From The Chicago Tribune – March 13, 2019
For at least a decade, most Illinois residents who receive food stamps have been exempt from a federal law that requires them to work or risk losing their benefits.
But a proposal that would make it harder to obtain those exemptions — a move designed to encourage people to find jobs while unemployment is low — has social service agencies in Illinois, like elsewhere, worried that the poor will only plunge deeper into poverty.
From the National League of Cities’ CitiesSpeak blog – March 8, 2019
This is a guest blog by Melissa Young, director of Heartland Alliance’s National Initiatives on Poverty & Economic Opportunity.
Housing and income are inextricably linked. Research and conversations with people with lived experience of homelessness tells us that people experiencing homelessness can, do, and want to work. Homelessness persists, in part, because public systems fail to support all people in equitably obtaining the employment and income necessary for long term housing stability.
Ending homelessness then requires that we double-down in cities across the country to address the employment and income needs of individuals and families experiencing homelessness and housing instability.
Learn more form National Initiatives on Poverty & Economic Opportunity.
From NBC 5 Chicago – March 7, 2019
Christian Garicia was a combat medic in the Army. His role in the military was to help soldiers medically. Now that he’s out, he’s helping them again but he’s helping them find a home and a job.
From The Chicago Citizen – February 27. 2019
The City of Chicago is known for many things: cold temperatures, towering skyscrapers, deep dish pizza and unfortunately, gun violence.
Although the Chicago Police Department announced in their 2017 Annual Report that homicides were down over 15 percent from 2016 to 2017 and shooting incidents were down 22 percent during that same time period, people living in the most at-risk areas of the city still don’t feel 15 to 22 percent safer.
“When I think about what New York and LA, which we are often compared to, have done in the space of addressing violence, they have drastically reduced their violence by far more than what we are proposing right now,” said Eddie. Bocanegra, senior director of Heartland Alliance READI Chicago. “It is going to take an entire community and an entire village to address this issue, but I think that it’s a very realistic goal and [I] think that if we didn’t shoot for this, we would be selling ourselves short.”
From US News – January 28, 2019
CHICAGO – AS BEST AS HE can recall, the first time Daniel James used heroin was in 2009 or 2010, when he was in his late 30s. It was shortly after he’d been released from prison for the second or third time, resettling not far from West Garfield Park, the hardscrabble neighborhood where he grew up.
A high school dropout scraping by as a part-time forklift operator, James was partial to smoking pot or sniffing cocaine in his free time, hoping to numb a lifetime of pain. He’d been sexually abused by his father, who later killed himself, and his unstable mother soothed her demons with crack cocaine. There was rejection, depression and almost as many years spent incarcerated as on the outside.
From WGN News – January 25, 2019
CHICAGO — He served his country as a medic in the U.S. Army. Now, Christian Garicia is serving his fellow veterans by treating the invisible wounds that can emerge after military life.
“I went to Afghanistan in 2012,” Garicia, 25, said, “then I went on a peacetime mission in Africa 2014. I honestly don’t have too many bad things to say, I would do it all over again.”
From the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board – December 31, 2018
The odds are stacked against Kiwand Brown staying out of trouble.
We’re pulling hard for Brown to beat those odds, unlike far too many other ex-offenders from tough neighborhoods. They get out of prison or jail and end up right back behind bars within months.
Brown, as reporter Frank Main wrote, is working hard to avoid that fate. He has spent over eight months in jail already, after cops nabbed him for taking part in a friend’s robbery scheme, and those 263 days were enough. Brown pleaded guilty and is finishing a two-year probation sentence.
