NeighborScapes

There are times, over the course of my NeighborScapes work, that I wish I could claim a Horatio Alger story. I can’t, though, not any more than any 23-year-old young adult without a trust fund can. That was my parents’ generation, who paid their own way through college from blue-collar  backgrounds. My mom was the one who grew up one of seven children in a family raised on the income of a welder from Ford motor company; my dad was the one who grew up the son of a POW, living on the second floor above an ethnic grocery. It is by virtue of their struggle and their financial decisions that I attended one of the most expensive colleges in the nation.

And it kills me to see them burn through their equity line of credit, to make sure that I launch into adulthood successfully. Not when it took them 25 years to build it, not when I have a brilliant, expensive sister in college right now, who will also need to become an adult very, very soon. I’ve put the brakes on that, and they’ll get another influx of money as soon as they sell the house, but I’m sick with worry for them in the meantime. Equity lines of credit are intended to be a last resort, a response to emergencies only.

Our camps are having mixed success. One is almost self-sustaining, and will become fully self-sustaining with the help of our fundraising, if we have just a few more kids (your donations are greatly appreciated). The other is a money sinkhole, with more counselors than kids. There’s talk that we’ll have to close that one down, and cut our budget in half. This means either laying off half the staff or cutting everyone’s hours in half.

It means either Amy or her brother Brian, both brilliant counselors, will have to go. Or it means that Maureen, who has the most heartwrenching story of a NeighborScapes Civic Leadership Corps member I’ve ever heard, will have to stay in dangerous circumstances a while longer, or take a job at Quiznos and try to work her way out.

What I must make absolutely clear about a 50% budget is that it necessarily means that one out of every two people supported by that budget has to go. Amy or Brian. Or it means half for everybody- that Maureen only gets to half-escape, half-rescue herself, which is hardly a rescue at all. It means that either Chris or sibling gets to transition to independence, and the other one doesn’t. The age of excessive shopping, of buying plasma TVs and I-Pads because they exist, is over. If you start cutting at this point, you’re cutting people.

Meanwhile, there’s rumor going around the back offices of many nonprofits that the state of IL will pass a six-month budget, and not call it that and hope to get by. On a statewide level, it’s Amy or Brian. Either Harvey or Posen gets to have a clinic for low-income populations, either Alsip or Matteson gets to have a major nonprofit to promote behavioral health. And that means that camp staffers, free clinics, and major nonprofits whose resources have already been both thinned and stretched past capacity to meet the current climate, will see their work per hour doubled or their pay halved. They’re already running on equity lines of credit as it is to pay their staff and keep their doors open. Asking more of them will kill them.

This is a crippling situation. And, as arrogant as I can be about the solutions I identify to big problems, this time I’m at a loss. I’m too busy asking myself, Amy or Brian? Harvey or Posen? Or do we see NeighborScapes, the state of IL, my family, go bankrupt trying to take care of both?

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.