Current Organizing Agenda:
Through its organizing work, APNC seeks to achieve systemic change on issues impacting the low and moderate-income communities in Albany Park and the surrounding communities of Irving Park, North Park, and West Ridge. Those issues currently include immigrant rights, affordable housing, education, youth rights, and access to affordable health care. In order to achieve social change, it is the goal of APNC to develop leadership at the heart of its organizing work through direct involvement in the creation and implementation of strategies in the community, and through research processes in which leaders develop a deep analysis of the problems affecting their schools and communities.
APNC?s organizing agenda is based on the needs of the community and is set by leaders who come from different ethnic, cultural, and economic background. Community residents are mostly low-income, working class immigrant families who have mixed immigration statuses or are first generation Americans. APNC leaders recognize that civic participation is one of the strongest tools to advance work around issues affecting the neighborhood. APNC?s work is critical to the broader organizing efforts towards bigger civic participation among immigrant communities in Chicago and across Illinois. In 2004 and 2006, APNC was part of the New Americans Democracy Project, a local Get Out The Vote campaign in which leaders registered over 1800 voters in the Albany Park and West Ridge neighborhoods. This year, APNC leaders plan to register 2,000 new voters and mobilize 5,000 voters to the polls in Albany Park and West Ridge over the course of 5 months leading up to the November election.
Immigrant and Refugee Rights Organizing Initiative: The Immigrant Rights Organizing Initiative was created to reform and create city, state, and federal policies that impact immigrant families living in Albany Park. Recently, as the debate over comprehensive immigration reform gains momentum, immigration leaders began a rigorous education campaign. During the largest marches in Chicago?s history, APNC brought over 1,200 residents from a diverse range of ethnic and religious backgrounds to voice their support for immigration reform.
APNC has had a number of significant accomplishments in the area of immigrant and refugee rights. APNC played a key role in getting Rep. Rahm Emanuel to become more accountable to his constituents on immigration reform by leading a public meeting in the 5th Congressional District with Rep. Emanuel and Rep. Luis Gutierrez. Over 500 Albany Park residents marched two miles to the site of the meeting. At the meeting, APNC leaders gave testimonies on access to higher education for undocumented students, family reunification, citizenship delays, and refugee funding issues, and an APNC youth brought the legislators to tears with her powerful story about her experiences as an undocumented high school student. As a result of this meeting and calls put into Rep. Emanuel?s office leading up to the meeting, he became an original co-sponsor of the STRIVE ACT (introduced by Rep. Luis Gutierrez). APNC also won disciplinary action for two police officers wearing border patrol hats who racially profiled an APNC youth leader, asked him about his immigration status, and proceeded to make racial slurs towards him. APNC held a march and rally at the 17th District Police Station to highlight the case and demanded that disciplinary action be taken against the officers in order to reduce the chances of the incident occurring again.
Emerging Communities Education Coalition: APNC?s Emerging Communities Education Project (ECEP) is a unique community organizing initiative, which brings together parents, teachers, students, and administrators to examine and tackle issues in public education. The ECEP?s main areas of concentration include increasing parental and student involvement within the public schools in the greater Albany Park area, addressing school quality issues, and winning more equitable allocation of resources to meet the needs of Albany Park school children. In the first years of organizing, parents won three new schools to relieve overcrowding, new playground equipment to replace dangerous and dilapidated equipment, and increased funding for after school programs. Following these victories APNC?s parent organizing team gained support from area teachers and administrators to form the Greater Albany Park Education Coalition (GAPEC) two years ago. Having conducted research on effective practices and school reforms to increase student achievement, GAPEC is a professional learning community consisting of the local high school along with seven of its feeder elementary and middle schools. GAPEC unites parents, students, teachers, and administrators around the school reform plan that APNC parents developed with input from teachers and administrators. This reform plan consists of: sharing best practices across schools, fostering distributive leadership within and between schools, increasing teacher input into professional development and education reform, increasing student support during transition years in education, and increasing parental and student input and involvement within local education reforms. Some initial results of this work were a first-ever professional development day that involved 6 area schools with 75 teachers present and parents and teachers developing a parent-teacher communications contract which the committee is working to gain support for from a broader range of teachers and administrators. Additionally, APNC has recently identified the issue of bilingual education as a central obstacle to the success of local elementary school students. Chicago Public Schools currently views bilingual education as a 3-year ?transition to English? program, but research indicates that not only are 5 years necessary for bilingual education programs to be successful, but also that ?additive? models are much more successful (i.e. programs that build upon and value students? native language abilities). APNC parent leaders have launched an organizing campaign around these issues and are currently building a long-term strategy for reform of bilingual education in Chicago.
Project Y/VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education): Since its inception in 2000, APNC has involved young people in its organizing work. In the beginning, however, youth leaders were involved alongside adults around issues that were of mutual concern. In the spring of 2001, youth leaders who were excited about the organizing expressed a desire to create a youth project that would specifically address the issues and concerns of young people in Albany Park. As a result, APNC hired its first youth organizer who worked with the existing youth leadership to create a youth council, renamed Project Y by its leaders, that has since engaged 800 young people in the Albany Park community. Project Y is an ongoing project, based on APNC?s commitment to expanding the collective voice of the organization.
Since APNC?S original organizing efforts around police harassment and school violence, the focus has been around the quality of education with a team of 25 students conducting participatory action research in their school regarding how relationships between students and teachers, and relationships between peers, impact the issue of school culture and teen violence in and around the school. Students conducted in-depth interviews with 20 teachers and 40 students, and as a result of the research findings, won a commitment from Roosevelt High School administration to make the improvement of student-teachers relationships a priority in the coming year. As a result of this success, APNC was able to come together with six other organizations to form VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) to take the youth organizing work that individual groups had been doing around high school reform to a higher level, and tackle the drop out rate across race and geographic lines. With VOYCE, Project Y has conducted research that will lay the foundation for a citywide organizing campaign to tackle the drop out rate at area schools. In the past year, Project Y has been able to increase the number of AP courses offered at Roosevelt High School.
Affordable Housing Impact and Policy Project: When APNC was founded in 2000, the primary housing issue that neighborhood residents were facing was slum landlords keeping their large multi-family buildings in disrepair. In response, APNC had a strong track record of success in organizing low-income tenants to win building improvements, and educating over 1,000 community residents on pathways to homeownership and normalized banking opportunities. Gradually, however, community residents and institutional leaders began to notice a change in the housing issues facing the community, as rents were beginning to rise to levels that were unaffordable for long-standing community residents. In 2002, APNC tenant-leaders conducted their own study, entitled ?Where Will Families Live? which revealed that the percentage of families that are rent-burdened is increasing over time, with 33% of families renting in Albany Park paying at least 50% of their income on housing costs.
To address this new issue of rising rents and condo conversions, APNC leaders developed the Affordable Housing Impact and Policy Project. The goals of the project are to develop community leaders to effectively organize around local and citywide affordable housing initiatives and to measure the impact that the affordable housing crisis and unbalanced development are having on the neighborhood.
APNC is very excited that after five years of organizing with the Balanced Development Coalition, Mayor Daley and the City Council have finally adopted an affordable housing set-aside policy, making Chicago the largest city in the country with a mandatory set-aside. While not a perfect ordinance, it represents a significant step forward in the ability of community groups to impact city policy, and APNC is leading efforts to ensure that the units created are accessible to community residents. Additionally, leading up to the passage of the ordinance, APNC secured commitments for 40 units of affordable housing in the 33rd ward through a local set-aside it had secured in 2004. Through numerous meetings with members of the Affordable Housing Preservation Compact and local Aldermen, APNC has paved the way to develop a strategy for organizing to preserve private market rental buildings in Albany Park and surrounding communities.
The current goal for the housing team is to preserve affordable rental units in the private market, as many are being lost due to condo development. Housing leaders are conducting meetings with local landlords to come up with a comprehensive plan to preserve existing rental units while also maintaining affordable prices.
Healthcare Task Force: Through a series of one-on-ones at area religious institutions in 2005, access to affordable healthcare and abusive billing practices by Chicago?s non-profit hospitals emerged as a key issue impacting low-income families in Albany Park and surrounding communities. Despite qualifying for free and reduced care at area hospitals, low-income patients were not being notified of their rights to free care and were being sent into collection proceedings for tens to sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a result, APNC leaders canvassed over 2,000 households and found hundreds of similar stories. Feeling community pressure, Alderman Mell put the issue of hospital accountability on the ballot in the 33rd ward in 2006 to gage the pulse of the community. In the months preceding the election, a team of 45 community residents worked tirelessly to educate community members about the issue and about the free care that is available at non-profit hospitals. The referendum passed with over 90% support and over 7,000 people voting. APNC is now working with other organizations in Chicago to organize around improving the provision of charity care at the county level.
