2016 – Smart Chicago

Listen In: The First Episode of Smart Health Center Podcast, “Chicago Food Justice” Is Live!

Chris WalkerJanuary 11, 2016

Smart Health Navigator and Chicago Health Corps member, Anne Lin, debuted the first episode of her podcast “Chicago Food Justice” today entitled “Teaser”. It is described as follows:

Chicago Food Justice is a monthly podcast series which explores the various ways in which Chicagoans are working to increase access, affordability, and sovereignty over healthy food. Tune in!

As an added bonus, it also features two of our other Smart Health Navigators, Bendarius King and Akya Gossit.

Tune in here:

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Check out the whole Smart Health Centers Podcast Playlist here:

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Suzy Connor on the Future of Arts Infusion Initiative

Suzy ConnorJanuary 11, 2016

It’s intriguing to see how intuitively Dan O’Neil dives into the 5-year evaluation by the Urban Institute to outline the confluence of circumstances that too many of our teens have come to accept as normal – poverty, danger, and insecurity. The research documents systems that are broken; communities that are in decline; social problems that remain intractable even after generations of “reform”.

But for me and for the 48 teaching artists who are the life-blood of the Arts Infusion Initiative, the data also has names and faces full of hope and promise. Our faith in and respect for these irreplaceable young people is unshakable; for some of them, that is unprecedented. The arts are not part of The System; they are not an “intervention” designed to fix something about them that is broken. The right to express themselves, to nurture the talent within, and to translate their passion into a career is as fundamental as their right to safety, to a good public education – and often just as illusive.

Access to high-end equipment, instruction, and role models in arts and digital media, is common in high-performing schools and high-income communities, but most teens at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center report that they were exposed to these opportunities for the first time while incarcerated through the Chicago Community Trust funded Arts Infusion programs. The recent evaluation documents the broad appeal and sustainable impact that these arts and media offerings have on a population that is known for voting with their feet.

In upcoming posts, we will be examining the implications of the report for both the arts and tech sectors.

New Expunge.io Video

Sonja MarzianoJanuary 8, 2016

We recently worked with the Mikva Challenge Juvenile Justice Council to create a video about Expunge.io and why expungement matters.

We did this as part of our Expunge.io work, which is to increase public awareness, support the work of institutions, and document the juvenile expungement application process.

This is a youth-led project, and it was important that our outreach, and this video, is also youth-led. Therefore, this the JJC’s direction that they created from the prompt: “If you had only a minute to tell someone about Expunge.io and why expungement matters, what would you say? What would you tell them to get them to visit Expunge.io and kick off the process of getting their records expunged.”

Here are a couple of quotes from the video:

There’s no reason you or any of your friends should be struggling to get a job or go to school.

Really bright and ambitious kids get into trouble in their youth and that says nothing about who they are as a person.

Expunge.io is important to me because it gives children who have been in the juvenile system a second chance, without letting other people know that this is their second chance making it.

The youth from this video all are part of the Mikva Challenge JJC.

This video was created by Kamal Williams (a Youth-led tech instructors from last summer!).

We are members of Literacenter, and filmed this video in their space.

Arts Infusion Evaluation: Research on The Crushing Effects of Poverty

Smart ChicagoJanuary 8, 2016

As I wrote earlier this week, Suzy Connor, former senior program officer for arts and culture at The Chicago Community Trust, has joined Smart Chicago as a consultant working on a series of projects focused on arts, education, and justice.

In this context, we’re also taking on the Arts Infusion program, which Suzy has led for the last six years.The Urban Institute recently completed a comprehensive evaluation of this program: Arts Infusion Initiative, 2010–15: Evaluation Report. We are serializing some of the findings of this report that resonate with our work.

First up is a look at some of the research that is cited in the report to highlight the crushing effects of poverty, especially on neighborhoods in Chicago’s south and west sides. here are a number of the passages from the report— and links to the underlying research.

The neighborhoods served by Arts Infusion programs each have their own distinct communities and histories, yet they all reflect disturbing national trends that disproportionately affect communities of color, such as high unemployment, a high crime rate, segregation, social disenfranchisement, and poverty (Coates 2014; Moser 2014; Sampson and Wilson 1995).

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More recently, changes in the landscape of public housing have also affected neighborhood dynamics and the lives of youth. In the 1990s, mid- and high-rise public housing complexes concentrated in the south and west sides of Chicago came to be viewed as the epicenter of the city’s problems, and public officials moved to demolish the buildings over the course of several years. The decision to tear down those properties was accompanied by a promise to improve the lives of residents, cut crime, and provide housing vouchers into mixed- income communities (Newman 2015; Eads and Salinas 2014; Crump 2002).

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The recession also had direct and indirect effects on neighborhood stability and housing, as housing values fell across the city and sales prices fell even more steeply (Chicago Rehab Network 2011). The housing crash was felt particularly acutely in Chicago’s south and west sides: for example, by the end of 2010, one in six properties in Back of the Yards was vacant as residents abandoned their homes after falling victim to predatory lending for home equity loans (Gallun and Maidenberg 2013; Rugh and Massey 2010). The growing number of abandoned buildings in those Chicago neighborhoods further weakened their property value and contributed to social disorder (Wallace and Schalliol 2015; Chicago Rehab Network 2011).

The full citations for those links are below, but I want to call out a number of observations:

The evidence of systematic racism and deprivation in our city is immense, astounding, and recent. This provides a setting for our work
The number and quality of current and former Chicago-based thinkers, developers, writers and researchers in the field is heartening. These are the people with whom we toil. I’m thinking specifically of people cited here like Whet Moser, David Schalliol, David Eads, and the Chicago Rehab Network
As we continue with the Arts Infusion project, pulling together the teaching artists who work directly with young people on careers in the arts, we have to see the work in the context of justice

More to come!

David Schalliol shooting an image in his Isolated Building Studies series

Coates, T. (2014). This town needs a better class of racist. The Atlantic. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/

Moser, W. (2014). Housing discrimination in America was perfected in Chicago. Chicago Mag. Available at http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/May-2014/The-Long-Shadow-of-Housing-Discrimination-in-Chicago/

Farmer, S. (2011). Uneven public transportation development in neoliberalizing Chicago, USA. Environment and Planning A, 43, 1154-1172. Available at http://blogs.roosevelt.edu/sfarmer/files/2013/02/Environmnet-and- Planning-final-version.pdf

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Newman, J. (2015, March 13). Dismantling the towers. Chicago Reporter. Available at http://chicagoreporter.com/dismantling-the-towers/

Eads, D., and Salinas, H. (2014). Demolished: The end of Chicago’s public housing. National Public Radio. Available at http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/publichousing/.

Crump, J. (2002), Deconcentration by demolition: public housing, poverty, and urban policy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20(5): 581 – 596. Available at http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=d306.

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Chicago Rehab Network. (2011). Building Our Future Chicago: A Toolkit for Residents and Community Leaders. Chicago Rehab Network: Chicago, IL. Available at http://www.chicagorehab.org/resources/docs/research/buildingchicago/buildingourfuturechicagofulltoolkit. pdf

Gallun, A., and Maidenberg, M. (2013, November 9). Will the foreclosure crisis kill Chicago? Crain’s Chicago Business. Crain’s: Chicago, IL. Available at http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20131109/ISSUE01/311099980/will-the-foreclosure-crisis-kill- chicago

Rugh, J. S., and Massey, D. S. (2010). Racial segregation and the American foreclosure crisis. American Sociological Review, 75(5), 629-651. Abstract available at http://asr.sagepub.com/content/75/5/629.abstract.

Wallace, D., and Schalliol, D. (2015). Testing the temporal nature of social disorder through abandoned buildings and interstitial spaces. Social Science Research, 54, 177-194. Abstract available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X15001258.

News From Our Smart Health Centers Project

Smart ChicagoJanuary 6, 2016

A pillar of our Health work is our long-standing and successful Smart Health Centers project. Here’s a current look at what we’re up to online across the city:

Fantus Clinic

Anne Lin, Katie Reed, Michelle Vu, Bendarius King, Akya Gossitt, Zaundra Boyd, and Daniel Broome do direct support in the main waiting room at Fantus Health General Medicine Clinic. They help approximately 75 patients a week to log on and navigate the patient portal on ipads and laptops, teaching them how to send messages to their doctor and request prescription refills through the MyCookCountyHealth pateint portal.

The overall objective will increase meaningful use of the portal, which makes the patient more involved in care and helps the clinic conform with federal meaningful use regulations.

They also consult with nurses and other staff on patient workflow in order to help improve the clinic experience and reduce wait times. They’ve put their findings into a presentation to hospital staff and are helping them learn the back-end of the patient management system so they can track and log accurate patient wait times.

Many of the navigators work with the nutritionist at Fantus, helping Spanish-speaking patients, speaking before groups of people, and helping with document translation.

We’re also helping support the planning and setup of an obesity clinic— sourcing education materials, finding meal plan templates, recipes, and so on.

Jorge Prieto Family Health Center

Daniel Broome is staffed part-time at Prieto. He does all of the patient portal work and he is also developing an introductory video shown about the patient-centered medical home model that plays in the waiting room. This video was created by Farhad Ghamsari, Alicia Phillippou, and Kymon Odukoya.

Lawrence Hall Youth Services

Kymon Odukoya is staffed here at Lawrence Hall, where he works with youth, working on health awareness, nutrition, and healthy cooking demonstrations. He also demonstrates how to research health topics online.

Podcasts

Many of the navigators are also working on a new Smart Health Centers initiative— podcasts. You can hear them all on the Smart Chicago Soundcloud page.

Here’s a look at episodes to date:

https://soundcloud.com/smart-chicago/be-healthy-yall-episode-1-digital-divide-in-health-care

Suzy Connor Joins Smart Chicago as Consultant Focusing on Arts, Justice, and Education

Smart ChicagoJanuary 5, 2016 2 Comments

Yesterday marked the start of Suzy Connor’s work here at Smart Chicago. We’ve worked with Suzy over the last couple years in her work as the senior program officer for arts and culture at The Chicago Community Trust, where she created the Arts Infusion program and was responsible for a host of other grants that enhanced cultural vibrancy, access and diversity.

Most recently, we worked with her to launch Get Drive, a project that compiled resources for court-involved youth to clear their records (expunge.io!), get back in school, get a job, and get other support.

Suzy’s work over the years aligns perfectly with Smart Chicago’s work to improve lives in Chicago through technology mission. We’re excited about combining her professional expertise, experience, and networks in creative youth development & juvenile justice with our emerging models around civic engagement.

Suzy will strengthen the Smart Chicago justice work area and will help inform or stimulate our Connect Chicago, Chicago School of Data, and Youth-Led Tech programs. Her engagement will employ a number of the experimental modes we’ve investigated and we expect to be able to create new ones together.

Here’s a specific look at the work she’ll be doing:

Arts Infusion

Over the last six years at The Chicago Community Trust, Suzy created and led Arts Infusion. The Urban Institute recently completed a comprehensive evaluation of this program: Arts Infusion Initiative, 2010–15: Evaluation Report. The report is fascinating, and we will be sharing findings from report as we move forward.

Suzy will work to continue and expand the Arts Infusion cohort, focusing on teaching artists rather than organizations, with the goal of building a deep, diverse, and resilient community of practitioners. Our expansion efforts will include both arts-focused and technology-focused instructors working with teens and young adults in under-resourced communities, including court-involved youth.

Together, we will develop a coherent co-creation strategy with this cohort with communication at its core. The foundation of this cohort is not grants; it is communication and shared work. A civic engagement model rather than a social services model, based on principles found in Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement. We seek to help guide an expanded network to foster innovative approaches and respond to the needs articulated by practitioners themselves. Integral to this approach is the inclusion of young adult practitioners who are “alumni” of Chicago’s teen programs.

Connecting youth to technology

Suzy will also work to strengthen the links among released juveniles and Arts Infusion grantees, other arts and technology programs, and relevant resources. Smart Chicago is already a partner in this effort through Get Drive and Expunge.io.

We will incorporate recommendations from the Urban Institute evaluation to enhance strategies for using technology and social media to spark & sustain connections between court-involved youth and the people and resources they need to move forward in life.

This work also ties into our Youth-Led Tech program, where we will look to work in the detention center and connect those youth to community opportunities to build their skills. We’re also looking to evaluate how to replicate the Youth-Led Tech mode.

CPS Digital Arts Career Academy

Suzy will also lead Smart Chicago’s efforts to help to guide engagement, design, and advocacy efforts related to the development of a potential CPS Digital Arts Career Academy. Our focus will be on engaging the public and helping foster communication with the community around planning.

Smart Chicago’s commitment to developing a diverse IT workforce and its recent success with Youth-Led Tech makes it a valuable partner to CPS in this first-of-its-kind initiative.

Chicago Track

Lastly, and more loosely, Suzy will help the Trust grantee Office of Creative Industries at the City of Chicago to connect to the broader context of workforce development, which brings back the lessons of Investing in people and organizations as the key to civic tech.

We’re interested in helping build the workforce pipeline in digital media by integrating the Chicago Track project and career-oriented digital media nonprofits with the workforce development and technology sectors that are more adept at tracking trends and job growth. We hope to leverage the combination of our commitment to juvenile justice, the needs of the tech community for diversity, and the opportunity to strengthen a career pipeline for an important constituency in our city.

Join us in welcoming Suzy to Smart Chicago.

Year: 2016