Southside Together Organizing for Power
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Q: Can you tell me about STOP? What is the organization’s mission and what kind of work do you do in the community?
A: STOP was founded in 2004, as I believe the Student Tenant Organizing Project and students worked with residents to save a 500 unit Section 8 subsidized building that was home to about half of the project base subsidized or low-income apartments in the neighborhood. And that was going to be demolished as students figured out from the University documents through the University redevelopment effort that would displace a lot of residents. And so STOP's mission is to organize and develop the leadership of people most affected by economic and racial oppression. And we do that through tenant organizing, our first work. And from there, organizing of mental health patients and providers, especially around a clinic that was closed by the city and was previously at 63rd and Woodlawn, a couple of blocks south of my apartment. And finally, we organize youth currently at our nearby public high school Hyde Park Academy.
Q: Why is this work important for Woodlawn specifically, as opposed to other neighborhoods? What would you want students to know about when engaging with the Woodlawn community?
A: STOP uniquely is situated next to the University of Chicago, and so the racial contrast is very sharp and the opportunity for inter-class solidarity, the opportunity for people in this neighborhood Woodlawn who've lived here for a long time to lead work that needs the support of, you know, the more established groups in Chicago is really ripe. Students can easily take up a lot of space in organizing spaces and volunteer spaces and so on. Students make huge contributions when they organize other students and when as an organized group, they ally, in coalition structures. And I think, you know, getting out directly into the community, interacting directly with longtime residents of color in Woodlawn is great and, you know, is most powerfully done when it's done quite intentionally.
Q: What are some of the most pertinent social justice and/or human rights issues facing the Woodlawn community? How do these issues affect residents? How are these issues modified or further complicated by STOP/Woodlawn’s proximity to the University?
A: Gentrification, which relates ideologically to capitalism and on a day-to-day basis to housing. There is a big investment coming in the form of the Obama Presidential Center. The city's estimate is that, you know, a majority of Woodlawn residents who rent, about 10,000 people could be displaced because they are rent-burdened and pay well over a third of their income in rent. So they're highly sensitive to increases in rent from property speculation, which tends to precede investment in jobs that pay better and could help them pay the rent. If that investment ever comes, and the track record of that historically is very spotty in terms of especially that investment benefiting the people who have been in the neighborhood the longest versus the people who moved to the neighborhood. And so I think, you know, there's a longstanding desire on the part of longtime residents, you know, for the neighborhood to get stronger and institutions and opportunities and, you know, grocery stores, etc. The mental health fight has been a lot slower because it relies entirely on the city budget. And sort of, you know, public health infrastructure that's been crumbling. I don't remember when the city clinics were started, but decades ago. But there is a second wind or a new wave of energy and possibility around funding the city clinics but defunding the police, if not abolishing the police entirely people across the spectrum politically tend to agree that there are things that the police don't need to be doing, like handling mental health crises. And so shifting resources from police to both crisis response and then long-term follow-up of prevention.
Q: The advocacy work that STOP does has proven to be incredibly impactful. Can you speak to some accomplishments or current initiatives that you’re most proud of?
A: The question of police has not always been as central as it is now to the work that STOP has done around violence. I mean, previously we've done restorative justice we've done trauma care. And now we're looking at police in a way that's very contentious. It's really good that our youth are willing to speak up and, you know, more and more purpose is needed again. We successfully organized around Hyde Park Academy which is all the way down that street. And their local school council, which under Mayor Lightfoot and the George Floyd protests last year, has the power to remove one or two, of two, of the school resource officers. And with an immense amount of work by our youth organizer and social justice club students and teacher allies at the school last year, we got one police officer removed a couple weeks ago, the vote was, and replaced with a dean of culture and climate that will be decently funded with money freed up by CPS because we're declining a police officer.