Da’Sean Hillsman was 17 when he became a father in the late ’90s. By 2000, his mother had died, leaving him to make sure he and his siblings — two younger sisters, and a disabled older brother who survived being shot in the head at age 20 — stayed together.

To do that, Hillsman said, he made the choice to provide for his family by selling drugs.

“No one was hiring me,” said the now 45-year-old father of seven. “I became a new father. Three years later, my mother passed away. I had two kids, three siblings and no job. What else can I do? Either get food stamps or rob? I made the choice … to take care of my family … make sure my siblings were taken care of because I couldn’t allow them to be separated. That’s something my mother wouldn’t have wanted. Dad was alive, but wasn’t really there, so I was the man of the house. So I made the choice to make some money to keep them together.”

Hillsman said the “fast money” was plentiful, but he would eventually land in federal prison, sentenced to 10 years. Before all of that, Hillsman was looking forward to attending Grambling State University. But life happened — and he encountered circumstances similar to those faced by many in the Chicago area without resources, means or wealth.

These issues were at the center of a recently released study, “The Color of Wealth in Chicago.” Produced by the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School in New York City and funded and released in partnership with The Chicago Community Trust, the study shows how race and ethnicity impact homeownership, access to financial tools and resources, incarceration, medical or education debt, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disparities across groups are stark. According to the study, data collected in 2022 showed Chicago’s white families have the highest median net wealth ($210,000), while typical Black families report no wealth ($0). Chicago’s U.S.-born Mexican families have 19% ($40,500) of a typical white family’s wealth, while foreign-born Mexican families have 3% ($6,000) and Puerto Rican families have 11% ($24,000).

As for median asset values, Black families have $20,000, foreign-born Mexican families have $26,000 and white families have $325,500.

The study also found Black families had the lowest estimated rate of home ownership at 34%, while white families had the highest at 72%, reflecting the city’s historic discrimination against people of color through redlining, racial covenants, a lack of checking or savings accounts, and payday lending, where unsecured loans with high interest rates are used as emergency financing that keeps borrowers in a cycle of long-term debt.

U.S.-born Mexican families, Black families and Puerto Rican families (29%, 30%, and 21%, respectively) were more likely to have medical debt than white families (18%). White families with a history of incarceration still had higher median family income ($75,600) than Black families with no incarceration ($38,000).

Community leaders said that although the statistics are tough to digest, they’re not surprising. Andrea Sáenz, president and CEO of The Chicago Community Trust hopes bringing the data to light will enable people to address the issues that are holding back so many families in Chicago. Similar racial wealth gap disparities have been seen in large metropolitan areas such as Boston, Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as evidenced by the work the institute has done in past years.

Kathleen St. Louis Caliento, president and CEO of Cara Collective Chicago, a nonprofit that helps people retain gainful employment, knows what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck. Her parents did, too. She said there is mental and emotional instability that comes with doing that. Caliento says getting folks an income does not solve all their problems, particularly when you think about the fact that many people of color are in debt, behind on payments and are victims of predatory lending.

“This report talks about the access that wealth gives you, the access that it talks about is education, health — all social determinants that are inextricably linked,” she said. “I think underscoring the importance of wealth helps people truly understand the systemic barriers that are in place particularly for folks of color who are unable to access those resources.”

Hillsman, senior manager of coaching and retention at Cara, has been working at the collective for 12 years, helping youths and the formerly incarcerated. After his involvement with the prison system, he has seen how those with felonies go for the “bottom of the barrel” jobs, thinking they are not candidates for better jobs.

“When I came out, even though I did all of this training while incarcerated, I always felt like I had this big X on my back,” he said.

But his competitive personality wouldn’t allow that X to dictate who he was or who he needed to be. He tells his clients the same thing. “Yes, we made mistakes, but I want people to start to give Black and brown people chances because we’re not all bad. We have a voice, we have skills to make this world a better place,” he said.

Darrick Hamilton, founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, and principal investigator of the study, said wealth is the foremost metric of financial security, a means for people to have agency, to be self-determining. Hamilton labels it a human rights economy — one where political, civil and social rights combine with economic rights to let a person be authentically free.

“You have to design, manage and implement policies in such a way that Black people are included, Indigenous people are included, because without that intentionality, the reasons why we have this wealth inequality is a political economy that is built to exclude,” he said. “We know the bootstrap narrative has never been true for any group. Our dominant framework believes if you simply get a college degree, find a partner, and stay out of trouble, that not only is that a pathway to social mobility, but also to the security associated with wealth.

“Now without a doubt, education in dual family households, and not being incarcerated is associated with better outcomes,” Hamilton said. “But when it comes to wealth, the bang for the buck of those activities for Black people is not a large gradient. The disparities persist and widen at higher strata. And here’s another point that may be shocking: Black families where they have done all those ‘right things’ have less wealth, typically, than white families that are at the lowest strata in our society, namely without a college degree.”

“The Color of Wealth in Chicago” study also surveyed people about potential policy proposals for addressing structural economic disparities. Data shows that public support for interventions on local and federal levels would have a meaningful impact on racial wealth inequities. Wealth-building options such as guaranteed income projects, a Medicare for All program, and baby bonds, which are government-issued trust accounts for newborns, garnered support from the bulk of respondents, including families at or above the median net worth.

Co-authors of the study say such policies, used in conjunction with meaningful redistributive measures that increase access to sustainable homeownership, can foster equitable entrepreneurial environments and build a justice system founded on prevention, moving the inequity needle.

“There’s always this sense that people in the corporate arena, people in government, and even those of us in the nonprofit arena, use data to make decisions,” said Karen Freeman-Wilson, president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League and former mayor of Gary. “We have to use this data to make decisions about where to deploy resources; that is my hope from this report.”

Hamilton says the disparities in wealth assets we see today are not natural. They are the result of government intervention, just like the precedent that was set with the federal government giving financial relief to households impacted during the pandemic, promoting economic security and providing resources for people to thrive.

“We know policies that can yield wealth,” he said. “We did it for white people, created a middle class where a good portion were able to generate wealth and pass it down from one generation to the next. That group didn’t emerge on its own. Chicago’s deep in historical pathways and of seeding capital and then providing a homeownership infrastructure to allow that capital to accumulate. So we know how to do this. What is problematic is that we have excluded certain people.”

Ross McDonald, aka Ro$$ Mac, a South Shore native, has been educating his community on financial literacy for years through his Maconomics platform and providing tools and actionable items to put that education in practice, such as investing in stocks, life insurance, venture capital and real estate. In early July, the Whitney Young High School alumnus held a wealth summit weekend in Chicago. A former hedge fund employee, McDonald said he started educating the community when he discovered the firm was promoting a portfolio of cash advance loan places, preying on people of color and those who are underbanked, with limited or no access to financial services and products.

“When you’re looking at where we’re at, there’s no ifs, ands or buts about it; this is all done systematically, on purpose,” McDonald said. By helping people interrogate their relationship with money, assisting them with budgeting and educating them on ways to build wealth through investments and improving credit, among other things, McDonald is doing his part to reverse the statistics found in the study.

“Distrust comes from valid reasons, whether we’re talking Jim Crow or the Freedman’s Bank, but how do we get past it,” he said, “because in order to get generational wealth, you’ve got to overcome generational trauma.”

Hillsman, a native West Sider turned South Sider, said “The Color of Wealth in Chicago” study saddened him because he said he fell victim to the the same barriers as other Chicagoans. While imprisoned, he learned from those jailed with him, partaking in programs offered inside.

When he got out, a friend led him to the Cara Collective. “I always wanted to do something to make sure that I got legit money,” he said. “I always tell people slow money is still money. With the slow money, you have to learn how to manage and budget.”

Hamilton wants to get the information in the hands of people who will agitate, advocate and promote pathways toward a different future. He knows that sounds pie in the sky, but he said that’s how to chart paradigm change. “What is clear from the report is that there is no amount of behavioral change within a group that’s going to be able to change this phenomena, except for politically organizing,” he said.

Hillsman just bought his first building, a two-flat in Washington Park. He plans to buy more buildings as investment properties, and is looking at getting into the stock market in the future, all in an effort to accumulate wealth.

“All of us want to be able to relax a little bit and have a nice bank account. This is Building 1,” he said. “I’m definitely going to try to get Building 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and beyond. It is a family building, something my mother always wanted.”

Originally Published: August 2, 2024 at 5:00 a.m.

The post Wealth in Chicago’s Black and brown communities was eroded intentionally by discriminatory policies, study finds appeared first on Cara Collective.

The persistent racial wealth gap in the U.S. continues to be a burden on Black and Brown Americans, as well as the overall economy, according to a study by McKinsey. It is estimated that its dampening effect on consumption and investment will cost the U.S. economy $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

Even worse, if no action is taken to address this, communities of color are on a pathway to hit zero median wealth in the coming decades—estimated by 2053 for Black households and 2073 for Latinx households, per Federal Reserve data.

While there is no simple solution to closing the racial wealth gap, one critical first step is committing to providing opportunities for career readiness for our disinvested communities.

For more than three decades, Cara Collective has worked primarily with individuals and communities that have historically and systemically been left without access to opportunities for gainful employment. Primarily, we work with Black and Latinx individuals (more than 93% of our participant population) from our South and West Side communities (North Lawndale, Englewood and Austin among the top).

We prepare individuals for careers through a combination of training that focuses on both professional skills-based readiness as well as socio-emotional wraparound support services. This helps our job seekers achieve long-term on-the-job success. Throughout our history, we’ve been able to place people experiencing poverty into more than 13,000 jobs, with a one-year career retention at more than 20 points higher than similar workforce programs.

Through this work, we’ve learned that if we are to really prepare individuals for gainful employment successfully, it requires partnership and collaboration.

As part of our model, we work with dozens of organizations and leading companies in a multitude of industries to provide career opportunities. These unique partnerships are a leading factor to our success in job placements, and yet, in recent years, we’ve asked ourselves an important question—what would it take to catalyze these partnerships to create an even deeper, more-lasting systemic impact?

Recently, Cara Collective launched our three-year strategic plan, “Access. Equity. Opportunity.” A key priority of this is to better leverage our partnerships (new and old) to create more inclusive career pathways and close the racial wealth gap in Chicago and beyond.

We’re doing this by working with employers on creating branded trainings, designed to give job seekers the skills and certifications to become more market-competitive. We’re doing this by working with companies to examine how to make their hiring practices more inclusive. And we’re doing this by working with other social-purpose organizations to create effective workforce development solutions.

One such partnership illustrating the success of this is our collaboration with BMO Harris on BMORE. Launched in late 2020, BMORE is designed to increase access to employment in banking and finance. Recruitment for BMORE focuses primarily on the Austin and Little Village neighborhoods in support of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Invest South/West initiative, which addresses economic disparity in key neighborhoods.

Two years in, BMORE is responsible for the creation of more than three dozen jobs in Chicago for individuals who previously felt excluded from careers in banking. Additionally, we continue to work with BMO Harris to fine tune and evolve the program to better meet the needs of job seekers based off observations and feedback received from them. The success of this is evident in the fact that BMO Harris has launched BMORE in two additional Midwest markets in 2022.

Preparing for and developing pathways to gainful employment for our Black and Brown communities is a critical step in solving the racial wealth gap. But creating lasting impact requires an investment from all of us—both in the individuals, and the ripple effect that happens as they achieve financial stability; and at the systems level by working with some of the largest national Fortune 500 companies. By bridging the gap between the two, only then can we begin building a stronger, more inclusive economy.

Kathleen St. Louis Caliento is president and CEO of Cara Collective, a 32-year-old workforce development enterprise based in Chicago that has placed people experiencing poverty into more than 13,000 jobs.

The post An Investment in Career Readiness is a Step Toward Closing the Racial Wealth Gap appeared first on Cara Collective.

Low-wage workers drove the record voluntary quit rates that defined the early days of the “Great Resignation,” switching to better jobs in industries raising wages. And they’re coveted in the current split-screen job market—where job opening rates remain highest in the food service, hospitality and heath-care sectors while layoffs mount among higher-paid workers in fields like finance and tech.

Yet despite that long-running script, employers still don’t seem to understand what frontline workers really want or how much help they need to navigate career opportunities at their companies, according to a new survey by McKinsey & Co. and Cara Plus, a division of the nonprofit Cara Collective.

The report, shared exclusively with Forbes, found that employers place too high a premium on “intangible benefits” such as employee recognition, time off and bigger job titles, the last of which ranked among the bottom five priorities for frontline workers but was near the top for surveyed managers.

As Andrew Davis, a partner in McKinsey’s retail practice, explains, “employers do over-index on certain things that don’t matter as much” to hourly workers.

In another example of a disconnect, employers ranked “supportive managers” as the most important aspect for career advancement, while frontline workers ranked it fifth. That could reveal managers’ own presumptions that low-wage workers value the same things they do. In an hourly role with high turnover rates or limited opportunities to interact with managers, the boss’s behavior may also reflect the reality that managerial training is less prioritized in frontline settings—or might not be as top of mind.

“The nature of frontline roles tend to be much more production-related,” said Sara Wasserteil, a managing director for Cara Plus. “Oftentimes, the incentives of the manager are [focused on] ‘you’ve got to go do your job’ versus ‘are they checking in on their team.’”

The report, which surveyed 2,154 hourly workers who make $22 or less per hour and 305 managers or H.R. leaders of frontline workers, comes at a time when more companies are recognizing that their path out of the labor shortage will likely involve both retaining and retraining low-wage workers. Another recent survey of 7,000 “deskless workers” by the Boston Consulting Group, for instance, found that 37% of these workers could leave their employers within the next six months.

The McKinsey-Cara report reinforced the fact that hourly workers are ambitious to move up the ladder. But two-thirds of frontline workers surveyed said they don’t know how to do it. The number was even higher among women, younger workers and those without a high school degree.

As employers remove college degree requirements from jobs that don’t need them, that increases the importance of investing in “upskilling” programs to move workers into higher-skilled roles and removing barriers to unemployment for underutilized groups such as those with a criminal record.

Giving extra support to those workers who need it most can have more impact than employers realize: The report found that frontline workers who had previously been homeless or “been involved in the criminal justice system” are 14 to 16 percentage points more likely than the average frontline worker to devote nonwork hours to improving their skills.

Employers and frontline workers did agree in the survey that pay and job growth opportunities were the top priorities. But the information channels and awareness of opportunities were quite different. While 41% of managers used company web sites to share information about career advancement, only 17% of frontline workers said they used such channels—or frequently discussed career advancement with colleagues.

That lack of awareness–and access–can extract a high cost. While 32% of employers said they offered tuition or outside education fee reimbursement, only 15% of the workers surveyed were aware of such benefits.

Workers at all levels want more tools and opportunities to advance their careers. Getting a shout-out from the boss or a gift card pales in comparison to online classes, coaching or real promotions that come with more responsibility—and tangible increases in pay.

“They’d rather say ‘give me an opportunity to take on a new responsibility,’ ” Davis says, than “getting an employee of the week [award] or a Starbucks card.” To keep hourly workers engaged, he adds, the starting point is transparency and communication. “There’s a huge opportunity for corporations to help them understand what support is out there for them.”

The post Tension On The Front Lines: Low-Wage Workers Want Higher Pay And More Training, Not Bigger Titles. appeared first on Cara Collective.

https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/jpmorgan-chase/1-in-3-us-adults-has-a-record-give-them-a-fresh-start.html?fbclid=IwAR0SY4bVSEinrFrkoAuKRQNXexDwfzw0Ihk3HFwh8mM2sBCyMORZF0unnvg

The post 1 in 3 U.S. Adults Has a Record. Give Them a Fresh Start. appeared first on Cara Collective.

Unemployment has been a major issue throughout the pandemic.

Stay-at-home orders and supply stresses caused layoffs. Fraudsters took advantage and exploited the system. Those who needed help had trouble accessing it: Hotlines were overburdened, and COVID restrictions meant state unemployment offices remained closed.

The Illinois Department of Employment Security kept its offices closed, in part because of security threats from people apparently furious about it all.

That’s changing: IDES announced last week that it’s opening three job centers including one in Harvey, and announced Wednesday that another three centers will be open to those who pre-book appointments, including a center in Pilsen.

It comes as certain business owners are desperate for employees.

The Illinois Retail Merchant Assocation’s Rob Karr said grocery stores have resumed normal operations, but customers now also expect pickup service, which has proven to be more labor intensive than originally assumed.

It’s similar for shops and restaurants.

“We’re seeing signs everywhere about narrowing hours or closing on certain days,” Karr said.

It’s expected that some of those hiring issues will lessen as extended unemployment benefits, pumped up because of the pandemic, will expire Sept. 4. That includes supplemental payments of $300 a week and benefits for gig workers normally not eligible. Other benefits will carry through Sept. 11.

There’s debate over whether the benefits are keeping away individuals who’d normally be applying for open positions.

A Wall Street Journal analysis found that job-growth is on par for states — Illinois among them — that continued the extended pandemic assistance until Federal Reserve’s September deadline, and those that ended the boosts earlier.

Karr said it’s hard to measure, though, because some states had less expansive shutdowns throughout the pandemic, whereas others, like Illinois, instituted tighter pandemic mitigations and restrictions.

President of the Cara Collective, Kathleen Caliento, said there may be a lot of reasons someone is unable to work or to return to work.

Cara Collective’s mission is committed to connecting employers with job seekers as means of eradicating poverty. 

“What we’re seeing is because our participants are facing complex issues beyond unemployment, including health care, child care, perhaps even issues and challenges with the criminal justice system. Those issues continue to post barriers for our participants as they’re trying to enter into the workforce,” Caliento said.

Employers likewise may be putting up barriers, such as unnecessary job qualifications when they’re searching to fill open positions.

“You exclude essentially about 68% of Black and about 79% of Latinx populations when you put ‘must have college degree.’ And so that’s a question that we ask: Does it actually require a college degree? What in the college degree is required for an employee to be successful in this skill set?’”  Caliento said.

Caliento said the Cara Collective is preparing for a return to in-office work, and an increase in those looking to be part of that comeback.

A Safe Haven Foundation is another nonprofit that takes a comprehensive approach to ending homelessness, including through job training and placement.

Co-founder and president Neli Vasquez Rowland said demand for services is at an unprecedented pitch.

She predicts a “reckoning” could be coming, with the end of increased unemployment benefits and the housing eviction moratorium ending in mid-September.

“(High unemployment and joblessness) is expensive for the entire ecosystem,” she said. “Every stakeholder loses when you have people that are not employed. It’s very expensive to our tax base to have to cover the cost of all the expenses of having people that are employable, if only we made the investment in them to get them employed.”

She said A Safe Haven is doing what it can to make sure people don’t fall through the cracks.

Sometimes that means serving as a sort of matchmaker for those who need work and those who need workers.

“As employers are aggressively trying to hire people and they’re finding a lack of applicants, we’re actually helping people that are seeking careers in those jobs,” Rowland said.

That can often mean providing more than job-skills training.

“We are working as fast as we can, working with as many employers as we can, because we do see the open positions. But just getting people job ready is part of the process that we do,” she said. “You can’t just take someone that’s in crisis and dealing with all of these underlying issues and getting their bearings and then put them in a job, when they’re dealing with a place to live and mental health issues and stress.”

Business groups have asked for Illinois to be more active.

A coalition of major business organizations including IRMA and the state and Chicagoland Chambers of Commerce sent a letter to Gov. J.B. Pritzker in late July citing their struggle to attract employees even as the state’s economy had largely reopened with pandemic restrictions phased out.

The letter said even with bonuses, higher wages and other steps, employers were unable to compete with the extended benefits.

“Before we lose any more economic ground, now is the time to reinstate normal unemployment insurance operations,” the letter said.

One ask: Using some of the remaining billions in Illinois’ share of American Rescue Plan Relief Act money to help shore up a deficit in the state’s unemployment trust fund — the fund that pays for unemployment benefits — that ballooned during the pandemic as out-of-work Illinoisians claimed benefits.

Karr says the fund’s facing its largest deficit ever, more than doubling to $4.7 billion.

The only other options to pay that debt down: Reducing benefits and raising taxes on businesses.

“Employers did their part, right – they suffered shutting down. Employees suffered shutting down. Employees’ benefits shouldn’t be cut. Employers shouldn’t have additional taxes placed on them. They did their part during the pandemic. It’s not as if it’s a ‘normal’ recession that was brought about by other economic factors,” Karr said.

Illinois lawmakers intentionally left billions of ARPA money unspent given that the feds expect it to last longer than a single fiscal year.

There’s pressure to use the money for any number of needs, and decisions won’t be made until fall at the earliest.

Another demand in the letter appears to be void at this point:

Business groups had asked for Illinois to reinstate a requirement that those receiving unemployment benefits continue to search for work by registering on the state’s IllinoisJobLink.com website.

“Unemployment insurance was never supposed to be an end. It is supposed to be a means of bridging someone from one job that they lost to another, even if it means learning new skills,” Karr said. “And so I think by having that work search requirement, the thought that was put in place decades ago, was that it encourages you to keep walking across that bridge.”

A spokesperson from IDES said as of Aug. 1, the state reinstituted the JobLink registration requirement for individuals submitting unemployment insurance claims.

Meanwhile – a state audit published in July found that IDES didn’t have proper checks in place as it awarded pandemic unemployment assistance benefits.

“Failure to accurately document PUA eligibility resulted in potentially ineligible claimants receiving benefits totaling” nearly $160 million, the audit found.

A bipartisan legislative commission voted to conduct another, more extensive audit into IDES’ handling of the pandemic unemployment benefits.

“We all realize in the first few months of the pandemic everyone was drinking water (from) the proverbial fire hose, but this is, this is outrageous,” State Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, said of audit findings showing benefits awarded without proper controls.

The Pritzker administration has taken other measures that could help to ease the employment gap, including expanding and making permanent financial assistance for low-income families in need of child care.

Cara Collective’s Caliento said the latest surveys show private payroll hasn’t increased at the levels expected, meaning that gap does persist.

The latest state and federal data put Illinois’ unemployment rate in July at 7%. That’s lower than the 12.4% in July 2020 – when pandemic restrictions were at a peak, but higher than the national rate of 5.4%.

Caliento said it’s clear that this is a job-seekers’ market, and those looking for employment are in the position to take positions that offer quality wages, perks, and supports child care and flexibility.

Helping those without jobs get gainful employment is “about work, but it’s not just about the work,” Caliento said.

“It’s about the power and purpose that comes from a job,” she said. “At Cara we’re obviously about more than helping folks find jobs, we’re about helping them find themselves. Helping them understand who they are is one of the critical pieces of work that we do.”

The post Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Set to End, Organizations Work to Bridge Employment Gap appeared first on Cara Collective.

https://tdameritradenetwork.com/video/rB4A-HumHPeBe6fbJQUAOg

The post Cara Collective CEO Talks State of the Labor Market with TD Ameritrade Network appeared first on Cara Collective.

A Chicago giving drive is looking for professional wear to donate to an organization that provides clothing to communities in need of interview or workplace outfits. NBC 5’s Patrick Fazio reports.

The post Making a Difference: Chicago Clothing Drive Looks For Professional Wear appeared first on Cara Collective.

The post BMO Harris, Cara partner up for a more inclusive Chicago appeared first on Cara Collective.

CHICAGO (WLS) — “The Road Up” follows four Chicagoans on their journey from struggling with addiction, homelessness and prison to independence with the help of a transformative program called Cara.

“I’ve been doing this for going on 18 years now, and I Have truly seen miracles happen, human beings’ lives being transformed,” said Jesse Teverbaugh, Cara director of student and alumni affairs. “For a long time we thought if we just threw a paycheck at someone, all their problems and everything would be alright, and they would ride off into the sunset and everything would be fine, but that’s not the case.”

Directors Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs found a film in the program.

“We’re totally blown away by what we saw, people sharing their stories, sharing in this incredibly supportive community,” Siskel said. “They’ve had real difficult roads and to see them persevere and get through that and triumph, it was really powerful to be there with them, to celebrate those with them.”

It wasn’t always easy to make the documentary. There were obstacles.

“These are people who were living in shelters, these are people who had a phone and had their phones disconnected, so staying in contact, staying connected over two years was probably the biggest challenge,” Siskel said.

If Siskel’s name sounds familiar, you’re not mistaken. His uncle was the late Gene Siskel, legendary movie critic who reviewed films with Roger Ebert.

“I think he would love the film, but I know that because of my involvement it would be very special,” his nephew said. “I wish we could have shared it with him.”

“The Road Up” debuts at the ChiTown Movies Drive-In in Pilsen on Saturday night, as part of the Chicago Film Festival.

The post ‘The Road Up’ explores how some overcome addiction, homelessness, prison with the help of Cara appeared first on Cara Collective.

Originally published in Crain’s Chicago

Our front-line workers are the ones who are leaving the safety of their homes, who often live in precarious housing themselves, rely on public transit, have challenges with child care, are blocking and tackling multiple and concurrent obstacles that are part of experiencing poverty in our country. They are the ones who are keeping us fed, clean and safe.

Might our dependence on this talent pool during this incredible time in our country make us truly see them for the assets that they are?

These workers, now deemed “essential” under the governor’s stay-home order, have overcome countless adversities that don’t pin easily to a resume, but manifest in lived experience that builds character, develops skills and creates a persistence and a resilience that carries the type of contribution for which I am infinitely grateful.

Make no mistake, I am also so grateful to our health care professionals, our scientists and our first responders. Their selflessness, quiet leadership and unrelenting commitment to public health is a profound and extraordinary expression of patriotism and duty.

But we must also recognize the rapidly emerging, and today widely unrecognized, leaders in our first line of defense—the janitors who do the deep cleaning of our commercial structures so business can resume, the grocery store and food service employees who keep the shelves stocked as best they can and get us checked in and checked out so our families can eat, and the sanitation crews who ensure our neighborhoods remain clean and safe. 

In Chicago, we call ourselves the city of broad shoulders—a riff off of the hard-working muscle of our city, the energy that courses through our veins with the momentum and the intention of the rolling Chicago river. This name evokes one of the most beautiful sentiments of a community—that I stand not because of my own two feet exclusively, but because I am boosted by the broad shoulders of those who came before me.

With that sentiment in mind, is it not time for us to re-examine how we value our fellow worker, for us to look for and recognize and realize the leadership in others, not the CEOs and the C-suite, but those on the front line? If we can work now to shift our perspective on where talent lies in our country, we can build the foundation for a more inclusive employment structure that could mobilize more people back to work.

The reality is that before we hit this incredible moment, the tight labor market was already widening the aperture on who employers would hire. Couple that with a burgeoning interest on the part of the private sector to not just do well, but do good in the process, and we were on the precipice of some real change.

This crisis doesn’t mean we should stop thinking the big thoughts—the thoughts that were the manifestation of our best selves, the best leaders we could be in this work, the leaders who would leverage the assets we have as a means to lift up the assets in others.

We had the will just a few moments ago. Hopefully we can get it back as we see—and benefit from—the front-line workers who keep us fed, clean and safe.

Maria Kim is president and CEO of Cara Chicago, a nonprofit helping those impacted by poverty find and retain jobs.

The post Our country’s talent lies with our essential workers appeared first on Cara Collective.