When the rest of the world shut down, community organizations showed up
By Zoe Malin, Miranda Chabot, Maggie Galloway and Michael DeAugustino
Walking the streets of Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, one wouldn’t be able to see the damage the coronavirus pandemic has inflicted upon the community. Jacquline Miller, a trainer and facilitator at Annie B. Jones Community Services Inc., said East 71st Street and South Jeffery Boulevard, a major intersection, is a mainly commercial area that has people scattered throughout. While many businesses are closed, Miller said people gather in small groups, talking and laughing, some wearing masks and others not. Overall, it’s not much different than life as usual.
But what the South Shore looks like doesn’t illustrate the full picture of how its residents have fared throughout the pandemic.
The 60649 zip code almost fully defines the South Shore’s geographical boundaries, in addition to some parts of the 60619 and 60637 zip codes. Currently, The Illinois Department of Public Health reports that there are 795 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the 60649 zip code, and the number is continuing to rise. Additionally, 75.4 percent of those confirmed cases are among the South Shore’s Black population, which sources said is to be expected since the neighborhood’s residents are 93.8 percent Black.
However, there is not a direct causal link between race/ethnicity and the likelihood of one contracting the coronavirus, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention making it seem as so in its new releases and informational campaigns. There are multiple confounding factors, many of which are present with the South Shore. For example, socioeconomic status and employment type are extremely influential. The majority of South Shore residents make an an average of less than $25,000 a year and 20 percent of residents work in the health care sector, which is essential work during the padnemic. Less money to spend on medical care and more forced exposure definitively puts the majority of South Shore residents at a higher risk for contracting the coronavirus.
“The community has been hit pretty heavily,” Miller said. “The South Shore community has one of the highest numbers of deaths due to COVID. The impact is severe.”
During the early days of the pandemic, it was clear that the South Shore and it’s residents needed help combating the coronavirus. On March 25, WTTW, Chicago’s PBS station, reported that South Shore Community Hospital, a small nonprofit, had very few emergency room beds and was only able to do about six COVID-19 tests a day. Access to food was also an issue. Many residents cannot afford grocery store prices and others were unable to leave their homes to purchase basic necessities. It was clear that the neighborhood needed long-term assistance in order to make it through the pandemic.
That’s where community organizations come in. Non-profit organizations and charities of all shapes and sizes identified problems and created solutions. They took inventory of the South Shore’s immediate needs — COVID-19 testing, free food distribution and aid for small businesses — and took action. The organizations began lifting the South Shore up and have not stopped since.
Annie B. Jones Community Services Inc.
As news of the coronavirus pandemic became increasingly dire around late March, so did its impact on South Shore residents. Annie B. Jones Community Services Inc. (ABJ), a youth and family centered organization, began to personally feel the effects of the pandemic as those a part of it lost family members and close friends due to COVID-19. Jacquline Miller said ABJ was getting numerous phone calls a day about loved ones passing.
“Out of an abundance of concern for the Black community, which is stated to be the hardest hit by COVID-19,” as its flyer states, ABJ, in partnership with The Ancestral Village, created a Community Health Survey. The survey was a platform through which to collect information about how people in the community were faring in regards to their physical and mental health, access to medical care, ability to receive government assistance, and financial hardships, among other things. Miller said a specific area of inquiry, for example, was individuals’ hospital experiences.
“The Black community is a very close knit community,” Miller said. “In the past, if you went to the hospital, five or six people would come with you. Now, in the time of COVID, you have to go to the hospital alone.”
Traumatic experiences like one’s solo trip to the hospital or losing one’s job and thus, one’s entire source of income, are stories ABJ believes are important to record in order to learn from the pandemic. That’s exactly what the Community Health Survey aims to do. With all of the responses ABJ got from the survey, Miller said the organization will analyze the data and use it to implement new programs or adjust existing ones. ABJ is also working to identify citywide programs in Chicago that it can participate in to expand its offerings.
“We want to know, what do we need to survive and be better on the other side of the pandemic?” Miller said. “Our survey helps us answer that question.”
Local Market Foods
Local Market Foods is one of many storefronts along the South Shore’s bustling East 71st Street. But to residents it’s much more than a grocery store — it’s a pillar of their community. Just take a look at their reaction to the store’s reopening on June 4th.
There’s good reason for that enthusiasm; before Local Market Foods set up shop in the South Shore, the neighborhood was a veritable “food desert,” without easy access to affordable and nutritious food. When the store opened in December 2019, residents could purchase fresh produce and healthy pre-made meals close to home for the first time in years.
But that access was threatened by the pandemic. Grocery stores remained open as essential businesses, but some customers faced greater medical risk going shopping themselves. Amena Karim, the commissioner of South Shore’s Special Service Area, saw this problem within her own family.
“My sister has cancer,” Karim said. “She was unable to leave the house, and she’s medically fragile. So I was trying to find nearby places where I can get food.”
That left Karim with two options: food pantries, where offerings aren’t as healthy and social distancing is difficult, or food delivery services like Instacart. Unfortunately, Instacart wasn’t delivering from the closest grocery store, Local Market Foods.
Karim collaborated with Eva Jakubowski, a co-owner of Local Market Foods, to create a free food delivery program with Special Services Area funding. The campaign, Feeding South Shore, provided fresh groceries for over one thousand of the South Shore’s most vulnerable residents from May 12th to June 2nd, free of charge.
Not only did this keep the neighborhood healthy and fed, but it also protected the jobs of Local Market Foods employees. Instead of layoffs, Jakubowski could offer hours filling grocery bags for delivery. The bags were dropped off at central locations — senior homes, public schools — and distributed internally to promote social distancing.
“It’s a multi-prong approach,” Karim said. “Feeding the community, keeping the employees employed… and addressing an inequity for the store.”
Neighborhood Network Alliance
The Neighborhood Alliance Network (NNA), formerly known as the Southeast Side Block Club Alliance, is a social network association that provides communities with resources to strengthen their block clubs with a focus in the South Shore neighborhood. Because of the South Shore’s high senior citizen population, the neighborhood has been hit especially hard, said Val Free, lead steward of the NNA. Free personally has family members who were in nursing homes that were hit with the disease.
Because the NNA is a mostly volunteer-run organization, Free said their resources and response to the pandemic have been limited. However, she said they have been focusing on the mental health of their community members during this time. The NNA has also been working with other South Shore organizations to help make sure residents without easy access to the store or transportation can get necessities like medicine, water and diapers.
“[We] have a community check-in for members to talk about what’s happening and come up with some ideas as to things we can do,” Free said.
After protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd on May 31, extensive looting and damage was done to South Shore’s main business corridor along East 71st Street. Even though Free said most of the damage was concentrated and confined to large corporate chain stores, some small black-owned businesses were harmed to a lesser extent. The NNA partnered with the South Shore Chamber of Commerce to organize a volunteer clean-up the morning after. Free said they were so successful in the clean-up and gathering volunteers that they have now shifted their focus to protecting Local Market Foods, for which the NNA spent six years fighting to be built.
In response to the recent increased awareness about police brutality, gathering donors and sponsors for a community policing strategy is next on the NNA’s agenda. The idea was posed before the protests and is still in it’s beginning stages, but Free said it has gained a lot more traction in recent weeks. However, the biggest priority of the NNA is still responding to recent looting and the pandemic.
“Last week we went into survival mode in terms of food access and prescriptions for community members, and we’re still in that place,” said Free. “[The community policing strategy] has been put on the side until we can narrow down our operations.”
Despite the hardships the South Shore has endured in the past few months, the neighborhood has learned a lot from the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent protests. Community organizations continue to lift up South Shore residents, no matter what comes their way.
“Community members [now] understand, or are beginning to feel, the urgency of being more organized,” said Free. “Having a structured, organized community [has] become something that they really would like to see.”
