Unfortunately, lives change, and for many of our children, participants and staff, NeighborScapes is one of the few permanent things in their lives. Daniel, one of our greatest success stories, graduated the program, entered college, had health insurance, was in a year-long relationship with his girlfriend, and had a part-time job that paid enough to support himself- and was ready to take on the role of mentor to this generation of participants. A week later, he lost all of that, because life happens and sometimes people fall into losing streaks. Meanwhile, Rosa, one of our staff, had transitioned from NeighborScapes to a full-time job in a field that would lead directly into grad school- but lost it, because life happens.

Most funders would consider these impermanent gains, symbols of NeighborScapes’s failure as a program. But NeighborScapes can’t fix in a summer what could take years to happen, and we aren’t a magic bullet to fix all of our participants’ and staff’s problems from the moment of first contact. We can give people the ring and the lantern, but life happens, and sometimes people need bailing out.

I think one of the most enduring roles that NeighborScapes plays is that of an elective family. Our tiers of mentors and our personalized career services offer participants and staff something that they may never have seen before, and our “once in, always in” ethos provides enough security for participants to take calculated risks for personal growth. It’s still very much a new family; budget is tight, and we’re figuring out how to pay our bills. But having enough security to take those calculated risks is where we get our power.

We’re always grateful to donors, whose commitment to community, family, mentorship and growth makes this possible and eases some of our financial worries. And we’re working hard to chase the bigger contracts, the equivalent of temporary jobs. But I’m feeling good about where we stand, for this summer. The great thing about forever narratives is that commitment to them is the strongest thing they have going- and everybody here is committed to what we do.

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.

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The school year is just past half over, and most consulting firms have already hired. Grad schools won’t get back to you until April, or as late as May. And, if you are a fourth year and don’t have your next steps lined up yet, you’re probably sweating.

The scary truth is that work as we know it has changed dramatically since the economy bottomed out. Only 24.4 percent of 2010 college graduates who applied for a job had one waiting for them after graduation (up from 19.7 percent in 2009). The average job search takes 8-10 months of full time, dedicated effort, and experienced professionals are going 2+ years without work, using social services to be placed in entry level and menial jobs to pay their bills, or dropping out of the work force altogether from fatigue. The decks are stacked against recent college grads, and even more, as levels of education decline.

Even the college grads that do find traditional work, are finding much more brainless work at salaries far below their pre-2008 levels (and generally starting at ¾ of the rate of an entry level truck driver). This is particularly powerful in its long-term effects. A recent New York Times article reports that “when jobs are scarce, more college grads start out in lower-level jobs with lower starting salaries. Academic research suggests that for many of these graduates, that correlates to overall lower levels of career attainment and lower lifetime earnings…The pat answer is that college students should consider graduate school as a way to delay a job search until things turn around, and that more high school students should go to college to improve their prospects… For many undergraduates, especially those with large student debts, graduate school would be prohibitively expensive. And while more than half of this year’s high school grads are expected to be enrolled in college in the fall, most will have to work to help pay the bills. For them, college is not a retreat from a bad job market; a bad market is an obstacle to a college degree.”

In summary, there’s barely any work, the jobs that are available pay poorly and offer little room for growth, and education buys progressively little as time goes on.

However, the flipside of this is that the ground is fertile for a new wave of entrepreneurship and small business creation. Established organizations are closing, creating room in the market for new organizations, and while the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is running out, it has inspired a new wave of job creation opportunities for those savvy enough to turn a stone into soup. Chris Furuya of NeighborScapes: Workforce Development and NeighborScapes: Social Good walks you through creating a job you’ll love doing, while making a living as you do it and identifying clients that are delighted to pay you.

Chris Furuya is a University of Chicago alumna, class of 2009, and previously of Snell House. She has completed an AmeriCorps VISTA/LeaderCorps year through the United Way and Aunt Martha’s Youth Services and Aunt Martha’s Health Care Network as a community advocate and program assistant with heavy grant writing and young adult/employment experience. Her work through NeighborScapes’ workforce development program has placed hard-to-employ young adults in jobs specifically tailored to their interests and skills, offering a living wage and career development opportunities, and mobilized high skill workers to volunteer their way into full-time employment. Meanwhile, her work as program affiliate and primary grant drafter at Metro Alliance Consulting/NeighborScapes: Social Good has brought poverty-alleviation, community development programs to under-served Chicago south side and southland communities. Chris is currently a Research and Development Associate at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and an Associate Consultant at LM Strategies. Chris continues to work with NeighborScapes on a project-specific, interest-driven basis. Chris has previously published articles on job creation and career development in Ms. Career Girl, Monster and Excelle.

And, over the course of my grant writing experience, I have indeed learned a lot about what makes nonprofits function. A staggering proportion of them cater to the grant, fulfilling the expectations of whoever promises to keep their doors open and their salaries paid. All of the grant writing training I’ve had, has told me to write the grant by promising to fulfill each of its terms, and do it cost effectively.

The problem with this, is that it creates a culture of thousands of cookie cutter programs vying for limited (and shrinking) federal funding contracts; the effect is replicated in the hundreds across State contracts and in the tens across County ones. The bigger private foundations see the same effect, in proportion to the degree of detail their proposals ask for. Requests for Quotes (RFQs) tend to be pretty specific in the activity they want the recipients of their awards to perform, and if an applicant fails to make those promises, that applicant is Seldom Offered Licensure (S.O.L.).

This frightening reality often makes the more hefty, established nonprofits that really could drive meaningful, sector-wide change, paralyzed and less able to enact this change. Instead, they strive to always do what they have always done, but better and cheaper and for more people. This is good, if what they are doing is sensitive to the needs of the surrounding community and the modern era. But it is very, very bad, if, say, Washington DC or Springfield, IL do not know the needs of Dolton, IL, and don’t know what questions to ask. Or, if a nonprofit in Tinley, IL designs a financial literacy program in 2001, the cornerstone of which is “buying a home is always a good financial investment”- and relies on the grant to pay its people, and fears changing the curriculum for ear of losing the grant, to the point that it runs essentially the same program by 2010.

The NeighborScapes philosophy is to always do one better than the grant asks for. This is smart, from a competitive angle- an application that promises 110%, and a nonprofit that has been coached to perform what it has promised, will almost always have a strategic advantage over those who only promise to do what’s asked of them, all else taken equally. It’s smart, because it gives back to the funder- not only in supplying the funder with feet on the ground to carry out the funder’s mission, but with a deeper understanding of the social goal the nonprofit and the funder share. And it’s smart, because it preserves the diversity, individuality, and nuance of the individual nonprofit applying for the grant. If, after all the boxes are filled, there’s still room in the margins- a nonprofit is free to add whatever to the margins it pleases, so long as it believes this extra will also please the funder. And, you know, that the RFQ has not specifically forbidden such margin doodling.

It’s why I’m sitting in a borrowed office today, far past when the regular tenants of the miles of cubicles surround me have gone home, busting All Services Securable to bring in yet another massive federal grant with draconian expectations. I’m an hourly employee, my job doesn’t offer benefits, and I’m making far below my worth in a for-profit company. But I love my job.

I think it’s because NeighborScapes takes the same philosophy for its youth- and its staff. Yes, I’ll design a GED program for Yasmine- but if Yasmine wants to be a CSI, I’ll design a GED program catered to getting her into crime-solving. Karen wants a job with benefits and health insurance, to support her family- but also loves numbers? Okay, let’s put her on a career track, not just somewhere that will take care of her basic needs. Let’s preserve the artistic leanings of the youth who come to us looking for menial jobs that will pay regularly, let’s make businessmen out of hustlers, let’s make scholars out of students and advocates out of earnest individuals.

People- and organizations, especially nonprofits- are complex and nuanced and beautiful. And I’m so glad to be able to help keep them running- and keep them remembering what it’s like to be themselves.

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.

Ariel only got it halfway, though. It’s not enough to just collect the junk; you have to fix it, shine it, make it do things. It’s not enough to demand an answer of Scuttle for what the items did; you have to use them, and teach others to use and value them, too.

My living space, alas, looks a lot like Ariel’s cavern. I love books, and show my love of them by collecting them constantly. My library would look a lot like the Beast’s, if the Beast had no taste for presentation; the shelves are crammed with books without any real governance, and the space in between is filled with other miscellaneous bric-a-brac that is  both supremely useful-someday, and presently quite useless.

The key to this collection compulsion is that every item I collect symbolizes possibility. With the yarn, I don’t know yet what I will make, but I know it will be beautiful because I value my skill at creating things. With the books, I don’t know yet what they will contain, but I will almost certainly someday discover it.

Figuring out what makes a good nonprofit run, and then doing those things, feels very similar. A good grant provides governance, and a skeleton of how goals should be achieved- but deliberately leaves the entrails out. It’s up to the grant writer to invent things like the heart, the lungs, and the liver. Even if the appendix isn’t strictly necessary, it’s usually good to include it just in case.

I like discovering things. Discovering talent, discovering possibility, and cultivating it to bring it to bear fruit. I believe that the strongest tenant of environmentalism and the strongest tenant to social change is to waste not, and there’s so much out there that, with some repairs, a good scrubbing, and a coat of polish, can run far beyond anyone’s expectations.

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.

But there’s a certain charm to Hanukkah, that comes from more than just being the Jewish holiday that’s chronologically closest to Christmas that also involves exchanging gifts and lighting candles. I’m overcoming the irony of a nonprofit that focuses on green jobs and a Green economy celebrating a festival of oil. Instead, I look at it, as with everything, from the perspective of nonprofit operations, where using one day’s resources to last eight is the kind of holiday miracle that our funders expect us to perform regularly.

Giving us one day’s resources to last eight is impossible. It’s insulting. It defies science and common sense and spits in the face of good work. It takes overworked, underpaid employees and demands that they do ever more, work ever harder, to meet need rising like a tsunami with resources washing away like sand.

This, I think, is missing the point of the miracle. It is a superhuman accomplishment to do eight days of work with one day of oil. It is superhuman to achieve in six months what should take a year, it is superhuman to meet 2010 (or 2011’s!) needs with resources at 1990 levels. There is no science or logic to it. I want to throw up my arms and quit.

But, always, something comes along. Prairie State offers us a partnership with YES right when the NeighborScapes network has been exhausted for summer fundraising. HCI pays us when our operating funds are right about to dry. A new van is donated right when the possession or absence of a van will make or break our summer camp, a high-skill volunteer with specifically the skills we need shows up on our doorstep a day before we need them. A partnership with National Able brings us Sandra, right when we need her most- even though we’ve tried to reach out to National Able for months before.

I’m educated. I like to operate with certainty and science. I like to look before I leap, plan for the worst, have a back-up strategy AND an exit strategy. But that’s not the funding environment I find myself in, nor the kind of nonprofit I work for. With the economy so unstable and NeighborScapes so new, sometimes I only get one night’s worth of oil.

But NeighborScapes is a lighthouse to too many people for me not to keep the candle burning. So maybe I’ll learn from my Japanese heritage and study a little Kaizen, working towards constant improvement in myself, my work, and those around me. Maybe I’ll honor my white grandfather who spent forty years in a factory for Ford, and see my work as one powerfully important step in a much larger picture. And maybe, during the winter Holidays, it’s the time of year for Hanukkah Miracles to happen.

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.

Kelly Evans from Hire Learning runs a tight ship. She takes an innovative approach to job training, and runs the kind of program that should rightly be replicated across the greater Chicago area, if not wider audiences. She is the kind of shrewd, fast-moving, strategic start-up executive director that all startup executive directors should aim to be. And I can easily see Kelly Evans being the next Gary Leofanti and Hire Learning being the next Aunt Martha’s.

Hire Learning has a lot of overlap with NeighborScapes. We serve much of the same population, doing many of the same or similar services. Hire Learning is headquartered in the same town that NeighborScapes’ board president and two board members live in. And, according to conventional wisdom, we should be competitors, and I am a fool for saying that Hire Learning will catalyze your dollars and volunteer hours to enact a far more powerful and lasting change than almost any nonprofit I’ve seen in the Southland.

But Hire Learning knows something that most other nonprofits in the Southland do not know, and this will be the key to their exponential growth. Hire Learning needs only Kelly Evans’s shrewd interview of a potential partner and her Board’s approval, before she will throw the full and growing heft of Hire Learning’s capacity into that strategic partnership. Hire Learning is an engine catalyzing other organizations’ growth, and uses the goodwill that it builds up and the collaborative fundraising that results to drive its own growth. Hire Learning helps itself by helping others.

This has been juxtaposed recently in our application for a Federal grant. Hire Learning was brought to the table two days before Thanksgiving and had a letter of commitment detailing specific offered in-kind services by Tuesday before the holiday. Other, far more established nonprofits with far bigger operating budgets, who have the full cost of the federal grant in the bank as cash reserves, took a far slower approach, and required a full month and the absolute guarantee of a subgrant in the case of winning the federal grant before making the same commitment.

This, I think, will be the key to who survives in the face of an IL budget crisis. I’ve seen the United Way numbers, and know that offices will close, staff will be laid off, hours of operation will shrink, and it’s very likely that some of the more unstable nonprofits will halt operations altogether. But Hire Learning is going to go for broke, making the dream happen for other startup nonprofits, strategically selected by a shrewd executive director with an eye for explosive growth. Maybe some of those nonprofits will be selfish with that money. But maybe subgrants and goodwill built up by Kelly’s efforts will translate to capacity building for Hire Learning, and be the route to Hire Learning’s true potential. I hope so. NeighborScapes is taking the same route. Kelly is an inspiration to how I understand nonprofits in the Southland, and I think Hire Learning and NeighborScapes share a lot of ideology.

So, here’s to Kelly Evans and Hire Learning, and a paradigm of collaborative growth. I trust Kelly Evans and Hire Learning to catch me or mine when they need it, and be a model for other start-up nonprofits to do the same. And, Kelly? We’ve got your back, should you ever need us.

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.

Of these five, Jawan stands out particularly. While the others would write back to me maybe once a week, Jawan would send very short letters every day, and pack content into those letters. I could tell that receiving mail from somebody really made a difference in his life. We must have exchanged a good fifteen letters a month, which was impressive, since they were written outside of class time but during the school day; he was writing them during his lunch hour or recess or free class time. And he was puzzling through the letters when my mom wasn’t around to remind him of the tricky words. It may be my memory and the nostalgia playing in, but I think his vocabulary grew, too, for the few months I worked with him.

Mid-March, he disappeared. We still don’t know what happened to him; he just stopped showing up to class one day. My mom and I frantically combed the news, but the teacher and principal said that, when a young, very poor, low-skills Black boy stops showing up to class one day, nobody thinks much of it; he’s moved, or started going to school with a relative, or something.

I don’t know if the school ever tracked him down, or if he ever returned. I had bonded to this child, and was badly shaken by his abrupt disappearance and by the way the district took it in stride. I finished up the year with the rest of the students, and then switched to frequent but not sustained one-off  volunteering through a local youth group instead.

By the time I was eighteen, I was back in the classroom, again, this time through my college. Twelve hours a week, I was providing support to a crowded Bronzeville classroom, either in helping students concentrate from across a sea of heads, or taking individuals or small groups out into the hallway to catch up on remedial skills. I must have spent upwards of sixty hours teaching Kendra the differences between b, d, p and q, which, let me tell you, was NOT made easier by the rhyming of the first three of those. Seven months later, Kendra had about an 80% understanding that letters have shapes, names, and sounds, and that you need to know all three to make and read words- but that, once you do know how to make a word, it’s really easy to make lots of other words by just changing one letter. It was a stressful job, and a frustrating job, but it was a fun job, and a fulfilling job, and I returned to the program my second year, to be placed at a different school.

I was nominally placed to teach fourth graders how to write stories. I wound up in a first grade class, again teaching remedial students basic shapes, colors and letters. I spent nearly every day working with Angel. I say “nearly” because Angel was missing from class about one day of every five. Angel was widely picked on by her classmates, and would respond by hitting or biting them, then be punished by the school, resulting in a note home. The next day, she would stay home, and the day after, she would come back with a note that she had been sick. The teacher and I suspected that something was up, but we guessed Angel’s mom, who tended to be a strict disciplinarian, either kept Angel home as punishment or to give her some time to cool off and give her classmates some time to forget. It didn’t work, of course; the classmates considered Angel somewhat wild and continued to pick on her, and Angel continued to respond the only way she knew how.

I found Angel to be a sweet girl who sincerely wanted to learn. She was a shrewd negotiator for candy or treats, and my barter system to teach her to trade correct flash cards for treats or toys was constantly under assault from her attempts to leverage more rewards per card. She was a cuddle junkie and had absolutely no problem drawing me picture books and telling me stories to go with the pictures.

Early April, Angel, too, disappeared. She left on the day after a fight, so teacher and I expected her back two days later, but she failed to show up. The teacher, too, assumed Angel had transferred to a different, maybe better, school. While I was again devastated by our inability to follow up and find her, it didn’t hit as hard as the first time, and I continued to work.

Angel came back a month and a half later, with trips of taking a sailboat out to sea. She stayed with the classroom the rest of the year.

Last year, I met Tamara. Tamara was an enthusiastic, together woman who was also doing a year of service, while taking care of her son, maintaining her house, and looking at continuing in her line of work after the service program was over. We became instant, and good, friends, played off each others’ ideas for improving the program, ourselves and each other, and assisted each other’s job searches as much as we could. Even though our work sites were a good forty-five minutes away from each other’s, we would make time at least once or twice a month to have dinner together and make plans. But in February, Tamara’s expenses became far higher than her income, and she stopped being able to do things like get to work and continue to be paid, or keep her son in day care while she worked. Her job relied on her ability to be on site and not have a five-year-old on site, so the goodwill she built up by being a stellar employee was quickly squandered by her inability to be a stellar employee when she had no resources to assist her, and she failed to complete her year of service. She was missing from my sight, her supervisor’s sight, and her colleagues’ site for months at a time, and when she came back, it became a regular thing that I would do a month’s worth of laundry and dishes for her, clean her house, feed her son, and negotiate her back to work. Her car eventually died, and that’s when she dropped out of my life.

Megan is eighteen. She comes and goes from NeighborScapes. She has no car and her housing isn’t always stable, so she works enthusiastically when she’s back but is gone for long stretches of time. She’s trying hard to find a sustainable job, move out of her parents’ house, while still making responsible decisions about her personal life, her education, and her career. She’s by far one of the most responsible eighteen-year-olds I’ve ever met, fighting hard to be an adult when she has almost no resources to make the process any easier.

There’s a lot of talk around my operations through NeighborScapes about cradle through college covenants of care, of forever narratives, of being reliable and constant. It’s painful and confusing and frustrating to invest in someone, while always remembering that they can disappear from your life and you may never be able to follow up or find out what happened to them. It’s incredibly difficult to structure a continuum of care, from teaching Angel her colors and letters to teaching Kendra her alphabet to teaching Jawan to read, while also providing a good first job for Megan and supporting Tamara as she gets a job that can support her, her home, and her son- while also planning for large pockets of time in which Tamara has no car, in which Angel has disappeared, and also planning for the possibility that Jawan will disappear and not come back.

But this source of stability may be one of few sources of stability in their lives. Tamara knows she can rely on me to cheer her up, pick her up, loan her a pair of boots long enough that she can get a grasp on her bootstraps. We do not give up on Kendras that simply cannot understand alphabets. We do not give up on Angels who don’t understand peaceful conflict resolution. And we don’t give up on CLCs that have made mistakes in their lives, or don’t know routes to good jobs, or who need guidance and support.

Megan called me today. She’s back in town, and is looking for work. I have sustainable housing to offer her, as well as some leads to jobs that will put the housing within her income range and that she can access by public transportation. That’s what I do; I connect people to resources and provide follow-up, sustained care and support until Jawan is reading, until Megan is working, until Tamara has a career.

Welcome back, Megan. And Jawan, if you’re reading this, look me up. I still owe you a letter. You’d be about nineteen by now.

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.

I’ve seen businesses fold and I’ve seen friends go homeless.

But that will not happen to us.

Our 501(c)3 letter came in the mail today. This is an enormous step in the growth of the organization. While donations to NeighborScapes have previously been tax-deductible by virtue of our relationship to GoodCity, the presence of our own 501(c)3 is like the presence of our own driver’s license. We’re sixteen and not adults yet, but damn, it feels good to drive.

Monday, we will be bolstered by four highly educated, highly skilled volunteers, interns, and mission-driven people working for us for little to no pay. One of them is a microfinance guru with experience leveraging minimal dollars to prompt maximum growth. One of them is a master at personal outreach, excellent at talking to people and communicating the NeighborScapes mission and goals. One of them is a veteran of Snell-Hitchcock’s Scav Hunt team, undefeated in four years at leveraging unusual items or skills from invested communities; she, specifically, is charged with ensuring full compliance with a List of items to be obtained, while assisting in liasoning with staff. And one is a serene, sweet girl who believes in the NeighborScapes mission and wants to help out. They are joined by two other, younger volunteers, who are familiar with the Wacker Park and Rich Central area and want to assist in growing the organization.

The Youth and Summer Jobs Bill has made it to Congress, but it hasn’t passed yet. I’m a bit superstitious about naming the baby before it’s born, but if you could call your Congresspeople and ask them to support the Closing Tax Loopholes Bill, we’d really appreciate it. Doesn’t matter where in the contiguous US you are, call them. (If you’re not in the contiguous US, but any of your contacts are, tell them to call THEIR Congresspeople.)

We’ve passed out a lot of fliers. We’ve measured a lot of windows. We’ve scrubbed toilets, we’ve filed things and licked envelopes and built furniture and kept a schitzophrenic internet line going.

We’ve talked to Mayors. We’ve talked to Legislators. We’ve talked to the heads of nonprofits, major for-profit corporate social responsibility representatives, principals, superintendants.

We are exhausted, and we are now delirious with hunger. But I’m starting to smell bread.

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.

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.