Chicago, The Great and Terrible | The Apartment

She was a great and terrible beauty. She was burned to the ground, rebuilt, elevated, stabilized. She was exposed, publicized, she was made of steel, she defied gravity. She changed the flow of water, she gave a home to workers. The blood of animals soaked into her soil. She was separated by neighborhoods speaking different tones and tongues, she tried to used the wind to scatter the segregation of her sections, but to no avail. She watched in horror as administrators advocated for the destruction of the needy, she predicted it, she watched her brainstorms torment into actuality, the cracks of gunpowder stronger than thunder. And through it all she keeps her neck so straight and poised and proud. The blood of men soak into her soil, she cries as her hands are stained red, five pointed stars caught between two water ways. She is patient, but disappointed.

It was not what I imagined, it did not have exposed brick walls, creaky hardwood floors, or a built in bookshelf, but my first apartment was perfection. I walked into the building, surveying the off-white carpet, drooping blinds, and dirt smudged walls, down a narrow hallway into a kitchen with linoleum floors, plastic tiles on the walls, and exposed plumbing lines. The rooms were small, there were three of them. One had a window facing the grey-blue back stairway leading to the other flats. That was the room I wanted. My parents tried to sell me on location, price, practicality, but I wasn’t hearing any of it. I had already begun to imagine how I would be spending my days and nights of freedom here. Now all I had to do was show it to Giuliana. As complimentary opposites go, Giuliana and I make, bake, and take the cake. I am a thinker, she is a doer. I am the risk-taker, she is the joint-gluer. We signed the lease to our apartment on the day of our senior prom, and got the keys on our graduation day. A week or so later, we went to work. While I would have been completely satisfied slumming it out with floor seating and no counter space, Giuliana took the reins on turning our humble house into a home. Because of her (and her genius mother), we had a house that had a place to set your shoes, a seating area in the kitchen, and a patio that belonged in a magazine. As thrifty and spirited as it was, this was not your typical first apartment. This apartment was the kickstart of my education as a community developer.

The thing that our apartment was able to achieve that so many other buildings do not, was a sense of community. As hard as an organization may try to create a space that meets the needs of their community, there must be heart over design, functionality over fashion, and brains over budget. Giuliana created a space not for herself as much as for the people she knew would be visiting. She cleaned the carpet before company because she knew how uncomfortable it was sitting on a dirty floor. She made a pound of pasta incase anyone hadn’t had a meal yet. She made a fire pit in the back yard so that people would be encouraged to spend cooler months outside instead of cooped up in the house. She created a space where people felt comfortable, so people returned time and time again. As important as the space is to house a community, establishing a community is just as important. In our case, the case of recently graduated high school students, our audience was teenagers around the Chicago who wanted a centrally located space to feel creative, safe, loved, and comfortable. At the time we were the only ones in our community with our own space, a space without parents and rules, but a place that still had the comfort and resources of home. Before we knew it, our apartment was no longer just an apartment, it was “the apartment”, the place of meeting before or after events, a place to relax after work or school, a place to eat, and occasionally a place to party. If you build a place that serves many functions, it will attract many kinds of people.

The reason I would call our community a success is because as time went on, it grew. And it did not grow upwards or longways, it grew in a circular fashion, attracting people that had nothing to do with our original community, but now found a strong connection to very different groups of people. How does this happen, and how does it happen in a way that attracts the kind of people who will benefit your community? For Giuliana and I, who were not in any way planning who came into our home, and had no community development intentions, it happened the way all good things happen: naturally. Friends came into our home and loved the experience. A close group of friends got a bit bigger, one friend invited another, and they came back as well. Our community was expanding simply because of our hospitality and ability to make people feel welcome and accepted. In this manner of growing through association, people who were not originally in our close group of friends began to come over even when our mutual friends weren’t there. As our community was growing, our relationships with individual members of the community grew as well.

Now this idea is not revolutionary or worthy of a news story, but in our case, the extreme case of Chicago youth, I feel blessed and proud to share our story. In the extreme case where kids run home from the train every night, praying they’re fast enough to outrun bullets, where kids have had to burry their friends, sometimes more than once, where black and brown kids don’t talk like that, I feel blessed. I feel blessed because on the nights where my friends are gathered in my apartment, late into the night, and they choose to sleep on the floor so they don’t have to travel home, I know I will see them the next morning. I feel blessed when my friends choose to party in my house instead of in some warehouse, because I know there won’t be knives thrown or bullets flying in between songs. I feel blessed because in the city of segregation, where kids can grow up never having a friend that’s not his race, I see blacks and browns and whites and girls and boys and atheists and christians and college goers and music makers and drug dealers and bus boys and track stars and businessmen sitting together, sharing time and space and love. And that just doesn’t happen all that often.

Chicago is a place of terror and terrible beauty, sorrow and strife that creates warriors of hardened stone. Chicago’s warriors have been cheated and manipulated, making them prideful and confused. Many years ago they began to fight each other, and they were good, violent warriors. They formed armies for the eyes, their skin tone was their coat of arms, enemies were made instantly. The armies each conquered land and defended the honor of dead warriors before them. They took revenge by taking children, at first it was a tragedy. Sometimes they even took their own warriors children, they just couldn’t make it stop. They took so many we forgot to cry, we forgot to shake our fists in rage. They took so many no one was left to scream for help, for justice, for peace. I wonder what they would want now, all those stolen children. Would it be vengeance? No, children know better. Children’s thoughts are much simpler than ours, they lack the pollution of money motivations and ego retentions. The answer is much simpler than us grown folks think it to be. We have bought into the lie that it’s better not to know each other, it’s better not to look each other in the eye. We use our lives to gain capital and success instead of self-worth and strong relationships. We live under the false assumption that if we make ourselves great we will have a great life. We are selfish, we are terrorized, we are brain dead, almost. It is easy to loose hope in this place. But if you look, it is just as easy to find it. I have seen the power of love between two people, and it is stronger than any weapons our warriors carry. As instant as the journey of a bullet to it’s prey, a smile passed between strangers is quicker.

The History of A Community Developer

Three months ago I came to Nicaragua in search of something. I came here to find some answers to my questions about life, to discover questions that I didn’t know I should be asking, to experience direction and purpose, and to explore faith. While it feels like only yesterday I drove up in the thick Nicaraguan darkness to my first night in another world, more has happened here than I can accurately process. I have grabbed on and let go of love. I have experienced the far away death of loved ones, and dealt with it over the phone, and through emails. I have learned how to travel and live alone, keeping my own company. I have learned how to meet people, and how to say goodbye. I have taught classes full of children, feeling them all look at me, waiting for me to speak. And I have learned how to be a part of a culture completely different than my own, learning customs, language, history, politics, economy, and day to day life of a country that I never would have expected to end up in. So far this experience has been everything and nothing like I would have predicted. I am learning about myself just like I knew I would, but the things I discover are always surprising.

When you meet someone for the first time, a traveler, just passing through, you realize that this is a person that will come into and leave your life in an instant, and it can have as much of an effect on you as you want it to. The things about yourself that you tell strangers, the ones you’re never going to see again, those are the things that are important. The information you choose to leave out of the summary of your life, the fact that you went to this school or that, the job you kept for so many years, the kind of car you drive, is not important anymore. The cat you miss so dearly, the city you know and love, your dream of becoming the mayor, those are the things you realize define you, and those are the things you want people to know about.

Discovering yourself in an honest way, away from the expectations of family, close friends, the role you’ve assumed in some corner of the world, is an intimidating discovery. Sometimes you find things that you weren’t ready to find, or realize you want something you’re too scared to go out and get for yourself. Before I left Chicago, I had a general direction I wanted my life to take. Early on I witnessed the problems of my city, and a large part of my heart has always been dedicated to the reconciliation and revitalization of Chicago’s disconnected and broken communities. It is a passion that runs in my family, my parents moved into Little Village, a community struggling with poverty and violence, to work from the inside out for the neighborhood. My father is the CEO of Christian Community Development Association, a non-profit that promotes committed people to inspire development in a struggling community. A value taken from their website: “Those of us who orient our lives around this practice we call Christian Community Development (CCD) Practitioners. As Practitioners, we often commit to living in an under-resourced neighborhood for a minimum of 10 years. This is obviously no easy task. But we believe that true and lasting change takes time and requires real relationships. We think this approach is pretty unique.” This idea of relocating yourself into the neighborhood you want to work for has driven every aspect of the way I think about community development, and it is the core of what I believe will bring successful change to a neighborhood. Being brought up with this attitude towards the kind of effect fostering loving and compassionate relationships can achieve, I have learned to make people the focus of my life, specifically, the people of under-served neighborhoods in Chicago.

Looking back on my short, blessed life, I can clearly see how each chapter, from elementary school to Nicaragua, has prepared me to inspire change by putting the love for people at the wheel. When I was five years old I learned two things, to love my neighbor, and that my neighbors didn’t just come from my neighborhood. I attended a magnet school on the near west side of Chicago, which drew in students from all sides of the city for a quality public education. I shared a classroom with kids of all races, religions, and zip codes, growing with them for nine years, realizing that these kids had just as much potential and worth as I did. As simple and obvious as this idea sounds, most kids in Chicago, or cities across the country for that matter, do not get the benefit of growing up with that piece of knowledge. I went on to Whitney Young High School, also a magnet school, that I chose for it’s diversity above all else. Here I continued to meet people from around the city, and my awareness of different Chicago neighborhoods, and the value of their people became clearer and more defined. Here I learned to use the arts as a way to reconcile people that are under the false assumption that they have nothing in common, and I began to realize how uniting people through the love that comes out of sharing something beautiful is a power that seemed to go unnoticed by world leaders and politicians. I continued to nurture this decision as I chose to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I spent a year surrounded by people who were dedicated to use the arts to begin learning how to learn. I was taught to see everything around me, and find the interest and beauty in things often overlooked. This manner of creative thinking was another angle I wanted to bring into my method of community development. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago then led me to Detroit, where I learned just as much about community development in two weeks as I did in all my years in Chicago. It was there that I saw how arts could be used to draw positive attention to a neighborhood in need, and how the power of relocation was changing the way communities and community developers were relating to one another. I learned about community development working through schools, churches, housing programs, community gardens, cooperatives, and economic redistribution, and all of it was being done by people who were passionate about their neighborhoods and dedicated to meeting the needs of the community members, not the needs of an organization, a grant, or themselves. Detroit made me see the hope growing in a city broken down by corrupt policy and racial hatred, and I made it my mission to bring the hope I found there to the neighborhoods of Chicago facing the same strife.

I used that trip as a turning point in my life. I dropped out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, feeling too distanced from the people I wanted to work with, and enrolled in Malcolm X, one of Chicago’s community colleges. It was during my semester there that I learned how to listen to the views of my neighbors on they ways they viewed American history (American history course), the use they believed they had for basic math skills (math course), their opinion of public schools their children and siblings attended (education course), and they way they raised their children (child development course). Their comments, discussions, and opinions taught me more about the needs of Chicago’s neighborhoods than any acclaimed urban planning course teaching the effects of poverty and joblessness could have. In all my years of education it was there, surrounded by my peers in community college, that I felt the most comfortable. The decision to follow my nose instead of the visible pre-paved path led me to community college, and then to Nicaragua. I came to Nicaragua with no expectations as to what I would find, but so far I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. However even here, surrounded by horse drawn carts and baskets filled with mangos, I am thinking of the neighborhoods of Chicago, and how what I’m learning here will help me once I return home. We do not become successful when we educate ourselves, we become successful when we use our education to serve others. While I am anxious and excited to return to work in Chicago, I know my chapter here is not over yet, and I have so much more to learn and experience. I am continuing to roll with the punches, go with the flow, and above all remain open to learn and grow.