Hull House to examine policies affecting young men of color
By Jean Lachowicz
The Jane
Addams Hull House Association Center for Civil Society (formerly the Human
Relations Foundation) has been selected as the first agency in the nation to
implement the recommendations of the Dellums Commission, a Washington,
D.C.-based group analyzing policies affecting young men of color. The center
will develop the Illinois action plan and manage it for the City of Chicago.
The Dellums Commission, named for former Congressman Ron Dellums, reported that, during the past 25 years, a series of public policies has had a particularly negative impact on young men from communities of color. Those policies include a shift from substance abuse treatment and rehab programs to criminal sanctions, zero tolerance strategies in public schools, and states diverting youthful offenders to adult criminal systems.
According to Terri A. Johnson, vice president of policy and advocacy of the Hull House Association, “The Dellums Report is about policy, and the implementation of the report is about social service work. We believe that the beauty of Hull House is that Jane Addams truly believed that you had to go the extra mile to advocate around policy. As we infuse the Dellums Commission policy work with our social service work, we are marrying the two sides.”
Hull House kicked off the project with an event at the National Museum of
Mexican Art in Chicago on Jan. 15, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Those attending included
Congressman Danny K. Davis; State Senator Mattie Hunter; and Don Stewart,
former president & CEO of the Chicago Community Trust. Featured
speaker Gail Christopher, vice president for health, women, and families at
the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the group that
published the Dellums Commission Report, outlined some of the report’s
national statistical findings:
• Death by homicide among African American males age 15 to 17 is 34.4 per 100,000, versus 2.4 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic white males of the same age.
• More than 29% of African American males who are 15 years old today are likely to go to prison at some point in their lives, compared to 4.4% of their white male peers.
• Only 42.8% of African American males graduate high school, as opposed to 47% of Native Americans, 48% of Hispanics, and 70.8% of whites.
“We sought to find out why young men of color, more than any other group, were feeling every blow,” said Christopher. “The more we uncovered, the more we realized that, for the most part, the disaster was man-made. With that realization came immeasurable sorrow for the lives needlessly lost and a new sense of responsibility and hope for today’s children who are still searching for a way out.”
Many policies intended to improve life for youth of color have done just the opposite by forcing schools, police, courts, and juvenile authorities to adopt practices that marginalize, exclude, confine, and punish. Along with lack of healthcare and shrinking educational and employment opportunities, they sap hope and waste human potential.
As an example, America has become the world’s leader in per capita incarceration, surging from 204,211 prison inmates in 1973 to 2.2 million in 2003. Young people in juvenile justice facilities suffer assault by other inmates and guards as well as substance abuse, mental trauma, and a host of diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Incarceration limits young men of color’s options upon release, as they struggle to re-enter society and the workforce with limited skills and resources.
The Dellums recommendations are wide-ranging, specifying local, state, and
national approaches in education, family support and child welfare,
workforce and economic development, juvenile and criminal justice, and the
media. To truly help America’s young men of color, policies must address
poverty, exclusion and discrimination, poor housing and inferior schools,
disparate treatment by the justice system, environmental toxicity, and
inadequate access to healthcare.
Hull House’s Johnson said her organization will start by conducting a community needs assessment to determine what is being done on these issues already. The next step is bringing many different organizations and governmental bodies together as a large group and as numerous subcommittees to identify and resolve gaps.
“We will work on assembling a core group of advocates,” she said. “We are not interested in usurping what others are already doing or reinventing the wheel. We are interested in viable solutions, and the representatives on committees will be as diverse as possible. The work will be as elastic as it needs to be—intergenerational and cross-cultural.
“The Dellums Committee project is a very natural extension of what we have already been doing at Hull House, combining policy work with social service applications,” continued Johnson. “For example, we will soon release a position paper on the working poor and housing issues by our Women’s Policy Board.”
Johnson explained that, while the Dellums report pertains to young men, Hull House understands youth belong to families, so women will be involved and concerns generally considered women’s issues will be included in the process. “There will definitely be many partnerships with other organizations,” she said. “The findings in the report are so big, it would be arrogant to pretend there is a single answer. There will be long term and short term goals, and many groups will be involved, including talking to the young men themselves.”
In a detailed analysis of each issue and how it is addressed around the country, the Dellums Commission Report cited Illinois as a positive example for its 2005 decision to extend healthcare coverage through age 18 for all children not covered by state Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). For more information, call (312) 906-8600, ext. 267.
