Communities create quality of life plans to bring change

LISC Chicago will partner with the Far South Chicago Coalition to create a quality of life plan. Photo courtesy of LISC Chicago
LISC Chicago will partner with the Far South Chicago Coalition to create a quality of life plan. Photo courtesy of LISC Chicago

Communities create quality of life plans to bring change

BY TIA CAROL JONES

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Chicago has chosen to partner with neighborhoods on the South and Far South Sides of Chicago to create comprehensive quality-of-life plans.

The goal of the partnership is to help bring equitable change to these neighborhoods.

Throughout the next six months, LISC will support to these communities through asset mapping, which helps organizations determine what resources are present in a community and what is needed to enable more capacity building.

Other LISC support includes collaborating with advisory committees and establishing outreach campaigns in the communities where the quality of life plans will be created.

The quality of life plans have led to more than a billion dollars in investments for communities. Planning might take three to four months, then the vision would be published, and working groups would be convened.

After a year, a reflection and assessment would take place. The aim is that each plan would exist for three to five years and include renewal phases.

Jake Ament is the Director of the Neighborhood Network at LISC. Ament said there were 11 different applications from a wide range of neighborhoods. “They [the community organizations chosen to do the work] brought the strongest group of stakeholders together, so there’s a really wide and diverse set of folks,” he said.

Ament said in South Shore, there’s several different coalitions who have been doing planning and organizing work on different issues and they’ve really come together much more in the last year. “They want to use that quality of life plan as a way to unite that vision into one comprehensive vision that includes all of the work they’re doing to make sure there’s not gaps in what they’re trying to achieve,” he said.

Ament said with the Far South Chicago Coalition, there was a lot of work already done in different places around the community. “They really saw the quality of life plan opportunity as a way to create the table [and] bring everybody together. So, they’re starting from more of a blank slate in terms of the plan,” he said. “It’s a big group of folks who have an extreme amount of enthusiasm to take this opportunity to work together, to be able to create that vision for a community and use that as a way to drive resources, and help make things happen in the Roseland, Pullman, [and] West Pullman area[s],” he explained.

Ament said there are also big opportunities already planned for these communities, which include Invest South/West and the Amazon Distribution Center.

LISC will provide operating support to the organizations’ fiscal agent so they can hire a community organizer. They will provide a $30,000 pool for early action projects, which will be able to jumpstart some immediate opportunities with seed money. LISC will train organizations on how to host big community meetings, as well as how to do community engagement.

“Everyone’s got their own style, so we always adapt to how the community groups are doing that, but we try to equip everybody with a set of tools so that they’re not having to reinvent the wheel every time,” he said. “Hopefully, down the road, they’ll have some best practices they can use down the road.”

Lauren Lewis is the Assistant Program Officer of the Neighborhood Network at LISC. Lewis acknowledged that LISC is also looking at ways community organizations can engage the community virtually in “more creative ways,” during COVID-19. “We’re getting a lot of advice from our lead consultants on the different platforms, like zoom and [from] other virtual meetups,” Lewis said. “It really depends on what the community wants,” she added.

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