Programs, groups, campaigns
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Housing
Our housing-justice program organizes the Chicago Tenants Council, a group of tenant associations including those of the Grove Parc, the Burnham, Park Shore East, and Island Terrace complexes.
The program works with tenants in market-rate, multi-family, and subsidized housing to secure their homes’ quality and affordability, and to build the movement for the human right to housing.
The program organizes Community Benefits Agreement campaign around the Obama Center: ObamaCBA.org. Also the program organizes as a founding member of the Tenant Union Federation of tenant-union organizations across the country.
We are also building an environmental-justice group to fight gentrification and environmental threats around the proposed quantum facility in South Chicago.
Health
Our health-justice program organizes people directly impacted by the need for free public mental health care, as well as clinicians and allies. We want City-run mental-health clinics, public infrastructure to care for people, and a human right to health care.
We co-lead the Collaborative for Community Wellness, a city-wide coalition. The Collaborative’s main effort is the Treatment Not Trauma campaign, which fights to open more public clinics, make the city’s clinics more accountable to residents, and get the City to respond to mental-health crisis calls with clinicians instead of police.
The campaign builds on our Mental Health Movement coalition, which fought the closure of City clinics like the Woodlawn Mental-Health Center.
Youth
Our youth-justice program organizes middle-school students and parents at South Shore’s Parkside Elementary School, as well as students at Woodlawn’s Hyde Park Academy High School.
The program meets weekly during the school year. And it meets for five weeks during the summer for more intensive training.
Students have in recent years chosen to organize with the campaign for a Community Benefits Agreement around the Obama Center, which will be built across from Hyde Park Academy. And they have chosen to organize a campaign that won removal of all Chicago Public Schools-based police in favor of community-based approaches like restorative justice.
In addition to organizing, the program does restorative justice at Hyde Park Academy, for instance, establishing the school’s Peace Room.
