Hood for Humanity
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Putting people without homes in homes without people.
Hood for Humanity builds on the Campaign’s “Home Liberation” efforts which have gained significant publicity over the past few years. Hood for Humanity is a program launched in 2017 to provide low income and affordable housing options for renters and low to moderate income homebuyers within Cook County. This program provides hands on training to youth, returning citizens, and those looking to build skills for future employment. Under the guidance of our General contractor and Lead instructor Sylvester Blue, we provide jobs, and skilled labor training to unemployed, underemployed and unemployable Black youth and adults within our communities. Hood for Humanity trains unemployed and underemployed youth in the process of fixing up blighted properties so that these homes can provide low-income housing for homeless families and thereby show working solutions to many of the community’s challenges.
Creating solutions to violence in Chicago
Hood for Humanity seeks to highlight new research that suggests that providing unemployed youth with job opportunities and adult supervision can have a significant impact on building neighborhood cohesion and reducing violent crime. A recent University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab study has shown that providing “at-risk” teenagers with jobs and adult guidance results in a substantial reduction (up to 43%) in violent crime arrests. These findings support anecdotal observations regarding the pressing needs of homeless youth, the ways in which unemployment and homelessness invariably funnels young people into the criminal justice system, and ways in which criminal activity and criminal records trap young people in poverty.
The Hood for Humanity program raises awareness about the need to teach young people the hard skills required to fix up abandoned buildings and improve their communities. More broadly, Hood for Humanity promotes policy solutions for several parallel crises that are dragging down some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods: youth unemployment, rising homelessness, the plight of abandoned buildings, and vacant properties in need of repair. And, while each of these issues on their own do not directly undermine community safety, they each help to frame the context in which high rates of poverty and gun violence can be found. In recognizing that these problems compound each other, this project puts forward an approach to addressing them and puts young people at the center of a solution by engaging them directly in transforming their own communities.
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Our work has been largely funded through private donations. Seeing these houses become homes and watching the growth of our members and our organization has been a collective and personal endeavor. We are grateful to all our donors and supporters. Please click the donate button if you’d like to support and contribute to this work.