LIFT-Chicago 1 Running head: LIFT-CHICAGO

Organizational Action Research on Lift-Chicago

Meghan Donaghy, Adam Garrison, Mark Lamb, Jennifer Severyn, Tameer Siddiqui Loyola University Chicago

LIFT-Chicago 2 Background/Content In the fall of 1998, Yale University students Kirsten Lodal and Brian Kreiter founded LIFT, a growing movement to combat poverty and expand opportunity for all people in the United States. Both Lodal and Kreiter started out as active volunteers in a variety of child services programs but then noticed the difficult obstacles the childrens parents were facing. Parents were often working multiple low-wage jobs, paying their taxes, and sending their kids to school, yet still were unable to afford sustained shelter, food, and clothing for their children. LIFT was established with the intention of helping underprivileged adults through a variety of social services including finding jobs, securing housing, obtaining public benefits, and making connections with other social service agencies. With LIFTs first center firmly established in New Haven, Lodal and Kreiter soon discovered that student leaders on college campuses across the country were dialoguing about the same issues related to poverty and opportunity and were eager to get involved with these issues. Lodal and Kreiter recruited passionate student leaders to replicate sites of their organization around the country. LIFT now serves thousands of families each year in Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Today, LIFT has become one of the most active voices in the call to bring domestic poverty to the forefront of our nations consciousness (Our History). LIFT-Chicago focuses on five asset areasbasic necessities, employment/financial stability, housing, education and training, and health carethat are vital for individual and family success on the path out of poverty. By working one-on-one with LIFT volunteers to find jobs, secure safe and stable housing, make ends meet through public benefits and tax credits, and obtain quality referrals for services like childcare and health care, LIFT clients are able to

LIFT-Chicago 3 holistically address their immediate and long-term needs while making concrete steps towards realizing their greater dreams and aspirations. In the process of working toward their goals, LIFT clients develop an important internal toolkit for progress and resiliency that enables them to move forward independently and bounce back from challenges and setbacks. With the support of LIFT volunteers, clients strengthen their goal-setting abilities, problem-solving skills, knowledge of key community resources, self-confidence, and ability to advocate for themselves and their families (Path out of Poverty). Research Question Our community-based research project seeks to address the issue of housing. Firstly, we are interested in studying the prominent issues facing clients at LIFT-Chicago in regards to housing and what resources LIFT-Chicago volunteers can provide to their clients to best support the clients needs. The second part of our research project focuses on advocacy and how we can assist the clients, particularly with finding stable housing. By understanding the various issues that create problems for LIFT-Chicagos clients, we are better able to make a positive difference with efforts to enhance housing conditions. Our effort to make a lasting impact for the clients at LIFT-Chicago has come in the form of a telephone survey as well as a flowchart. The telephone survey we created has been used in an effort to speak directly with hundreds of LIFT-Chicagos clients regarding housing issues. Based on their responses, we were able to examine the issues carefully and then search for resources that would resolve the clients housing issues. For instance, many clients reported bedbugs in their apartments, so we researched low-cost agencies that can help resolve this problem. All of the housing issues we heard about from clients, as well as the resources we found to help resolve these issues, has been put into a tangible flowchart which the client will be able to access at the office of LIFT-Chicago.

LIFT-Chicago 4 This flowchart is imperative because currently, many LIFT clients are faced with housing issues that they cannot adequately resolve due to their economic situations and social position. For example, a client may complain to his landlord about a cockroach infestation, but the client has no social or financial power to convince the landlord to fix the problem. In such a situation, a client may be forced to move out of his apartment, which is expensive and time-consuming for the client and also does nothing to resolve the issue at hand, meaning someone else could move into that roach-infested apartment later. Even if the client does not move, he will likely have to silently stomach his shoddy living conditions with few other options, thus going without the basic human right of a decent place to live. This is why our research project culminates with a flowchart of resources, which LIFT-Chicagos clients may access. Such resources will help directly solve the clients housing issues and improve their present living conditions so that A) their homes are more adequate for a human to live in, thus fulfilling a basic human need, B) they do not need to go through the rigorous, costly, and time-consuming process of finding new housing that they can afford, and C) housing conditions will be improved for those who live there in the future. Data Collection To collect our data, we surveyed clients who had come into LIFT-Chicago in the past year regarding their own housing conditions (See Appendix). LIFTs site coordinator gave us a list of 282 clients to call, and we divided this list evenly among our five group members. Each client was called up to three times if he or she did not answer the phone. This experience demonstrated how difficult and varied this form of data collection can be. The two main challenges presented were that clients did not want to take the survey, which is rather typical of any phone survey, and that myriad phone numbers we called were disconnected or invalid. After

LIFT-Chicago 5 calling each client three times and thus determining we had the maximum number of responses possible, a total of 74 clients affirmed that they currently faced housing issues or had faced them in the recent past. The 74 clients who affirmed that they have housing issues reported 82 cases of housing issues in total. We broke down the reported cases into six subcategories: economic issues, bed bugs, pests, sanitation, safety, and appliances/aesthetics. Below are the six subcategories containing the specific problems of the reported cases, followed by a breakdown of the cases by number. Results and Findings It appears that only about a quarter of LIFT-Chicagos clients are in the midst of housing issues. The organizations clientele seems to come to LIFT in search of resources for different issues, most notably finding work, but this does not mean that housing issues are to be taken lightly. In fact, housing issues seem to go hand-in-hand with many other social issues. Of the 74 people who claimed to have housing issues, over a third of them cite economic woes as the source of their housing struggles. Present economic times are difficult, and it seems that the lack of available jobs in the market is one of the biggest influencing factors on the housing crisis. People are forced to either live in the place of residency of family members or in conditions that are sub-par at best. These places, usually SROs or apartments that are rather run-down, are where the other housing issues can be found. These include faulty appliances or aesthetic problems, such as plumbing, climate control in the building, the dcor, etc (See Appendix). The people residing in places with these issues often have a hard enough time making rent, let alone throwing out money for repairs for such problems, and the landlords rarely step in to help, so the

LIFT-Chicago 6 issues persist. One out of every five clients that reported housing issues claimed that appliances were the source of their concerns, if not one of several. Pests, bedbugs, sanitation, and violence were also issues of concern to the LIFT clients. The aforementioned dilapidated housing structures are host to a variety of creatures that, due to the inaction of landlords or inability to afford exterminators, force the residents to simply tolerate them and deal with them as they can. It is a horrific thought to have to share your home with cockroaches and bedbugs while being helpless against them, and yet roughly one out of nine Chicagoans live this reality. Once again, these issues tie back into the financial struggles faced by the clients, and unfortunately this was outside of our domain in regards to our research project. However, it is clear that residents have trouble affording the services to repair their housing or a better place of residency in general. Thus, we set out to find companies that would be willing to work with the organization in resolving these issues and that could be added to LIFT-Chicagos comprehensive resource guide. Implications The implications of our findings can be summed up simply as the housing issue is not a singular thing, but rather a web of interconnected problems that cannot be fixed by a simple, single cure-all solution. There are a plethora of problems faced by each client and they need to be deconstructed layer by layer, and the underlying causes and issues each need their own resolution. To take all of them on would be overwhelming, and while some of the issues may overlap either in action or between clients, any organization that attempted to take them on would be spread too thin, both on manpower and time.

LIFT-Chicago 7 Making changes and fixing the problems people face isnt going to be a fast or glorious process. However, if it is taken one step at a time and each issue is actually solved rather than given a Band-Aid solution, the housing problems people face will be greatly reduced. (Complete eradication of the issues is ideal, but impossible.) Fixing the problems will also require the coordinated efforts of many people, from the landlords to the residents to the organizations and companies involved, all on benevolent principles of helping residents. Suggestions for Further Research Our study did not control for race, gender, economic status, or age; thus, we suggest that future community-based researchers develop a concrete way to control for such moderating variables that have the potential to bias or induce shortcomings for the overall research. Additionally, it would be important to focus the survey questions so as to have a more tangible list of predicaments and narrow in on several of those. If that were done in the future, it might be possible to pair residents with specific problems to specific organizations and companies that could offer help to alleviate their problems. In contrast, we took the phone survey and never followed up with the participants, disallowing further help to be offered and provided. Lastly, our research was done via self-report, which has limitations in that certain effects of hazardous housing conditions could have been over-generalized or forgotten during the brief phone conversations we had with clients. In future studies, we argue the importance of utilizing trained researchers in an effort to offer a more realistic portrayal of the issues clients face in terms of housing. This portrayal would come from one-on-one conversations with various clients that could be performed over a longer period of time, which would result in more detailed depictions of certain conditions and more realistic achievement of goals set by the researchers. In terms of goals, it might be useful to

LIFT-Chicago 8 hone in on two or three specific goals of the project, including one concerning following up with participants, which will likely induce more change than simply locating organizations that will offer low- or no-cost services. While there are companies that are willing to offer low- or no-cost services to families and individuals who are constrained economically, future researchers could bridge the gap between individuals in need and those who could potentially provide them necessary services, which is something that working- and lower-class families and individuals often have trouble doing. Conclusion LIFT-Chicago is a resource center for people in need of employment, education, public benefits, and stable and secure housing, among other things. Our research project has attempted to maximize the efforts of LIFT in connecting clients to assistance with an array of housing problems by first conducting a survey of LIFT-Chicago clients to deduce the most often faced housing issues and then locating resources within the community that can help resolve some of these issues so that the clients current housing conditions may improve for their sake and the sake of those who will live in their buildings in the future. We found that the most prevalent housing issues among the people that we surveyed could be divided into six categories economic issues, bed bugs, pests, sanitation, safety, and appliances/aestheticsand we were able to locate resources that LIFT-Chicago had not been aware of before that could help with these problems. Economic issues such as doubling-up with relatives or being unable to afford marketrate housing were by far the most cited by the 74 respondents with housing issues as their number one problem with their current living conditions. This is mostly outside the scope of our intended project, as economic issues are complicated and cannot be addressed in the same concrete way that bedbugs can be, for example. However, the frequency with which economic

LIFT-Chicago 9 issues were mentioned is indicative of the complexity of housing problems as well. Housing issues are not simply tangible violations of human standards of decent housing, such as pest infestation or lack of sanitation, but rather all of these issues seem to be symptoms of a much more widespread social plague: poverty. We were able to find resources to help combat poverty on an individual level, which is vital to the well-being of people in the here and now, but in order to ultimately solve housing issues to the utmost degree possible, we need to directly address poverty and its root causes. However, LIFTs goal is to assist people with present needs and so the organization may continue this admirable mission by further studies which control for factors like race or gender, have more extensive yet focused conversations with clients to define the housing issues they have, and personally link clients to the resources they require. Ultimately, such research will aid individuals with housing problems or economic issues in the present while discovering methods for preventing such issues in the future, which in the end helps to fight poverty.

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References Our History | LIFT. (n.d.). LIFT: Combating Poverty and Expanding Opportunity | LIFT. Retrieved September 29, 2011, from http://www.liftcommunities.org/about/history Our Volunteers in Chicago | LIFT. (n.d.). LIFT: Combating Poverty and Expanding Opportunity | LIFT. Retrieved October 4, 2011, from http://www.liftcommunities.org/chicago/ourwork/volunteers

LIFT-Chicago 11 Appendix Number of Clients Who Do and Don't Have Housing Issues
Number of Clients Do Dont Total 74 208 282 Percentage of Clients 26.24% 73.76%

LIFT-Chicago Sample

Confirmed housing issues

26%
40%
Inavlid Numbers

Refused to answer questions

4%

30%

Other

Thematic Analysis of Housing Issues

LIFT-Chicago 12

Economic Pests Bed Bug Sanitation Safety Appliances/Aesthetics

Survey Hi my name is _________________ and I am a student at Loyola University Chicago doing a project for LIFT Chicago. We are contacting everyone who has been to LIFT for help with housing in the past year. We are trying to research helpful organizations in the community about prevalent issues regarding housing and hoping to use the information to make significant future changes. If you have a minute or two, I have a few questions to ask you. 1.) Are there currently any specific problems in terms of your housing conditions? 2.) If so, what kinds of problems have you encountered? If not, have you experienced any problems with housing in the past? 3.) Are you aware of anyone else in your building who has had to deal with similar or other housing issues? 4.) How are the problems you and/or others have experienced or are experiencing been resolved? What has the time frame been like in terms of how quickly issues are attended to? 5.) Would you be interested in getting involved with a community organizer who works specifically with housing advocacy efforts?

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