Introducing SoulBoricua...

Earlier this year my sister, Jessica, and I began to think about how we can create change in our communities. This was on our mind as the creativity in the food industry has been impacting my own community of West Englewood.

See my sister has been in culinary and hospitality industry since 15 years old. She enjoys the demands and creativity of that life. I have been working in social justice and community building since I was 15. Dedicated to our careers-or lifestyles- we decided to begin a social enterprise that would combine our passions and create a company that would grow into a beautiful extension of our callings....

So SoulBoricua was born. 

My sister and I grew up in a home filled with lots of love and connection. We were the family that ate dinner together each night. And my mother had perfected a menu rotation that infused our Black roots and Puerto Rican roots. My mother's family was recent immigrants from the Island, and when she meet my Dad 33 years ago she would learn about his culture from my Grandmother, Lenora Carroll. My Dad's family also had just moved from the South to Chicago, still close to their own story and culture. With my mother's mom still close we have been able to stand on their hard work and love and take on the world with good food in our bellies.

It wasn't until we were older that I understood what privilege it was to grow up in a home like ours. We didn't have much, but we were connected, and was able to embrace our cultures. My sister and I wanted to share that love, and that privilege of being able to be who we were and the support we had from our parents to inspire.

SoulBoricua is our catering and event planning company. It was what we did this year...when we could. My sister and I have juggled Grad School, demanding full time jobs, oh yeah and kids and husbands!!! But we have been given an opportunity this year to grow and fully realize our vision of creating a social enterprise in the food industry. Our goals include:

Deleting the BOX. Hiring those that may have a criminal past. We were taught not to judge people, and to be humble. Our job application does not have the box that asks and limits hiring based on criminal convictions.

Becoming Sustainable and Organic. As mothers this is important to us. It is our visions to grow to become a sustainable company using alternative methods for energy and other resources. And we have begun and will continue to expand our sources of food to be non-GMO, no pesticides or hormones.

Fair and just employment policies. We believe in equitable pay and will pay accordingly with a $15 minimum wage. Providing our employees with maternity and paternity leaves that are evolved like other countries have already done. And also providing staff with personal and sick days that take into account families and health. Being a great employer for families.

Providing support for personal development. So many jobs are dead end, or demand so much from employees with little support. We want to provide job training and support and take into account the whole employee for a great future with our company and beyond.

Supporting community building. Our service will benefit the community organizations and building that is happening in the Chicagoland area with reasonable cost in food and event support.

We hope you try us out and watch our growth and chime in with any good advise you may have. Please check out our website www.soulboricua.com to learn more about this new side venture.

“This food is the gift of the whole universe – the earth, the sky, and much hard work.

May we live in a way that is worthy of this food.

May we transform our unskillful states of mind, especially that of greed.

May we eat only foods that nourish us and prevent illness.

May we accept this food for the realization of the way of understanding and love.”

-Anonymous

It's our money and we want it now!

The West Humboldt Park community in Chicago, has long been neglected in terms of development, as evidenced by its old housing stock, many vacant residential and storefront lots, no major places of employment, and few local businesses. Currently the community suffers from lack of opportunities in employment and affordable housing, with high unemployment. 

Blocks Together's housing and economic development campaign goals were to impact policy and practices around resource allocation of public funds for more direct benefit in the West Humboldt Park community. While the usual rhetoric is there is no money, BT members initiated a campaign that would led them to the issues of local Tax Increment Financing, where there was "money". 

Photo of West Humboldt Park Library, BT members organized for over 7 years to win this library and demanded the local TIF be used to build it after elected officials said there were no funds for the project. The Library has become an anchoring institution for learning, and employment support. 

In 2008 – BT’s Housing Committee began participatory action research around school closures and the intersection with Tax Increment Financing dollars. From here the Housing Committee created a long term agenda to bring more transparency and direct benefit from the local TIF and organized the first town hall meeting around the Chicago Central Park TIF, the TIF district that covers most of West Humboldt Park.

2009 – BT members worked on a campaign to use Chicago Central Park TIF funds to bring an affordable housing development into the community with a community developer.

2010 – BT and Westside United members created a Community Benefit Agreement (CBA) for the project but the developer of the affordable housing project refused to sign. From here BT and Westside United members wanted to require CBA’s with public funds used in the community.

2011 – The Chicago Central Park TIF was underestimated and residents worked with the City’s Department of Planning to reallocate funds into community informed budget line items such as increasing funds for job training and daycare services.

2013–  BT staff and members work with the Participatory Budget (PB) project and University of Illinois at Chicago, Great Cities Institute to learn how to use PB in the community. BT Members also visited other wards in Chicago and other organizations throughout the country to learn how public dollars were being used through PB.

2014 – Alderman Walter Burnett commits to using the $2 million in TIF funds from the canceled housing development to the PB process to allow residents to directly decide how to use those funds!

Organizing around Tax Increment Financing has been gaining momentum in the last few years, when BT started to work on it years ago we had a funder tell us it was irrelevant work, their actual words was that it was "so 1990's". The work around making changes around TIF illuminates quality community building strategies. Organizing around TIF accountability and increased benefit forces communities to understand the numbers, the policy and legislation around TIF, and a little bit of urban planning. In West Humboldt Park residents learned together and strategized together, organizing community teach in's about TIFs  and made TIF the "community gossip". 

It was clear as worked together as a community to research the TIF budget that these funds were being taking from the community and expenditures were not matching the critical needs and redevelopment goals that would have created long term change. We could do better. 

The work around TIF organizing BT has been doing is about changing the policies and practices of public dollars that takes from a community while leaving that same community in more economic vulnerability. The work to address this inequity is grassroots and powerful as it moves residents to think about what economic development looks like, and holds elected officials accountable to real investment, calling out the political games. 

A new controversial City steered development in Englewood is prime opportunity to begin a campaign that further illuminates the issue of low income communities being taken advantaged of, residents own funds not being used to maximize development. While development projects are being announced, the reality of jobs and contribution of institutions to the larger local economy must be spelled out and held accountable to the needs of a community. 

As the municipal election realities are facing Chicago head on, the issue of TIF reform is critical. The complexities of the City's financial dealings is interconnected with many of the issues that face Chicago; school funding, unemployment, safety, and infrastructure. Our candidates must have positions on changing how we utilize TIF, how to continue the program or not, and support challenging the status quo of vague and ineffective redevelopment that has continued to leave so many Chicagons behind, and work with residents to create new realities through with own investment. 

Photo: 63rd and Halsted, Google Images

How Numbers Lied After Schools Closed

During last year’s historic school closure process in Chicago I advocated against the closing of schools in multiple ways. I have seen schools as anchors in a community and it is sometimes through the facility itself and what happens in that space that could never be measured through a blunt utilization formula.  For example the closed Ryerson Elementary School, it was a Level 2 School according to CPS, and not on probation. The school serviced a high poverty student population. The school had been Level 1 for past three years. The school received citywide attention for its 6-8th grade single sex class that had made remarkable gains. It was the first school to pilot Longer School Day before the Emmanuel administration. It had a neighborhood clinic occupy one of the classrooms, a Chicago Bulls Health and Fitness Center, and a state of the Art Library and Media Center donated by Target, with recess rooms with computers and a community rooms which were useful spaces as the outside park area had been a drug dealing hang out. The enrollment reported when it was slated to closed was 398 with a student capacity of 690 students. The utilization rate according to CPS was 58%. When parents took it among themselves to count their own classrooms and special education rooms they used the formula and determined they were 77% utilized.

The Chicago Board of Education voted to consolidate Ryerson with Laura Ward Elementary School but inside the Ryeron building. The Laura Ward building is now vacant, the school had a capacity for 720 students versus Ryerson’s capacity of 690 students. Ryerson according to data from the Utilization Commission needed $16 mil., and Laura Ward needed over $9 mil. But both schools 2008 facility assessments had reduced numbers, matter of fact Laura Ward only needed $3 mil. During the school closure decision process there was never any clarity on those maintenance dollars.

So now here we are in 2014 and the one pager for Real Estate Brokers from CPS recently posted RFP states that the yearly maintenance of Laura Ward is a little over $200,000 a year, and the information given to the brokers explicitly shows the available Tax Increment Financing dollars available to be potentially used.

Why couldn’t we have used those funds to lower the cost of Laura Ward and Ryerson maintenance and keep these high performing schools in the community? Keeping two schools with high academic achievement with relatively high utilization (Laura Ward's utilization was 55%) and continuing to support the stabilization of these anchoring schools who before the closure had eighth graders going elite high schools across the City. Matter of fact, Laura Ward is now back to being a Level 1 school. The new Laura Ward which is the consolidation with Ryerson no longer has a Fitness room, and has over 694 students in a building made for 690. 

The vacant school buildings mean so much more than a potential development project they must be a part of restoring the hurt, any damage done by the school closures and uplift these communities through community decision making and advising the disposition of these anchor institutions determined by those impacted.

Participatory Planning with Chicago Public Schools Closed Buildings

The Mayor's Advisory Committee on School Re-Purposing came forward with their recommendations a few weeks ago detailing a process for school disposition. The recommendations included an aggressive timetable and a call for community engagement, primarily post bids. The recommendations spoke to moving forward as fast as possible to find alternative uses for the empty buildings, and could limit the ability of communities to organize and create their own process.  

The communities impacted by last years mass school closures need to be able to create their own vision for the vacant spaces as oppose to bids being created by others who are developing a plan for the space based on their market needs. Alderman should take the opportunity or push back on the process and create spaces for community visioning around the re-purposing of these schools, even connecting with more traditional development as well. 


Communities should be able to ask themselves...where do we want to be in this community in the next ten years, how does that look and feel...and what are the institutions and services needed to get there-and can we use the vacant schools to support this vision?

This can build on current plans and initiatives and can introduce new ones, and promote conversation around gaps in services or social capital support that can be addressed in those buildings or by a community controlled bid process. Understanding the parameters of the closed buildings already acts as a filtering process so no need to think the process will get too overwhelming, the maintenance and operation of these buildings cost money and this makes communities and local stakeholders think critically about how the proposals address a communities growth and keep the lights on! 

Community/Collective visioning can include surveys, interviews, and focus groups using the great university and community based organizations throughout the City like the work being done by Resident Association for Greater Englewood and there collaboration with Illinois Institute of Technology. Yes, this will take time but a collaboration like this creates ownership, transparency, increased democracy, and is smart planning. In 2009 the Taskforce did just this to help us create our recommendations that became law in 2011. We devoted a year to vision what CPS needed to be doing when it came to school buildings and worked with teacher, students, parent, principals, and elected officials. From here we created draft changes for the district that were spearheaded by the common recommendations, from this data collection here we translated those themes into Citywide recommendations. We went further and then redistributed it for final review all over the city gaining consensus and working to address people's concerns creating a grassroots informed bill. It was clear that the community recommendations were heavily weighted in our work and without approval from the larger community we were not going to move forward. 


Community engagement should not be post bid where people are giving feedback on whether or not a proposal should go through. Communities can create proposals and create criteria for bids. The participatory budget model that is being used here in Chicago and used in New York City, and throughout the entire City of Vallejo, California also shows some ways we can implement a community engagement process. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It offers residents a fundamentally different way to engage with government. The process has been used in disenfranchised communities to support stronger democracy, citizen engagement, and encourages leadership in the local community. The engagement for the process includes activities such as neighborhood assemblies, this is where you and other community members propose project ideas and priorities. From there committees research and price out the project and potential impact and finally there is a community vote on the projects that will be considered and sent to the elected officials.  Imagine residents engaging in their own committees to propose plans to the larger community for the closed schools....

These efforts such as community/collective visioning, large scale engagement, requires technical assistance and any resident and stakeholder driven process takes technical support. As CPS takes over the work, as being advised by the Mayor's committees recommendations, CPS should be reaching out, or communities can begin to get support for an initiative like leaning on local universities, funders, and other organizations that support in research, mapping, analysis, data collection, leadership development for residents, and other skills needed for a community engagement process. 

Yes it should be messy,yes it should be time consuming, maybe even cost some money, and yes this should be be done right and not expediently.  The district has many more buildings and much land that has yet to be disposed of prior to the closures of last year. So there is much work to do around getting closed and vacant land off the books besides those recently closed. 

Last years closures were devastating and for many children throughout the City they have had to change their lives because of the school actions. So yes we should respect those that have been changed, and those who have lost, and ensure the sacred spaces are turned into something that is beautiful and can leverage human and community development. 

The Purpose of Re-Purposing...Demanding more from the reuse of closed schools

The recent closing of 49 schools in Chicago leaves huge institutions where learning once was vacant. Now, I have a lot of reasons why schools should not have been closed, most of them are rooted in best practice research I have done over the years in my policy role on the Chicago Educational Facilities Task force. I also can dispute many of the "financial reasons" schools were closed, and I wish the City would done "rightsizing" in a different way. Nevertheless, this post is around the sacred process we must undertake to find uses for the closed schools many in the community I work in solidarity with, West Humboldt Park, and my home West Englewood.

The vacant school buildings are a huge opportunity to help restore where communities have weaknesses. This is critical community development opportunity, and it is also the decision of the people of these communities affected that must lead the way in these spaces, they are the real investors and the ones that have to deal with the mass closures and will have to manage with whatever decision is made on the future use. 

As a mother, I wish there was more in my community for my children to engage around, while the Greater Englewood community has many unknown great resources, there are still many gaps. I am driving in different communities to help expose my children to different activities, Why can't I find these resources in my own community, my family and I and our community deserve it? And my voice and others should lead the way in potentially having new access through our own community with our own property tax dollars that have or are supporting these sacred spaced of education and hope. Here are my recommendations in moving forward with the re-purposing of closed schools:

1.  CPS and the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on School Repurposing & Community Development should develop community-driven re-use strategies for the closed school sites.  Since the closed schools are in low income communities, these facilities should be re-purposed to anchor development, to promote the well-being of the community and neighborhood revitalization and reinvestment.  Chicago needs to take the lead in examining how these communities can re-use these spaces and not necessarily financial benefits.  

2.  The City of Chicago and CPS need to re-examine the communities with potential population growth.  Some closed schools should remain in the school district’s portfolio to be potentially repurposed as another educational institution, or re-opened in the future as a neighborhood public school as more families return to these communities.  This requires a careful review of CPS’ population projections to test those projections against demographic and redevelopment data and trends from several sources:

o   The Chicago Metropolitan Authority for Planning (CMAP),

o   Planned and anticipated new housing development - both public and private

o   Examining potential other new community development that can create improvement in neighborhood economies and housing values, and increase the housing demand

o   Data on home purchases and building permits for home construction and remodeling

o   Analysis of population age cohorts  and potential and projected birth rate. 

By gathering more data and doing this review, we can create a thorough analysis of potential population growth for the next 10 to 20 years.

3.  Carefully weigh the costs and benefits of disposing of closed school buildings.  Data show that building a school is much more expensive than re-purposing an older school building. With that being said, the cost of needed repairs to each school building as well as past operating costs also need to be examined. Before decisions can be made about the fate of these school buildings, CPS needs to be transparent about what is the cost to maintain these buildings.

Unfortunately, when the Board of Education voted to close schools last year, up-to-date and accurate data about these costs had not been released by CPS.  CPS had not completed updating Facility Condition Assessment, and did not have accurate numbers on the costs of addressing all of its schools’ facility needs. A prime example is the case of the old Ryerson Elementary building, now the consolidated Laura Ward Elementary School.  The Ryerson building had recently been improved using TIF funds.  At the time the district made its school closings decision, the money spent on the building was not included in the 2008 CPS Facility Condition Assessment roper that CPS used as the source of information for determining Ryerson’s fate.  CPS has now re-assessed all its school building condition reports, in according to state law. These new assessments may reveal revised cost estimates that may be less than CPS originally assumed. There are practical ways for CPS to be transparent and disseminate this information to the public, include posting the revised updated information to the “Property Owned and Leased by the Board” database on CPS’ website. This database was also created as a result of the 2011 State reform law which the CEFTF, BT, and many other parent and community groups supported and helped to pass.

4.  Community engagement is key to determining how to prioritize the re-use of our public school buildings. In Kansas City, Missouri -- a city also wrestling with Re-Purposing closed, vacant school buildings - the municipality and school district worked to create an open community engagement process and a transparent set of guidelines to guide the direction of decision making. Kansas City’s first guideline is:

“Repurposing will not impair or impede the District’s ability to achieve Global Ends Policy 1.0. (Support educational mission).”

CPS’ educational vision includes five “pillars”. Two of the pillars are:

• “Engage and empowered families and communities… identify community partners who can support children growth and learning”. 
• Another relevant pillar calls for systems of support to meet student needs: ”Remove barriers to learning with practices that promote children’s health and safety, social and emotional development, school attendance and college and career preparation” .

Like other educational facility plans across the country, here in Chicago we can use these two principles (pillars) of the educational vision as the priority goals for how the City and CPS move forward in determining the fate of our closed and shuttered public schools. For myself --as a resident of West Englewood – I want to be able to work with my neighbors and fellow CPS parents in my own community and other communities across the city to examine how these important and often historic public spaces can be used to “engage and empower families and communities” and build “systems of support to meet students’ needs”.A meaningful, inclusive and strategic community engagement process could take shape if we:

-         

•      Hold local community meetings widely publicized with parents from different communities where respected facilitators can take community input around the pillar’s and more.
•          Take that input and synthesize and disseminate the information to community members and partners.
•           Use a democratic process such as polls, surveys, and/or a community vote process to determine the values for the best use of these public assets and evaluate the potential proposals, many of which already exist.

In this process, data should be presented in a community-friendly way that describes the cost to maintain for the building, examples of other re-use projects across the country, and available data around local community educational barriers.  This would ensure that those directly impacted have the information to guide the development of values and criteria for potential re-use. This is similar to how the Chicago Educational Facility Task force created new legislation by doing a similar outreach plan to create IL Public Act 97-0474.

Again, like in the case of Kansas City, Missouri, after the guidelines were announced , their school district conducted a robust community engagement process to help identify and understand what community members thought would be the best uses for their closed schools, and leveraged public support for the plans.

Moving forward, the re-use of Chicago’s closed school buildings is an opportunity to address the educational vision for the district, develop the highest priorities, and then carry out a community engagement strategy that identifies the educational barriers in the communities where the closed schools are located. Through a community engagement strategy, we can develop both sound criteria on re-purposing approaches and help develop community proposals that satisfy the educational vision and support the revitalization of these communities. But it can not be the old engagement of the past, no buy in, no options that we can not control, and no manipulation. Citizen control and empowerment planning, we must say what are our principles and values are for our community improvement...

Dr. King and Chicago's Education System

I hope we are all reflecting and enjoying the annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His work and devotion has no doubt been impactful in my own life. This past year I went to a retreat and training at the Highlander Institute. This space was home to many meetings and trainings that supported organizing efforts of the Civil Rights movement, and many Civil Rights icons spent time in this space. I was inspired by the fact that people I find to be so far away from reality and that had courage I admire, I was walking in a space they had came to to also be renewed and to learn more about how to challenge the systems of oppression furthering my commitment to change and how it satisfies my spiritual practice.

Dr. King risked his life in the fight to overcome oppression, there are many like him. The fact that he was a minister and connected his religious beliefs to the struggle for justice is similar to my own journey. But in thinking of my work as a community organizer in Chicago, many religious leaders in this time have harmed others (indirectly or otherwise) and avoid addressing larger systematic issues with their lack of involvement or involvement in risky spaces. Now let me be transparent that I am not a religious leader. But I was born to a family of six generations of preachers, do I know their burdens in doing there work, not as much as I could if I were one. My father is a Pastor and we are really close and I talk to him about my frustrations and even address him with issues I have problems within his own work. I would rather tell the truth about the issues so we address them sooner--even to our religious leaders.

Just this past week there was news that a Chicagloand Pastor will potentially be supporting the expansion of a Charter School through his institutions. While the conversation around Charters Schools in Chicago leaves many divided or un-invited, there are elements in the debate that are real, and are problematic, and deserves advocacy around because of the negative impacts Charter School proliferation is having in Chicago... affecting "limited resources", and further dividing social economic class in the City in same cases, favoring the few over many.

The Chicago Public Schools closed 50 schools last year because of budget issues. These school actions have impacted families and students all over the City. No doubt have brought some hardships to families. I know in a school community I work closely with they are still struggling with parent and student tensions, lack of program space because of the enrollment growth, and CPS has no official policy to continue to support welcoming schools with resources after this academic year, while the issues may continue to exist. The issue of "under-utilization", the policy that guided these closures, was problematic. As a member of a statewide group charged to research and work with CPS around facilities, CPS never engaged around joint use development (sharing space inside schools with needed community resources that is cost effective), never altered the formula that determines utilization even though highly criticized and against research around smaller class size and its effectiveness. In addition the district delayed a 10 year long facility plan that could have minimized closures, protected small class size, and supported educational programming in schools. For me the bigger picture of planning to optimize our schools was something that was important to me as a mother who will be in the system longer then 10 years. And now this week CPS will be approving the expansion of Charter Schools, some politically connected, and in communities that do not need overcrowding relief. This goes against what CPS officials have said, and insults the families that have been negatively impacted by school closures for budget reasons.

The public schools that serve so many of our students that need support continue to have actions and policies bestowed upon them that impact some of the City's most vulnerable children, many are my neighbors, friends, but most importantly by own children.The new student based budgeting CPS has designed for this academic year further equalizes Charter School funding with Public Schools funding and can continue to provide more burdens for Public Schools.

This is an issue about equality and justice. And we need religious leaders to support and educate parishioners about the duty to live our beliefs and support changing a system. The work of religious leaders like Dr. King and others in history was not popular, and did not always have a lot of support, but the institutions that were mobilized helped to educate and galvanize critical mass. I can name so many religious leaders in the City that I would hope can start asking the questions to themselves and others:

1. What are the barriers to a quality education for children in low income communities and the public schools they learn in?

2. Why are practices against best practice research being implemented and used consistently in Chicago's public education system?

3. Why are policies and practices allowing political insiders to benefit financially from sacred and "scarce" educational resources such as tax dollars, facility construction, buildings, and educational support programming at the expense of others?

From here we can create real conversations about what is right and what we need to fix. Folks ask the question if King was here what would he say or do. I have no doubt that he would support speaking truth to power and working to change oppressive systems. The state of public education in Chicago needs to be addressed, not folks figuring out how to make small gains in the system, especially that benefit the few.

Today I turn 30 years old and for the last few months I have been heavy in thought and reflection.With that I have to confess that I have been struggling trying to make since of what I have accomplished in the last 30 years, seeing the good and the bad, my shortcomings and accomplishments. With the past year I have had, I felt a strong calling to begin to share my journey with others for multiple reasons, with the hope of influencing a better world.

One of my reasons I felt I should share my journey is that I have had some unique accomplishments.In my last 9 years of my life I have found myself in a career/lifestyle of a community organizer. This career has opened me to an experience that has brought so much to how I see the world. Environmental and education justice has humbled me as I am solidarity with others in the struggle to create a healthy living space for my family, and access to a quality free education for my own family and my own community. I would never imagine how education organizing in Chicago would put me in spaces that I would have never imagined, yet the fight spoke to every part of who I wanted to become; courageous, fair, dedicated, and compassionate...Here I want to share the work I do and with it garner support sharing my own experiences and the experiences of those I work in solidarity with.

Another reason I am starting this blog is to use it as a venue to express my own values and principles and keep myself accountable to them. Sharing my journey, and where I am in my life with others allows me to seek council with others, and have a process to organize my own thoughts.

Lastly, a kind of a combination of the two mentioned already, is that I am a mother, a wife, a student, a believer, and I do all this as I am raising my children on Chicago's Southside in the West Englewood neighborhood. This past year I traveled the country to learn about how to empower communities and myself and I am hoping to use what I learned to transform more of the spaces in my own life, and showing and teaching my children and others the approaches I am trying to support transformation in our own lives.

I am so happy if you come to join me and I look forward to being able to use this as a platform and a listening session. God Bless.