Community Renewal Society

How many times have you looked at a CTA map? Dozens, maybe hundreds, of times? Neat lines and colors, categorizing our city into eight colors and 144 dots.

But what if that map told you more about the people who lived there than just how to get to your destination? Read more »

The fight to save the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic appears to have its first victory. According to Mark Cassello, a Huffington Post contributor, the Emanuel administration has offered to keep the Woodlawn Adult Health Center open. The center would be staffed with two therapists and no psychologists. The announcement comes after ongoing demonstrations at the Woodlawn facility saw a second round of arrests on Monday night, with ten people being removed from the vacant lot across the street where protesters have camped out to protest the planned cuts. Read more »

Since plans for the NATO summit in Chicago were announced, advocates working on issues of poverty in Chicago have found increasingly common cause with anti-war protesters.

The endorsement of the May 20 march against NATO earlier this month by Rev. Jesse Jackson, along with support from Rev. Phil Blackwell, National Nurses United and members of the Service Employees International Union, represents the latest stage in this collaboration. Read more »

A smaller Chicago is seeing a greater percentage of its residents slip into poverty. That’s one of the takeaways from new city- and state-level data the U.S. Census Bureau released last week. The number of poor people in Chicago leaped by more than 40,000 between the 2000 Census and the 2010 American Community Survey, from 556,791 to Read more »

Reporter/blogger Megan Cottrell takes a look at seven ways of measuring income inequality offered by Georgetown University law professor Stephen Cohen. Cottrell says, no matter which way you measure it, things don’t look good—unless you’re among the richest 1 percent of Americans.

Read more at Chicago Muckrakers