The Concept
Challenges &
Opportunities for South Side Partnership
(A position paper, February, 1999)
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(Note: Rebuilding Bronzeville through Collaborative Action was written by the Southside Partnership in February, 1999, as working document and position paper for future action. The three key elements: education, jobs and housing, have become the focal points of an intense planning process expected to yield new action plans for the development of Bronzeville in the new century.)
Purposes
The South Side Partnership was organized in 1989 to bring together institutions in and outside of Bronzeville who could create, with residents, a collective vision for the community and carry out plans emanating from that vision. Before the South Side Partnership existed, Bronzeville had no indigenous planning infrastructure.
Members
South Side Partners include Bank One/First Chicago, Centers For New Horizons, Chicago Urban League, Elliott Donnelley Center, Gap Community organization, Grand Boulevard Federation, Illinois Institute of Technology, Lugenia Burns Hope Center, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mercy Hospital, Mid-South Planning and Development.
Commission, Partners In Community Development, Michael Reese Hospital, and STRIVE/Chicago Employment Services.
For the detailed list of South-Side Partners, click here.
Accomplishments
Current Priorities
Making home ownership more affordable to more families, and assuring quality
affordable housing for public housing. residents.
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Rebuilding Bronzeville
(Note: Rebuilding Bronzeville through Collaborative Action was written by the Southside Partnership in February, 1999, as working document and position paper for future action. The three key elements: education, jobs and housing, have become the focal points of an intense planning process expected to yield new action plans for the development of Bronzeville in the new century.)
Brief Introduction: Purpose of partnership, Current members, History
[ Top ][ The Concept ]
Purpose of Paper
This paper examines briefly where we've come and where we might go in facilitating the achievement of the community's vision for its development. This vision, articulated in Restoring Bronzeville, is of a vibrant, mixed-income African American community with plentiful jobs, affordable housing, top quality schools, accessible health and human services, well-maintained parks and public spaces, and safe streets. Economic development and public welfare and housing policies are combining forces to produce rapid changes in Bronzeville. These forces create new hope for realizing the community's vision, but they also create new fears that many families will be left out of the process. These forces also create new challenges and new opportunities for the South Side Partnership.
Purpose of the Partnership
The purpose of the South Side Partnership is to pull together relevant institutions, both Bronzeville-based and ones exogenous to our community, who are committed and willing to join with indigenous families to ensure healthy residents, sustainable economic development, new and renewed housing, excellent education, and full employment.
Since 1993, the Partnership has maintained accountability to the residents of Bronzeville through focused implementation of the Mid-South Plan. This Plan was created through the input of thousands of Bronzeville residents. The Mid-South Plan is currently being upgraded and will remain the tool through which the South Side Partnership will guide its activities. Many partners also conduct regular surveys to continually stay attune to the concerns of the residents.
Current Members
South Side Partners include Bank One/First Chicago, Centers For New Horizons, the Chicago Urban League, the Elliott Donnelley Center of Chicago Youth Centers, the Gap Community Organization, the Grand Boulevard Federation, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Lugenia Burns Hope Center, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mercy Hospital, the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission, Partners In Community Development, Michael Reese Hospital, and STRIVE/Chicago Employment Services.
For the detailed list of South-Side Partners, click here.
History of the South Side Partnership
The South Side Partnership was created in 1989, when local institutional leaders and First National Bank (now Bank One) recognized the promise of working together, with residents, to identify key opportunities for community reinvestment. At that time, Bronzeville had no indigenous planning infrastructure. Consequently, the community was vulnerable to being defined from without, and it lacked an articulated vision and a constituency in back of that vision to resist disinvestment.
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Accomplishments to date of the South Side
Partnership
Conceived the idea of involving residents and local businesses
and institutions in creating their own plan for their community's development, and brought
planning professionals and local people together to create and produce Restoring
Bronzeville.
Created an organization, the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission, to become an institutionalized force in implementing and renewing the Mid-South Plan, Restoring Bronzeville.
- the CHESS tutoring and scholarship program,
- a teller training program within Wendell Phillips High School Academy,
- Hire the Future, and
- "Introduction to Business" course
- the siting of the police headquarters here,
- restoring the Armory,
- preserving the Overton Building and Unity Hall, and
- securing capital improvements at Wendell Phillips High School Academy, including a campus connecting Phillips and Mayo School.
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Major issues facing Bronzeville today
A brief summary. Bronzeville is becoming a "hot" community, with private development activity everywhere and significant new public investment, exemplified by but not limited to the new Police Headquarters. At the same time, thousands of our residents are not participating in the booming economy, their welfare "clocks" are running out, and the roofs over their heads are about to come down.
Affordable housing
Challenges: Ten years ago the key housing challenge was to figure out how to attract middle income people into the community. We've done it! The two critical challenges now are:
- to make home ownership more affordable to lower income families, and
- to work with public housing residents to protect their housing, if it is protectable, and to build or rehab replacement housing for them if it is not.
Opportunities: The South Side Partnership is well-positioned to:
- provide cutting-edge thinking and programs to make homeownership more reachable for more families, even those earning under$20,000: strategies would include new finance mechanisms, new homeownership planning/preparation ideas, as well as new constructiontechnologies; and
- through its relational power, to press for more enlightened public housing policy and management, including honoring the Mayor's commitment to provide one for-one replacement rental and home ownership housing for displaced residents.
Public schools
Challenges: Despite the passage of the School Reform act, despite thefrequently-progressive new leadership in Chicago Public Schools, despite reconstitution and new leadership at Phillips, and despite the hard workof the Partnership, the performance of the public schools in Bronzeville remains abysmal, dragging down the overall development of the community and unconscionably limiting the futures of our young people.
Opportunities: There are schools around the country in communities like Bronzeville that work. These schools are generally characterized by:
- an organizational culture that is open to change and willing to look at outcomes
- creative and committed teachers
- the active involvement of parents in the school and in supporting their children's achievement at home
- strong partnerships with the community, and
- effective leadership. The South Side Partnership can become a far more powerful and effective force in creating effective schools: we can lend management expertise, curricular direction (to prepare young people for careers in the corporate, healthcare, and nonprofit sectors), programs for improved school-community linkages, and strategic guidance in organizing and public policy change.
Economic development
Challenges: Although housing and public works developments are progressing nicely, commercial development languishes in Bronzeville. We need to build a local economy that:
- Provides the basic amenities to working families that make a community attractive -- grocery stores, chain drug stores, healthy take-out food, etc.; and
- Create jobs that connect Bronzeville to economic development engines in the broader economy (such as businesses that supply the convention & hospitality industries).
Opportunities: The South Side Partnership should be connected regionally to the work of the Metropolitan Planning Council, and nationwide, to that of the Initiative for the Competitive Advantage of the Inner City. The intended benefits of the Partners' work would be to leverage commercial investment into the community.
Workforce development
Challenges: Despite a booming economy, more people are leaving welfare for lack of compliance with rules than are leaving welfare for work. Further, despite the great work of STRIVE, PICD, Tolton Educational Services, the Grand Boulevard Federation, new public programs like the IETC and Quantum Opportunities, and Centers For New Horizon's Kazi program, the community's collective capacity to provide workplace literacy, skills training, job placement assistance, and post placement support remains weak.
Opportunities:
- STRIVE's partnerships with American Airlines and healthcare providers, the Federation's with UPS, and FirstIBankOne's teller training program have shown us the promise of workforce development strategies that are a collaborative partnership between a corporate and a nonprofit partner. The opportunities for new and expanded partnerships with and among Partners are tremendous.
- The South Side Partnership's success with the McCormick Place hiring agreement also suggests tremendous opportunity in linking economic development and workforce development strategies, assuring local hiring and career path development in jobs created in the local economy and through linkages with the regional economy.
Health
Challenges: Bronzeville residents suffer high rates of morbidity and mortality. Despite the advent of several new health care and health prevention programs in the community, persistent problems remain in accessing information about how to stay healthy, accessing basic goods and services (like fresh produce and fitness classes) that support good health, gaining safe and drug-free public spaces, removing environmental toxins, and accessing health care. Particularly troubling has been a rapid increase in childhood asthma, the combined product, we now know, of stress and environmental hazards.
Opportunities: The South Side Partnership is well-positioned to tackle community health problems in creative ways, by combining its overall planning and policy expertise with that of both its healthcare and workforce development partners.
Children and Youth
Challenges: The quality of life of Bronzeville's children is greatly compromised by unsafe streets, dirty and poorly appointed parks and recreation spaces, poor schools, inadequate housing, serious environmental threats to their health, overwhelmed parents, and too-few supportive programs. The failure of our community to educate and nurture our children now seriously limits their futures.
Opportunities: We've already covered housing, schools, income security through work, and health. An additional, powerful, but misdirected resource in investing in the community's efforts to better support the healthy development of children and families is the State. State spending for children and youth remains focused at the "deep end", at treating a relatively few deeply-damaged children. The Partnership has the collective capacity to prototype and advocate for a redirection of the State's investment in children and families, to focus resources on their healthy development.
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Membership
The South Side Partnership has been, intentionally, small, to enable each partner to contribute fully and freely to the development of ideas, strategies, and projects. The opportunities before us suggest that the time has come to revisit our membership structure and enlarge it. Several important new indigenous organizations have come on the scene that are players in the redevelopment of Bronzeville; to exclude them from the South Side Partnership diminishes our credibility and our creative potential. Moreover, the scale of reinvestment needed to meet these challenges suggests a membership presence of exogenous organizations beyond BankOne and the MacArthur Foundation.
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Last Updated on October 10th, 1999