What we’ve learned that will help us lift our next generation
Last year at this time, Autry Phillips was angry. The head of one of the city’s biggest street outreach programs, Target Area Development Corp., Phillips was frustrated by how many young men were not taking the new coronavirus seriously, how many defied Chicago’s just-imposed stay-at-home order, how few wore masks. Their attitude?
“They say, ‘I’m going to die anyway,’ ” Phillips told us then, “and they tell me, ‘I don’t even expect to reach 25.’ ”
His job, he said, was to give these young men hope.
A year later, we know a lot more about COVID-19 — that it generally has spared younger people, for example. So the young men under Phillips’ watch weren’t likely to be among the more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. from virus, but they’ve felt the impact of this pandemic nevertheless.
About 75% of Chicago’s more than 5,000 COVID-19 deaths have been among people of color — parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Unemployment spiked last spring as the economy shut down. Schools sent kids home to fend for themselves in “remote learning.”
Thousands of teens and young adults have pushed through the challenges of the past year in heroic fashion, but thousands more are struggling.
Nacole Milbrook tells us the counselors at Youth Guidance, where she is chief program officer, are seeing signs of the kind of trauma that often comes after a natural disaster. The students they work with have experienced deaths among their family and friends, their school routines were upended, and they have anxiety about people close to them getting sick or losing their jobs. In neighborhoods where gun violence and gang influence is prevalent, this type of trauma is well documented.
“These kids, being at certain levels of childhood development,” she said, “it all affects their trajectory.”
At the start of 2020, we launched our “Chicago Forward: Young Lives in the Balance” community initiative to reach the Chicago area’s most vulnerable youth — the 16- to 24-year-olds trying to stay in school or stay employed (often both) and stay on track toward a prosperous and healthy life.
The challenges for too many young people often seemed insurmountable even before the pandemic — poverty, family strife, a lack of career-track jobs, the troubling influence of gangs, drugs and guns in our neighborhoods.
Toss in a global public health emergency, a paused economy, a summer of civil unrest and soaring violent crime, and for many, the future just became even more precarious.
Yet, at every tragic turn, there also have been reasons to be encouraged. Youth-focused programs across the city have adjusted, adapted and innovated to reach the communities they serve where they are now — mostly at home or in their neighborhoods.
Consider Youth Guidance, a national youth-support organization that operates within more than 150 Chicago schools. When the pandemic hit, the group’s main point of student contact, the classrooms, disappeared. Afraid they’d lose touch, Youth Guidance conducted a needs survey of more than 1,300 Chicago students. More than 800, or 61%, tagged “difficulty staying engaged in remote learning” as a “COVID-related need” — at least 20 percentage points higher than other issues, such as anxiety (25%), food/groceries for the family (39%), access to a home computer (40%) and employment for parents (26%).
Youth Guidance’s counselors started interacting individually more often, and they’ve shifted to a more holistic approach to working with students — considering life issues beyond the school walls.
They’ve upped their technology game too, Milbrook said, trading the standard squareboxes Zoom interface for bitmoji rooms where kids and counselors can gather and interact through virtual avatars. (Take note, bosses, the work-from-home crowd might like this too.)
Meanwhile, Chicago’s street outreach
groups are facing other challenges.
When we talked to Autry Phillips a year ago, he and the TADC outreach team were just getting a handle on how the pandemic would play out on the streets. Pointing to the city’s stay-athome order and telling kids to “go home” didn’t work. For a kid living with three generations in a two-bedroom apartment, staying home is unrealistic. But without school, sports or other programs to keep them occupied in a safe environment, they’re vulnerable to the streets.
Suddenly, homicides rise. Carjackings soar.
So Phillips’ team gets out and meets them there, on the street corners, building relationships and trust, trying to supplant bad influences and serving a role separate from that of the police. He believes Chicago’s violent summer would’ve been far worse without outreach teams like his on the streets. That’s hard to measure, but we believe the teams are essential if Chicago wants to reduce violence and make all of its neighborhoods safe.
A year ago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot awarded $6 million to support 11 street outreach programs, including TADC. Phillips’ group is using the money to improve the quality of training for their street teams, rather than increase “boots on the ground.”
Lightfoot allocated an additional $1.5 million to six groups that work with the type of childhood trauma that Milbrook spoke of and is now also part of living through this pandemic.
Much more is needed. As a Tribune news story noted in October, “The city’s spending for these alternate approaches to violence is less than 1% of the city’s share of the Police Department budget this year — which is about $1.7 billion.”
When we launched our Chicago Forward initiative, we told you that in 2019 about 47,000
Chicagoans ages 16 to 24 were neither in school nor working. It’s a staggering statistic. We noted that each disconnected young person costs society about $37,000 a year, or $900,000 over his or her lifetime, in lost earnings, lower economic growth, lower tax revenues and higher government spending — and that it totals nearly $2 billion a year for Chicago.
We had no idea what 2020 was about to deliver. The crises of this past year have thrown new focus on long-simmering problems in the city, including the decades of neglect of some of our South and West side neighborhoods. Lightfoot is chipping away at that too, with her $750 million Invest South/ West initiative.
But, as we’ve repeated throughout our Chicago Forward series, government can’t be the only solution. Chicago’s business titans and civic leaders have long played a vital role in moving our city forward and lifting the next generation of leaders, and they must keep it up.
Investment in all of our neighborhoods is crucial, whether it’s through job creation or support of the many organizations we’ve highlighted in this series.
That rising generation is watching, and they do listen. Even on the toughest street corners.
Autry Phillips sees it. The young men in Chatham, Auburn Gresham and Englewood are wearing masks now, he says, even if it’s not consistent. The guys might still feel invincible, but they want to keep their families healthy. The next goal? Vaccinations. “They might not want it, but they’ll tell their grandma to get it,” he said. “It gets frustrating, but it’s worth the frustration because of the lives we’re saving.”
Trust. Relationships. Investment. This is how we move Chicago forward.