Hull House, a cross class settlement house, founded by Jane Addams, closes its doors in Chicago after 123 years, due to government funding cuts. Louise White in The Nation:
The great insight of the settlement movement was the power of social ties to realign the energies of prosperous people away from their class self-interests and towards efforts to support the reforms working people sought, which in Addams’s times included a livable wage and the eight-hour workday.Underlying that insight was the recognition that materially comfortable people often held dangerous misconceptions about working class people as undisciplined and without ambition and that working people held prejudices of their own about the selfishness and greed of the wealthier classes.
Why settle among the poor when your taxes (sorry, I mean "government investment") supposedly do the work for you? Obama's 99/1% rhetoric castigates a condition only reinforced by the sort of "Great Society" approach to government he seeks to defend.
Posted by: Keith Whitaker | January 30, 2012 at 07:51 AM
Spoken, Keith, from among the poor?
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | January 30, 2012 at 07:44 PM
I take a different lesson from the closing of Hull House. It may be that the organization made errors and was badly managed - but at the center of the problem was it's big heart - it simply helped TOO MANY PEOPLE. It got over-extended because thee NEED was great. That being said - how can we let it go AFTER we (the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago) have lavished hundreds of millions of public dollars on private firms who are already ROLLING IN CASH? I'm speaking about the tax breaks and direct public subsidies given to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Sears, United Airlines, Willis Insurance (who bought the Sears Tower), Grossinger's Auto and Mariano's Grocery. Chicago pundits screamed when Frango Mints were about to go away when Marshall Field's was bought by Macy's. Where is Jane's fighting spirit? where is her piercing intellect and willingness to speak truth to power? Where is her creative and yet grounded ability to pull off events, classes and programs that combined the arts, education and togetherness? And what about the institutions that use her name to sell their own services? Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois. Jane Adams Hull House Museum. Jane Addams Senior Caucus. Where are they in this fight?
This is a sad day for Chicago. America continues to bail out the 1% Illinois and Chicago showers the wealthy with public dollars. Those who fight for the 99% can take a hike.
Posted by: iPhone Application Developer | January 31, 2012 at 11:49 PM
Thank you for the deep and thoughtful comment. We have another gilded age, but our Jane Addams has yet to emerge. I imagine she went to biz school, and has simply been delayed a few years as she masters metrics and accountability. Then she will get cost effective results and all will be well.
Posted by: phil | February 01, 2012 at 08:58 AM
A well traveled African proverb from the rich treasury of the African American experience informs us that “It takes a whole village to raise a child”. In times past the persecuted black community in the U.S. drew from our African forbears a system of extended family and close community ties that acted as our safety net and support system long before Jane Addams and her supporters invented the concept of social work. Slavery, American apartheid, and overt oppression couldn't tear it apart. Here in the 21st century we find that village on life support, if not in catastrophic failure. Re-gentrification and stratification of urban Black culture has produced alienation, lack of opportunities and a seemingly permanent black underclass. The result has been urban violence. drugs and a community preying on itself. This hopelessness and frustration in Chicago drove one local pastor in our Parkway section of the Lawndale community to garner national headlines and support by camping out in the winter, in a tent on the roof of a dilapidated former motel. He did this to raise funds to purchase the land, raze the structure and begin further fund raising [some $15 million worth] to build a community resource center. Hollywood mogul Tyler Perry and an anonymous donor heard about it and gave $98,000 and $85,000 to this work respectively.
Lost in the wake of this feel good story, a place known to all in the community [but less known outside] the Hull House Parkway Community Center ceased 75 years of uninterrupted vital community service due to the Jane Addams Hull House bankruptcy. This place was an urban oasis and was providing vital community services like Head Start, after school, adult literacy and children s' and youth athletic and cultural enrichment programs. It was a safe place for children to go and play and learn. We await a new community center in a violence ravaged community, while a useful building with classrooms, a gymnasium, kitchen and a theater stands vacant.
As a youth pastor in a small store front church located just next door to the center, I often donated and volunteered for many of the programs. This was wise, as we were serving many of the same families.
As far as seeing again what was before, we all realize that that ship has sailed. Publicly available bankruptcy papers from... :)
Posted by: iPhone App Developer | September 25, 2012 at 06:50 AM
The trends we now see as irreversible and almost like a force of nature we once only a dream among a cohort of specific funders and thinkers in time of LBJ. They wanted their country back, figured out to advance that agenda, and now we awaken too late. Yet, we can learn from them the lesson of a "saving remnant" who testify to what we know is right, whether in fashion or out.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | September 25, 2012 at 04:11 PM