They want to break this notion down and replace it with the idea that healthy living is for everyone.

Environmentalism, organic food, and healthy living—these are concepts that are today often associated with white yuppie lifestyles, with people who have the money and education to care. But the Graffiti and Grub market is born of black, urban hip-hop culture. It represents the claim of poor, minority culture to what Redmond calls real wealth: “wealth of spirit, body, and health, not just wealth of the pocket book.”

Ellis Calvin

Danielle’s grandma used to tell her that she was too pretty to be lonely. Darrell, the boy she just met, seems to agree, but it’s more than just that—he really gets her, sees her inside and out. They start spending time together in smaller groups, then alone. He brings her little things; he’s crazy about her. Danielle’s friends are jealous, but she doesn’t mind them too much. She and Darrell have a special connection.

Darrell is older and works, and all his business connections seem to be women. Danielle has to admit to herself that this bothers her just a little. Even though he promises her “it’s just business” with those girls, she feels like they’re taking him away. She wants to know what Darrell’s business is and why she’s not a part of it. Because she’s in school, he answers, and wouldn’t be interested. But he’s the boy who understands her: doesn’t he realize that she belongs in a better world than school and watching her younger brothers, that she’s ready for a real business, too? She’s done with school, done with babysitting, done with the squalor of home—that cramped two-bedroom that feels like it’s made of nothing but noise and dirt.

She’s ready to work, and Darrell gives her a chance. She starts with him, then gradually adds his other clients, one by one. A percentage of every payment goes to Darrell, since he’s the one who connects her. Working with Darrell will help bring their old connection back, Danielle thinks, and she works more; she does every kind of work he wants her to do. It will only take a little more to get things back to the way they were. She walks the streets later and later, does everything under the sun, but the past is gone. No drugs, no nothing can bring it back. It’s over, and by age 20 Danielle is dead in a dumpster, after some business goes bad and Darrell decides he’s had enough.

Brenda Myers-Powell tells this story to illustrate how young girls become prostitutes. While stories vary, Danielle’s is the basic outline. Myers-Powell experienced one not unlike it during her 25 years as a prostitute—years during which she was shot five times and stabbed 13, a period during which she felt desperation and learned how to survive. “I know what it feels like to work for a pimp, to want desperately to get out and not be able to…I know why I survived. God saved me to do this for these girls: this is my passion.” The girls she speaks of are the at-risk young women she and Stephanie Daniels-Wilson recruit and encourage to participate in the Dreamcatcher Foundation, an organization to prevent girls from going into prostitution.

Dreamcatcher is a young organization, begun in Daniels-Wilson’s living room in 2006 and funded entirely out of pocket by its directors, Daniels-Wilson, Myers-Powell, and Angela Roguenses. The influx of baby carriages pushed by girls ages 13 through 15 in Daniels-Wilson’s neighborhood of Englewood confronted her with the painful truth that young motherhood had become the norm for black girls in her area. During the summer of 2006, when sitting in the park reading or walking along the street, she began to ask some of these girls about their experiences and what led them to have children so early. Many were victims of sexual abuse or were involved with drugs and drug dealers.

She invited some of these girls to her apartment once a week to gather to talk about their experiences and feelings. In 2007, Daniels-Wilson and her friend Myers-Powell received permission from Bishop James Dukes to hold their group sessions at an Englewood church, the Christian Liberation Center. The group became official, and Daniels-Wilson called it the Dreamcatcher Foundation, fearing that a reference to prostitution in the name would turn people off.

The church is now becoming their satellite office, and the Dreamcatcher Foundation is moving to a new location on 87th Street. They have expanded their services: besides the weekly group discussion sessions, called the Youth Empowerment Project, they provide tutoring for girls over age 16 in a computer lab. The directors also do their best to find summer and after-school jobs for the girls, and they provide health service programs, including HIV and STD testing.

All the directors work full-time jobs outside the Dreamcatcher Foundation. Their search for outside funding has so far been fruitless, and Ms. Daniels-Wilson believes their relative newness is the reason. It is too early to judge whether or not they are effective at saving girls from the violence of street prostitution. They have no statistics or numbers, but the directors can already see that the girls who come regularly have changed. Daniels-Wilson recalls how most of the girls were when she first met them, with few goals and little but anger and bitterness growing inside them. Before joining the group, most of the girls had no idea what they were doing after high school; now, most respond to that question with “going to college!” as if the answer is obvious. The anger management help they receive in the group sessions has changed their attitudes, at least in part. A few of the girls are former prostitutes who have quit the work. There are about 28 girls who regularly attend; almost all are black, and about 95 percent live in Englewood. Most of their parents know they’re involved, but only a couple of parents are active with the organization themselves.

Both Daniels-Wilson and Myers-Powell worked in and were victims of the violent sex-trade industry themselves. Knowing how the industry works, they recruit specifically among the most at-risk girls. They hope to catch them young, teach them the dangers they face, and inspire them with dreams of better lives. Most of their membership consists of young girls whom they convinced to come: girls they saw hanging around drug dealers, prostitutes, young mothers, victims of sexual abuse. If they become sex workers, these young women will not be call-girls or escorts working of their own volition. They will face every kind of violence at the hands of their clients and pimps, and they will find themselves trapped.

What makes these girls at-risk? The girls attending the group seem to have the same energy and attitudes as most teenagers. But they often live in homes with only one adult, who is away working all the time. They are often, at age 16, responsible for the care of several younger siblings. Danielle’s two-bedroom apartment holding 16 people is not unusual. The directors asked the girls to make wish lists of anything they wanted; deodorant and socks were common items listed. Living in poverty with no adult supervision or attention, with the burden of heavy responsibilities and little knowledge of the opportunities in life, these girls are primed for a situation like Danielle’s.

It seems farfetched to say that all sex workers have followed a path like Danielle’s, but Myers-Powell insists that this is a typical path. The “understanding” a girl receives from her future pimp, probably the most attention she receives in her life, is enough to make the girl willing to do anything to maintain their relationship. At-risk women are in danger of falling prey to love, which, in their stories, is equated with abuse and even death. It’s an unhealthy love born of low self-esteem, but it is undeniable that love is often unhealthy in this way; the case of the prostitute working to please her pimp is simply an extreme degree of the sickness. It’s during the beginning of this type of abusive relationship that the Dreamcatchers wish to seize and change the girls. They are not catchers in the rye, saving the young from the loss of innocence, but they wish to turn the path of growing up from one of falling into a rotten love story into one of finding and achieving dreams of a better self. The directors of the Dreamcatcher Foundation know intimately the prostitute dead in a dumpster, and they see that her life could have been entirely different. Her potential was destroyed and her story disfigured by what could have colored it and made it better: by the dirtiness and roughness of the ghetto, by noise and crowded homes, by poverty and loneliness.

Though soil has been trucked in and piled thick on top of the concrete, cracked pavement still emerges at the edges of this empty lot in Englewood. Adjacent residential streets are scattered with discarded couches, and those couches are scattered with rusty springs and mildew stains. A couple of portable trailers nestle up to three hoophouses—that’s “unheated greenhouses” to those of us without green thumbs—half full of beautiful red kale, dying tomato plants and neat rows of spinach. From a fourth, open patch of land springs forth lettuce. Low-lying strawberry plants run down the center of the lot. This is the Wood Street Urban Farm, an organic farm on a formerly abandoned lot in the middle of Englewood. Since its owners bought the land from the city for $1 in 2006, it has been the only year-round functioning farm in Chicago.

But there’s more than produce growing in Englewood. Since the late ‘90s, Englewood has been a hotbed for nonprofits, and they all seem to have something to do with Wood Street. Take, for example, the Chicago Center for Urban Transformation (CUT). The CUT was founded in 1999 with the aim of turning existing neighborhoods into vibrant, supportive, and sustainable communities. Its mission statement cites the inspirations for its program—the Sarvodaya movement for Buddhist-inspired economics, principles of social justice and human rights, and community development—and its objectives: education for all, employment for all, housing for all, healthcare for all and, most insistently, environmental sustainability.

After nearly ten years, the CUT is finally beginning to see the implementation of its theories for community development. The recent progress is largely thanks to the LISC/Chicago New Communities Program (NCP), an initiative for community improvement run by the MacArthur Foundation. The NCP has been funding similar organizations in other Chicago neighborhoods for years, but it took Englewood’s a little bit longer to get off the ground. The Teamwork Englewood website cites a lack of broad base of support and misunderstanding of its purpose among many community stakeholders as the reasons for its slow start. It wasn’t until 2004 that the NCP approved Teamwork Englewood’s community planning program and initiated funding.

In 2000, 43.8 percent of the population of Englewood was earning below the poverty level, and poor public services and high crime have driven the neighborhood’s population down by seventeen percent since 1990. Meanwhile, the vacancy rate in housing went up 5.7 percent. Today, seventeen percent of the housing stock in Englewood is vacant. The community is driven further apart, and businesses have less of an incentive to stick around. This is how Wood Street Urban Farm got its lot for $1 and became the center of Englewood’s community revolution.

Although it was founded by an Englewood outsider, the farm is very much the property of the community. It’s a branch of an organization called Growing Home, which integrates principles of organic agriculture and healthy living with a full-scale job training program. A new group of thirty to forty interns tends the farm each season, and in doing so learns the fundamentals of organic farming and healthy living. They also—some for the very first time in their lives—start to make plans for the future. Candidates for the program come from backgrounds that make it hard for them to find jobs. Most have been previously incarcerated or homeless, and many have struggled with addiction. Growing Home founder Les Brown believed that learning to nurture and create could give these people the roots they otherwise lacked.

The program has been remarkably successful. Of those who graduate, ninety percent stay out of prison, and sixty-five percent find gainful employment. Participants have access to free GED courses and a full range of counseling and planning resources. Orrin Williams, the Employment Training Coordinator of Growing Home, is currently helping a graduate start a farm of her own on the West Side. (She dragged him into a hoophouse one day to show him her vegetables. “Isn’t this wonderful? I’m going to take care of these. These are my babies.”) The farm manager, he adds, is a graduate of the program. The story of graduate Margaret P. is on the Growing Home website. Before coming to Wood Street, she was an addict and an alcoholic. Now she’s in recovery and is a full-time student. “My life,” she says, “has done a 360 degree turn around.” Another, Demetrius B., says: “My potential is limitless.”

Graduates of the program bring their newfound confidence and job skills—as well as the money they’ve earned at Growing Home—back to the community. As healthy produce and empowered people fly out and those in search of a more promising life pile in, Growing Home continues to grow. It now runs a ten-acre farm in Marseilles, Illinois, where interns work for two days a week to develop their farming skills. Meanwhile, the Growing Home Community Supported Agriculture program, a sort of periodic food subscription service, delivers to 100 members on the South Side during the spring and summer growing season. Someone recently donated two lots at 56th and Hermitage for the development of another farm.

Last year, Teamwork Englewood connected high school students at the Lindblom Math and Science Academy with Growing Home. Under Williams’s guidance, the students planned and ran the new Englewood Farmers’ Market at a church at 64th and Ashland. Williams, himself a graduate of Lindblom, was incredibly pleased with how engaged the students were in the project. Growing Home had not planned on opening a farmers’ market in Englewood until summer of 2009, but with the students’ help they were able to have one up and running a year early, complete with its own website. From early June through October 30th, the farmers’ market provided affordable, healthy organic produce from the Wood Street Urban Farm to an area that is firmly entrenched in the so-called “food desert” of the South Side of Chicago.

Since the market has closed for the winter, people have been coming in even greater numbers to Wood Street’s Wednesday market days, when produce is available to purchase at the farm. As it gets more publicity, the farm has become a stronger rallying point for the Englewood community. According to Bona Bradbury-Heinsohn, Director of Public Policy at the Cook County Farm Bureau, the current economic situation has led to an “exponential” increase in the number of urban farms in Chicago in the past few years. The organization has 43,000 members in largely urban Cook County. “Urban farming is a great use of property, and communities really rally behind these avenues,” she says. Although agricultural community-building is a fairly new concept, supporters like Bradbury-Heinsohn firmly believe that it has great potential.

Williams makes sure that Growing Home is actively engaging this potential. Growing Home is a key part of Teamwork Chicago’s community development plan, which calls for an Urban Agriculture District that would provide healthy fresh food to the residents of Englewood. The project already has a design team working on ideas for produce carts and strategically placed grocery stores throughout the neighborhood. Plans for a corner store kiosk are in the works, and he’s currently trying to convince vendors to stock produce at existing corner stores. “There’s a process in place to build new communities in Englewood, and the strategy deals with food, fitness, and health,” he says.

The Wood Street Urban Farm doesn’t look like much, but the air seems fresher inside its fence than outside. A few young girls walk by and take a look at a row of Russian kale. One of them smiles widely and straightens the books inside her backpack. As anyone familiar with it would agree, this lot is more than a large garden; it’s a symbol of hope for a growing community.

Sikia has served an eclectic menu since its opening in August, offering, as its own website describes, “the flavors of a continent where the exotic mingles with the familiar.” The continent in question is Africa: a vast culinary terrain, which includes everything from the “memorable tagines of Morocco” to the “savory stews of the eastern grasslands and the curries of the Swahili coasts.” While WCI teaches the techniques of classical French cuisine, it’s clear that Sikia’s gustatory perspective remains unique to the cultural traditions of Africa. The restaurant’s conventional menu includes a handful of appetizers, soups, and salads, but also entrées where French technique meets, as Sikia advertises, “the variety of African cultures who prize wholesome, economical and thoroughly delicious cuisine.” According to LeTonya Black, a server and culinary student at the restaurant, there are some perennial favorites: the West African and Ground Nut Stew is a traditional stew, incorporating large, fatty pieces of goat meat in a savory and spicy peanut base. The West African Tilapia with Mango and Cilantro is a fresh take on a tilapia filet, rubbed with smoky and pungent spices and neutralized by the soothing freshness of sweet mango and a touch of cilantro chiffonade. Sikia’s side dishes are also reflective of this place “where the exotic mingles with the familiar”; its “jollof rice,” with nutmeg, ginger, Guinea pepper and cumin, nicely complements any of the entrees.

And yet, Sikia doesn’t forget the “familiar” cuisine it also advertises; the menu is peppered with recognizable dishes from the Caribbean and the South. Hand Ground Yellow Grits, Jerk Chicken, Sweet Potato Pie with Vanilla Ice Cream, and Black-Eyed Pea Fritters anchor the menu and add an everyday feeling to the restaurant’s meals. Chef Juan Brown, a recent WCI graduate who completed the two-year program in just one, explained the problem of cooking dishes with both cultural breadth and close tradition. “With this rustic and homely cuisine, it’s pretty hard to plate a stew,” Brown explains. “And you can’t beautify rice,” he adds, elaborating on the more common problems chefs at Sikia face on a conceptual level. Dishes served at Sikia are rarely done in an upscale setting, so preparing something as cumbersome and bulky as a stew proves to be a real challenge. Furthermore, Chef Otto Noble, another recent WCI graduate, expressed a similar frustration with the rigid French technique necessary in the kitchen. “Cooking is difficult,” he says. “Mostly because your own creativity, your own ideas aren’t allowed to come through. You’re not painting your own canvas.”

In a neighborhood like Englewood, Sikia may be seen as an anomaly. Yet, the restaurant’s presence and novel approach to American cuisine is not bizarre. The neighborhood itself enlivens the area’s culture with new approaches to old traditions, much like Sikia takes formidable African recipes and applies them to contemporary cuisine. Sikia, loosely translated from the Swahili as “an array of human senses,” signifies, as the restaurant explains, “a complex experience, one in which [both] concrete and abstract sense work together to make up total knowledge.”
Sikia, 740 W. 63rd St. Dinner: Thursday-Saturday, 5:30-9pm, Brunch: Sunday, 11am-3pm. (773)602-5200. ccc.edu/sikia

Moore is the reporter covering the South Side for Chicago Public Radio. She works out of a storefront in Englewood, next door to Joe’s Style and Mo’s Clip barbershop and across the street from a Klassy Hand Car Wash. Chicago Public Radio’s South Side bureau is located in a converted storefront church, the only visible vestige of which is the slightly raised floor at the rear of the office that now supports a recording studio instead of a pulpit. Moore, rapt at her computer screen, sits at a desk behind a heavily barred door and windows. An alert, petite woman, Moore is currently covering the R. Kelly trial downtown, which keeps her shuttling from Englewood to the courthouse often and on short notice. She says of the Englewood location: “It is a presence in the neighborhood, though people don’t come knocking on my door every day with stories.” It’s also convenient: “I do a lot of work out in the field, and I can have interviews in the studio here. It’s easier for people to come by.”

Moore grew up on the South Side of Chicago, attending school in the Beverly neighborhood. She attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. and continued on to get a graduate degree in journalism at Northwestern University. She’s been back in Chicago for the past two and a half years, freelancing for some time before landing at Chicago Public Radio.

Moore brings a unique perspective to her reporting. In 2006, she published a book titled “Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation,” which she co-authored with fellow journalist Natalie Hopkinson. It is mostly a piece of social criticism, exploring a composite cultural character to whom the two women have given the moniker “Tyrone.” It describes men who, in the words of Washington Post reviewer Evelyn White, display “a cavalier disregard for convention,” men who are “often disparaged as sidekicks to their more forceful male peers. Yet in their attention to everyday issues of survival, such men play an important role in the black community. Disdainful of the integrationist gains of the civil rights movement, Tyrones favor entrepreneurial endeavors over establishment jobs.” Moore considers herself a “black feminist in the Hip-Hop Generation,” and brings this unique background to her reporting of the South Side.

Of course, in covering South Side news for Chicago Public Radio, her scope extends far beyond the world of hip-hop—though when the two convene, such as in the case of the R. Kelly trial, it is certainly to her benefit. “I try to present a range,” she explains. And she does: in a piece about the opening of a Starbucks in the neighborhood of Bronzeville, which is seeing new growth, Moore claims that “many middle-class black households are attracted to Bronzeville for its proximity to downtown and the lake—home sales have increased sixteen percent in the last two years and continue to climb despite the national housing market slump.” However, she observes that class conflict may be imminent as wealthier residents clamor for more upscale retail while the lower-income sector is looking for “grocery stores, so they don’t have to go way down to Fairplay and shop. Or go down here to this 200 Cut Rate Liquor. They sell food, but they high,” as put by longtime Bronzeville resident Frederick Thomas in an interview sound clip in the article. Moore illustrates what it ultimately comes down to for the new ward alderman: “[Pat] Dowell realizes that there are new residents who hunger for a Whole Foods while others don’t.”

This phenomenon is growing across the South Side, where gentrification looms and developers are navigating what has proved to be an, at times, uneasy relationship with the established neighborhood. Moore presents a dynamic view of the neighborhood, trying to create as much of a multi-dimensional depiction as possible.

Another complex issue that Moore tackles is that of the Chicago Housing Authority’s recent—and dramatic—makeover. The CHA’s Plan for Transformation has upset and engaged many residents on the South Side, and Moore has been covering the public housing debate since sixty-eight families got relocation notices and a much shorter period of time to move than is usually allotted to residents. Since then, the head of the CHA has resigned and been replaced as families try to navigate the public housing system.

Moore says that the particulars of radio journalism prove helpful in the field: “When you tell someone that you’re from some publication, they tell you everything that’s wrong with that publication. When I say I’m from Chicago Public Radio, they say, ‘I love the radio!’ People trust Chicago Public Radio.”

Radio journalism, for Moore, is a different kind of storytelling than print journalism. She uses tricks that are specific to the medium, such as underlying her speech with ambient noise from the place that she’s reporting on: “something like the noise of an air conditioner—we don’t usually notice that.” Radio journalism is much more of a performance medium than print; Moore describes “switching scenes,” as if the sounds she uses are a kind of theatrical backdrop that can be changed at will.

In listening to Moore’s pieces, there is a very real sense of place. With a couple of seconds of school cafeteria noise, we’re transported to Percy L. Julian High School, where students are talking about the violence prevalent in the school community that a new principal is working hard to squelch. In another article, Moore talks over the chatter of the scene inside of the Chicago Recovery Alliance truck parked at 47th and Vincennes where Cheryl Hull distributes free clean needles, condoms, and alcohol pads to drug users to prevent spread of disease. As Moore goes into details about a new drug to prevent heroin overdose, we never leave the distribution truck—a locus for the people who most need it.

Moore says that Chicago Public Radio covers stories that people want to listen to—stories that are relevant, interesting, and human. “We don’t do a lot of crime,” she says, “We get a lot of phone calls saying, ‘if I want to know about crime, I’d watch the evening news.’” And Moore knows that there’s much more to the South Side than what’s on the evening news.

Photos by Ellis Calvin