COMMUNITY VOICES: A Q&A from UChicago Medicine,
Christa Hamilton is CEO and Executive Director of Centers for New Horizons. Cleophus Lee is the organization’s Director of Violence Prevention and Intervention. Dwan Holder is its Crisis Interventionist Outreach Worker.
Q: Tell me about Centers for New Horizons. Hamilton: We’re a 50-year-old non-profit social service organization headquartered in Bronzeville. However, we’ve expanded our service area over the years into other communities that are food deserts, that lack access to quality healthcare, and that have the highest rates of unemployment and violence. Those communities include Englewood, Austin, Riverdale and the Near West Side. I’m from Englewood; that’s where some of my family still resides.
We serve nearly 6,000 families each year under five pillars of programming: early childhood education, youth development, adult and family services, workforce development, and services for older adults. Each year, we provide job and training opportunities to about 600 people.
This interview was conducted by independent health writer Deborah Shelton on behalf of UChicago Medicine. Neither the Tribune newsroom nor the Editorial Board was involved in producing the content.
Q: How does violence impact the communities you serve? Lee:
Exposure to violence is traumatic and negatively impacts people’s lives in many ways. They experience depression, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorders. We see higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic pain, anxiety and stress. Violence damages young people’s development — their academic functioning, coping skills and relationships. When we see certain behaviors and actions by our young people, we have to understand why it’s happening, which will lead us to ways to resolve these issues.
Q: How do you tackle a problem that has such a huge impact on community health? And how do those efforts contribute to health equity? Lee:
Number one, we address mental health. We connect people to a clinician — for group or individual counseling — to help them address the trauma that they’ve faced. Trauma-informed care helps us understand why a person responds the way they do based on their past.
Economics plays a big role in violence as well. We help people develop the skills necessary for gainful employment. We also partner with the Chicago Police Department in a new program called custom notification. The Police Department identifies high-risk individuals in the community, whether they have committed a crime or are at risk of being a victim. We go out with
CPD and connect with these individuals, which gives us a direct pipeline to find individuals who need services. Hamilton: We have a mission to rebuild the community and to help individuals become self-reliant, which means we need to respond to the needs of our community. If you watch or read the news, you know violence is on the upswing. So, we decided to take a bolder approach, which is why last year we created the violence prevention and intervention department. People seeking our services have been victims of violence, maybe even perpetrators of violence, and we did not have the tools to address it.
With a generous grant from the University of Chicago Medicine’s BHC Collaborative for Family Resilience, we were able to launch this work. It was our starting point. Now we’ve acquired money from other funders to expand it. We started with one person doing all of our street outreach. Now we’re up to four or five employees. We engage community members as advisers. We use data to analyze and figure out what we need to prioritize.
My nephew was killed by gun violence when he was 21 years old, several blocks away from his home in Englewood. So, I understand very deeply what this means for our communities.
Holder: I lost three brothers to violence. I’m from the community, and I’ve used services at Centers for New Horizons. Going to counseling there helped me, and now I’m a part of the mission as a violence outreach worker.
Q: Dwan, you were the Center’s first outreach worker who Christa just mentioned. What does your job involve? Holder:
It’s been hard, obviously, doing street outreach due to COVID-19 restrictions. Normally, I go to community centers, the park district or places where young people hang out, and I’ll start my one-on-one there. I’ll stop at neighborhood stores and talk to the owners. I’ll get a lot of information about the guys who are hanging around. I usually already know the services they need. I’ll ask them: Are you ready to get your GED today? Are you ready for job training? What are you ready for today? I use relentless engagement. Sometimes it’s stressful, but the satisfaction of reaching even one person makes it really rewarding.
Hamilton: We’re looking for the people who are not looking for us, which makes our job more difficult. We have to build a level of trust. And that’s Dwan’s job. He’s credible. He’s relatable. When you’re talking to individuals who don’t typically seek out this type of support, you have to have credible messengers. It’s not a 9-to-5 job. It’s 24 hours a day. Whenever Dwan gets that call, he has to be able to respond because it may be the moment that person is willing to engage. We can’t miss that moment.
Q: What role does resilience play in trauma and violence recovery?
Hamilton: People who come to us have had adverse experiences in their lives — tragedy, significant stress, health problems, relationship and financial problems. But they are resilient. They still can have positive outcomes in their lives. Hopefully, we can change the trajectory of their lives, now and for future generations. We’re helping people to thrive, not just survive.
We had a man in our jobs program with seven bullets in his body from three different occurrences. And he was expected to go to work each day. Imagine the level of trauma you must have walking around with seven bullets in your body. People have had to normalize these things to keep living. But it’s not normal. So, we’re getting people into counseling so they can process what happened and be a better, whole person. That’s what we’ve been trying to do with our program, help people so they can be better off in the future.
There’s a narrative that Black people don’t want therapy, that we won’t go even if we have access to it. That’s not true. Our clinicians are booked solid. Black people are concerned about their mental wellness. When they have exposure to therapy, they take advantage of it. And that makes me hopeful. That’s why I do the work that I do. My role is to create opportunities for people that they may not have otherwise.
I’m always excited to hear success stories from my staff because that’s one more person we’ve touched. I multiply that times four, because they’re taking those skills and becoming ambassadors in the community. Once you give them the skills, they start to change their lives, the light bulb goes off for them. That always makes me extremely excited about the work that we’re doing.
Q: How has COVID-19 affected what you do? Hamilton:
We had to shut down in-person services because of COVID-19 on March 23, 2020. As you can imagine, many families that we work with were not prepared for a virtual world. We purchased cell phones and Chromebooks so we could stay in contact with them. Now, for us, it’s not just about hosting afterschool programs and group sessions. It’s about getting people food. It’s about getting them PPE. It’s about giving them a safe place to live. Many of our families are homeless, meaning a friend or relative has to let them sleep at their house at night. If there is COVID-19 in the home, not everybody can quarantine. Those are things we have to focus on: how to keep families safe and fed. And we’ve had to put some things on the backburner that we that we normally make a priority.
Q: How would you describe the residents of the communities you serve? Lee:
They want to be able to feed their family. They want to be able to pay their bills on time. They want to be able to save money. They want to be able to retire when the time comes and live a comfortable life. They don’t want to be involved in violence or criminal activity. Some individuals find themselves in a place of doing what they feel is necessary to survive. But that’s not what they want. The people we serve want to have a good life just like everybody else.
The wide-ranging federal criminal corruption investigation rolling through Chicago and Springfield had to begin somewhere.
And it’s so Illinois and it is so Chicago that it would begin with Viagra. It was given to a Chicago alderman who liked to visit a massage parlor at Milwaukee and Division. But he didn’t know the FBI was watching.
“What kind of women do they got there?” asked then-Ald. Danny Solis, aka Ald. Viagra, according to federal documents at the beginning of the probe.
“Asian,” said the political consultant, wise in the ways of City Hall, and who spent years anticipating what politicians seek.
“Oh good! Good, good, good,” Ald. Viagra said. “I like Asian.”
What began with Viagra has upended the political order in the corrupt city of Chicago and the corrupt state of Illinois with many indictments of big and little fish. The big white tuna hunted by the feds is Boss Madigan. He has not been charged or indicted with any crime and insists he has done nothing illegal.
But he has been stripped of the post of Illinois House speaker that he held in his pink iron fist for decades, and he relinquished his chairmanship of the Democratic Party of Illinois and his House seat.
So how did it start? We presume when Solis was confronted with his own alleged misdeeds that included possible bribery, fraud and those recordings of him musing about Viagra and massage parlors. So he flipped and wore a wire. He got on that big federal bus and others soon followed.
I assume that Ald. Viagra talked on his phone with friends and allies, including former congressman Luis Gutierrez and former Mayor Rahm Emanuel. I wonder how many times. In those thousands of phone calls, it would be reasonable to think Rahm and Luis might be on one or two phone calls, not that there’s anything illegal about talking to close friends.
So Viagra isn’t illegal. Yet who brought it?
Roberto Caldero, a former close political aide to Gutierrez when Luis was alderman of the 26th Ward. That’s how I remember Caldero when I covered City Hall. He was a Luis guy.
Caldero was recently indicted on a charge of allegedly steering a large Chicago Public Schools contract to a Cleveland company in exchange for donations to his friend Solis while Solis was cooperating with the feds. Caldero was also indicted on a charge of allegedly offering $100,000 in bribes to Solis from a suburban business owner to rename a street and park after his father and grandfather.
“Danny Solis was a friend of mine for 40 years,” Caldero told Tribune reporter Jason Meisner. “If he asked me for something, I would try to do it for him. I attended every fundraiser he ever held. I raised $100,000 to $200,000 for him. None of that was a bribe.”
Caldero likened the federal allegations against him to “the guy passing a bad check getting indicted while the bank robbers are robbing the vault.”
The government had its say. And it’s only fair for Caldero to have his say too.
But it’s got to frost him that Solis was helping the feds build a case on him after he brought the Viagra.
I called two legendary City Hall reporters with whom I worked years ago to see if I remembered correctly that Caldero started out with Gutierrez.
“Caldero was a Luis guy at the beginning. He was always around Luis,” said Fran Spielman, of the Chicago Sun-Times, who knows them all.
“He was with Luis, one of those hungry aldermanic aides,” said WLS-AM 890 reporter Bill Cameron, dean of the City Hall press room.
“The good ones anticipate their alderman’s needs,” Cameron said, “and maybe along the way they learn how to pick an apple from the bushel.”
That’s how I remember him, in flashy suits, hair product, sometimes a gold tie pin. Unlike many other aides, he was confident and unafraid of reporters.
And he was always a Luis guy before he transferred allegiance to Solis, and no different from dozens of others I knew. Adept apprentices eager to learn the game. The smart aides keep their mouths shut and watched the old masters at work in Chicago, now considered the most corrupt city in America.
Who disputes that it is? At bottom, corruption is the theft of honest government service from the people. But the people of Illinois must like it and paying a corruption tax because they vote the same types in year after year.
And those who don’t like paying? They leave.
Political corruption is proportional to the mountains of government regulations that the political class cement into law. Business owners know they must find the right Sherpa to guide them through those dangerous mountains or they could fall off a cliff.
Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, was believed to be untouchable once. But he’s been indicted on a charge of leveraging a permit for a Southwest Side eatery to get business at his law firm. It wasn’t a Michelin star restaurant or steakhouse in the Viagra Triangle. It was just a Burger King in a working-class neighborhood.
In a corrupt political system, taking care of the ruling pasha is a must if you wish to do business. In Arabic, it’s called “baksheesh,” but it has many names in many languages.
And it comes in many forms. Sometimes it comes as a blue pill.