Meg: Finding Comfort and a Place to Belong

A privileged upbringing in one of Chicago’s wealthier suburbs couldn’t keep Meg — who started using cocaine at age 16 — safe from the problems of drug use that would rule much of her adult life. Battling mental health challenges, including bipolar disorder, from an early age, Meg struggled with bulimia and anorexia and turned to drugs as a way to make herself feel good, even if, as she says, it was only for “fifteen and a half seconds.”

Meg has experienced sporadic homelessness over the past decade and today, in her mid-40s, she still struggles with occasional drug use. But, she says, the support she receives from Heartland Alliance, both permanent housing and mental health and addictions treatment, is helping her get to a point where “every day, drugs become less desirable.”

To help care for Meg’s physical and emotional needs, a nurse practitioner from Heartland Alliance visits weekly to ensure she gets adequate nutrition and support while she battles her eating disorders. A psychiatrist and therapist help her with mental health issues, including food phobias and healing from domestic violence. Case managers oversee her care and help her apply for the government support and medical care for which she is eligible due to her disabilities.

But, Meg says, she gets more than services from the people who work for Heartland Alliance. She gets a sense of belonging and comfort she hasn’t known most of her adult life.

“I know now that I am not alone in this crazy world,” says Meg.

How You Can Help

Donate » Help Us End Poverty

Heartland Alliance—the leading anti-poverty organization in the Midwest— believes that all of us deserve the opportunity to improve our lives. Each year, we help ensure this opportunity for nearly one million people around the world who are homeless, living in poverty, or seeking safety.

Please consider making a donation today to help others like Meg.

Being back in the workforce is what mattered most to Myra Jordan, a trainee worker in the billing department at Fox & Obel. Myra had been in and out of the workforce for over a decade. “I’ve been really blessed to receive this opportunity; it makes me feel better because I’m back in the workforce. I missed that,” she says. “I just love getting up every morning and going to work.”

Starting with a new dinette set and then adding living room furniture, Myra has finally been able to afford things she hasn’t been able to before now, creating a more comfortable home for herself and her family. And her new furniture was not purchased on credit, but purchased outright.

“Thanks to Put Illinois to Work… every time I look at the new furniture, I can say that this came from putting people back to work.”

With the new skills and self-confidence Myra has gained working at Fox & Obel, she is more certain than ever that by Christmas she will be in an unsubsidized job. All she needed was for one employer to take a chance— Put Illinois to Work made that possible.

Nadia

The Haitian town of Belladère rests more than 80 miles from Port-au-Prince, along the border with the Dominican Republic. In the center of town is the restaurant Chez Emie, where Nadia Fleurimé works as both a cook and a server. If you ask her about her daughter Narlie, she will smile, and ask you if you’d like to meet her—she’s playing in the yard at the side of the restaurant. They are together, and in the aftermath of the January 12 earthquake, this scene would have been hard to imagine.

Nadia was living in Port-au-Prince and running a quick errand when the earthquake struck. She rushed home to find Narlie seriously injured. Part of the house had fallen on her as she lay in bed. Family members were able to pull Narlie from the rubble, and she was taken to a hotel being used as an overflow hospital. After a few days she was taken to Haiti’s General Hospital. Nadia was with her daughter day and night.

Doctors soon realized they were ill-equipped to deal with the severity of Narlie’s wounds, which included a badly injured leg and a severe head injury that caused so much swelling only one of her eyes opened. Doctors told Nadia that Narlie would be transferred to the USSNS Comfort, an American ship docked off the coast of Haiti and operating as a hospital for the most severely injured, but that she wouldn’t be able to accompany her daughter.

Narlie was discharged from the Comfort three weeks later and placed in another hospital, where she continued to receive treatment—but her family believed she was still on the ship. The hospital had no information on Narlie’s family, so the center director called Heartland Alliance.

Heartland Alliance led the UNICEF-funded Family Tracing and Reunification Project, which worked to identify thousands of children separated from their families after the earthquake. Our child protection officers were able to get several key pieces of information from Narlie about her life: the name of her school and her teacher, the church her family attended. With this information, Heartland Alliance child protection officers were able to track down Nadia, who had left the capital to live with her cousin in Belladère, a town undamaged by the earthquake.

Nadia was overjoyed to finally learn news of her daughter. Narlie and Nadia were finally reunited on April 9, nearly three months after the earthquake. They received a reunification kit from Heartland Alliance with clothing and household items, and they returned to Belladère.

Narlie lost part of her right ear. She will need plastic surgery in the future, and she continues to walk with a pronounced limp. But she is alive today and has been reunited with her mother. For Narlie, as for many in Haiti, there is a long road to recovery ahead. Thanks to Heartland Alliance and our local partners, many children will face this road with their parents at their side.

Prince: From a New Land Emerges A New Leader

After 12 years in a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast, escaping Liberia’s brutal civil war, Prince and his family arrived in Chicago. Heartland Alliance found the family an apartment and helped ease the transition to the United States with job search assistance, classes in English for the workplace setting, and guidance with enrolling the kids in public school.

Prince joined a soccer league for refugee youth and began taking an after-school course through Heartland Alliance that provides tutoring, life skills, and addiction prevention education. With scarce opportunities for formal schooling while in the refugee camp, it took Prince about half a year to catch up, especially with English. Now an 8th grader, Prince is a solid student; an avid reader, he’s in the book club at school.

Impressed with Prince’s hard work and his attitude in the afterschool program, Heartland Alliance’s staff asked him to join the organization’s Youth Leadership Network, which promotes leadership skills among teenaged refugees. Participating in the Youth Leadership Network gives Prince a chance to learn how to acclimate to the United States without losing his cultural identity.

He says the program has helped him with decision-making—like avoiding fights—and given him new perspective on being a refugee and a leader. Someday, Prince hopes to be a voice in Chicago for refugees and immigrants from West Africa, promoting better policies for families who are beginning a new life in a new world. He’s already well on his way.

How You Can Help

Donate » Help Us End Poverty

Heartland Alliance—the leading anti-poverty organization in the Midwest— believes that all of us deserve the opportunity to improve our lives. Each year, we help ensure this opportunity for nearly one million people around the world who are homeless, living in poverty, or seeking safety.

Please consider making a donation today to help people like Prince escape poverty.

At 40 years old, Scott Olsezweski was living in a nursing home. Suffering from schizophrenia, he has also battled substance use and he says he’s been homeless many times. For three years in the nursing home, he spent his days trying to help others by attending to the needs of half a dozen elderly residents.

That changed a year ago, when Scott moved into his own apartment in Rogers Park. Through Heartland Alliance’s Money Follows the Person program, he’s one of nearly 100 formerly institutionalized nursing home patients who have a severe mental illness and now live on their own. Scott exercises every day, watches what he eats, and spends part of his days at a local coffee shop, talking politics and life with friends.

“I’ve had tough times in my life—bad days, bad weeks, and even bad years. Now I’m doing very, very well. I try not to take anything for granted, even just being able to walk to the store or do the dishes,” he says.

Participants in the program are given a subsidy to help pay rent and household expenses, and Heartland Alliance connects each person with a community mental health center that provides services like counseling and medicine management. Even with all this, because of the high cost of nursing home care, the program saves the government more than $40,000 a year per participant.

Money Follows the Person is a federal program running in 29 states to help nursing home residents live on their own; the Illinois Department of Human Services’ Division of Mental Health hired Heartland Alliance to create and operate a pilot program to specifically focus on residents with mental illness. Three Heartland Alliance teams work throughout Chicago, spending time with potential participants to see if the program is appropriate. “It’s such a good fit with our mission of human rights,” says Stephen Edfors, manager of clinical operations at Heartland Alliance.

“A lot of these folks don’t belong in a nursing home, but they just don’t have the financial support to get out,” Edfords says. “On the day of transition, they’re so excited and thrilled. When we check in with them after they’ve moved, there are a lot of hugs.”

“I don’t look at it as a place I’ve arrived at. I see it as a starting point,” Scott says carefully of his new life. “I have disabilities in certain areas, and I’ve learned to compensate in those areas. I feel like I’ve found a sanctuary where I can really think about what I want to do.”

Shannon: A New Job and a New Home for a Family of Four

Ask Shannon Redman what it’s like to be searching for employment on Chicago’s South Side these days, and the first thing he does is give a rueful small laugh that says as much as the words that follow: “It’s crazy looking for a job right now. It’s not easy.”

So Shannon couldn’t be happier to be at The Slab, a barbeque restaurant on 79th Street in Chatham. Since March, he has been working four days a week, cooking and cleaning, doing a bit of whatever needs to be done to keep the place running smoothly.  The Slab isn’t the only good news in his life these days. A single dad, he and his three teenage daughters were living “doubled up” at his mother’s apartment in Englewood, without enough money for a place of their own. Today they live in their own apartment, closer to the lake. “I love my new place, and my daughters love it as well,” Shannon says. “I love it here at the restaurant, too. It’s very family oriented. I like that I get to work with food and to work the grill. They’ve welcomed me with open arms.”

Both Shannon’s job and his new apartment were secured through Heartland Alliance’s program for Chicago Public School students and their families living doubled up in the Englewood neighborhood. The program, which has helped some 200 families, offers a wide range of services that work together to help families stabilize and succeed. “Our main goal is housing, but we also provide employment services and counseling support,” says David Fries, Heartland Alliance’s project manager. “We’ve heard from Chicago Public Schools that four out of five families that are homeless are doubled up, and so that’s what the services focus on,” Fries says. “We work closely with 12 schools in Englewood to work with students and their families who are in temporary living situations.”

For Shannon, the idea of finding a job, an apartment, and help with any other big issues all at once makes sense. “There’s so much negativity in being unemployed, not having a place to live, looking for a job,” he says. “Working with Heartland Alliance, now I feel like I have a lot of positive things in my life.” Tonya Trice, who owns The Slab with her husband James, says that Shannon fit in at the restaurant from the start. “We were busy and really needed help when he came,” she says. “For a small business like ours, it’s critical to have the right match with every employee. But Heartland Alliance heard what we needed and found someone who was just what we were looking for.” “With all this, it’s like I’m starting all over,” Shannon says. “It’s like a rebirth.”

How You Can Help

Donate » Help Us End Poverty

Heartland Alliance—the leading anti-poverty organization in the Midwest— believes that all of us deserve the opportunity to improve our lives. Each year, we help ensure this opportunity for nearly one million people around the world who are homeless, living in poverty, or seeking safety.

Please consider making a donation today to help others like Shannon.

Tiffany: A Working Mom Supporting Her Family

A chance to work, finally.

Since 2004, Tiffany Williams had been unsuccessful in finding steady employment. A single mother with limited work experience, she and her children were living in her sister’s apartment in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. When Put Illinois to Work came along, Tiffany signed up—hoping for a chance. Today she is working as an assistant cook at a barbeque restaurant, The Slab.

“I love it here. It’s like a family, and I like that between the catering and the cooking, there’s something new to do every day,” Tiffany says. “It feels great knowing I make my own money and can pay our bills. I love it.”

Part of the success of Put Illinois to Work was the local connection—subcontractors in each region finding the right employer match for each trainee worker’s circumstances. Tiffany Williams’ caseworker at Heartland Human Care Services knew her needs and skills and had built a relationship with the owners of The Slab. Put Illinois to Work helped families like Tiffany’s all across Illinois to get a foothold into the world of work and earn a regular paycheck.

“It’s given me a chance to be responsible and to be a great mom. I can show my kids that we can be independent.”

How You Can Help

Donate » Help Us End Poverty

Heartland Alliance—the leading anti-poverty organization in the Midwest— believes that all of us deserve the opportunity to improve our lives. Each year, we help ensure this opportunity for nearly one million people around the world who are homeless, living in poverty, or seeking safety.

Please consider making a donation today to help others like Tiffany.

 

For someone who hasn’t ever had much money, it can be difficult to begin the simple mechanics of saving. “It was a little overwhelming at first,” says Yolanda. “I was used to taking my money and doing with it what I needed to do that day.” Yolanda has had it tough. She was “semi-homeless” for a while and spent time in prison. Determined to turn her life around when she was released, she found a job at a Chicago museum. And she participated in one of Heartland Alliance’s asset-building courses, helping her set goals and adopt good financial habits to protect her new life from hard times. She says, “It put the confidence in me to say, ‘Hey, if other people can do this—work hard and make their money work for them—then I should be able to do this also.”

Watch Yolanda’s story below to learn more.