Shared Conversations for Social Change

There's a church in Lincoln Park that opened its doors during the 1968 Democratic National Convention to give protesters a place to escape the tear gas, eat, and sleep in a pew — no ID required, no questions asked. That instinct, minus the riots, is still the whole model behind Care for Friends, the Chicago nonprofit where I serve as chairman of the board, and it's what I talked about in this stage talk.

Chicago had two kinds of programs for homelessness: places that handed out food and coats with no follow-up, and rigorous, structured programs that actually changed lives but that the most vulnerable were too distrustful to walk into. We built the missing middle — a community meal served restaurant-style, in tables of six or eight, where a caseworker or a health navigator sits next to a guest without announcing who they are until trust is earned. Forty-six percent of one housing partner's clients now originate at our meals, and 80 percent of those people are still housed a year later.

The most effective distribution system for any resource, I've come to believe, is a trusted human relationship. Whether that resource is housing, a job, or a stack of Care Cards handed out on a sidewalk, the mechanism is the same: sit down, share a meal, let trust do the rest.