Photo: courtesy Inspiration Café
June 2007 | Choice News
Inspiration Café: Transformation Served Daily
Keith was once homeless and had no job skills. He found his way to Inspiration Café in Uptown, where chefs and volunteers serve guests who may be down on their luck. Keith went through the organization’s training program and landed a job at a restaurant. Recently, he bought his own car, his first big purchase, and he is ecstatic.
Inspiration Café has provided foodservice training and meals to at-risk individuals, like Keith, for almost 20 years. Over the years, the organization has become a full-service agency that gives people choices, skills and a chance to try again.
“Something about the café made me feel comfortable,” said Harry Maddix, who completed the program and later became café manager. “It was a foundation for starting over. There was a peace, a connection.”
What makes this organization different is its focus on dignity and mutual respect, says volunteer Karen Skalitzky, who has served meals and shared conversations with guests every Friday morning for years. Inspiration Corporation, as the organization is called, also runs The Living Room Café in Woodlawn on the South Side and Café Too, a restaurant serving the public seven days a week, also in Uptown.
In addition, Inspiration merged with The Employment Project to provide job training and placement throughout the city. To manage this expansion, the organization quadrupled its staff and its budget. With a current budget of nearly $3 million and 60 staff members, it serves about 2,000 individuals per year, and Inspiration is not slowing down yet.
“We’re doing more for greater numbers and a greater diversity of people,” said John Pfeiffer, Inspiration’s newly promoted executive director. “Not only people affected by homelessness but increasingly low income people, ex-offenders, refugees and people with HIV/AIDS. We are also reaching out to those at risk of becoming homeless, in a preventive strategy.”
Besides reaching those in need, Inspiration has strong hospitality ties. Well-known chefs provide recipes and high quality food is prepared for each individual guest. Volunteers of all types and stripes serve the meals and their dedication is also a key part of the organization’s ongoing success.
Karen had the idea of recording guests’ stories to help others see the humanity in the homeless. Her book, A Recipe for Hope, contains stories from 31 people that are part of Inspiration Café. “Their stories aren’t asking for the proverbial handout or hand-up, but rather a handshake, a willingness to engage, to see, to listen, to be changed,” Karen says.
To learn more visit inspirationcorporation.org.
— Keri Lynch
Chicago’s Appleseed Fund Invests With Values
With more investment funds screening for social and environmental issues, it is much easier to go for the green (bucks) too. Socially responsible investing, or SRI, has evolved since the 1970s to help investors evaluate businesses beyond the bottom line. Initial screening methods would rule out or exclude things like weapons, gambling, tobacco or animal testing. Later, some funds began using inclusive screens such as positive environmental records, fair labor practices and good corporate citizenship.
“Larger (corporate) players are advocating for worker and human rights, green technology and offsetting carbon footprints — and connecting them to a sound economy and to corporate performance,” said Fran Teplitz, who heads up socially responsible investing for Co-Op America.
Investors have responded with more money. Assets in socially screened funds reached $179 billion in 2005, a 15-fold increase over the $12 billion invested in1995, according to the Social Investment Forum.
But not all SRI investors are happy. Some SRI funds underperformed in the market, which contributed to a slower growth for SRI funds. One local group sees this as an opportunity.
Chicago-based Appleseed Fund, launched in December 2006, wants to do SRI “right.” Ron Strauss, the president, says most SRI funds are poorly managed. “We don’t think investors should have to accept lower returns with socially and environmentally responsible companies,” he said. “We thought we could do a better job.”
So far, the fund has attracted about 70 investors and has about $6 million invested. Although they’ve been in business just six months, the fund earned 10 percent returns in 2007, better than the S&P 500 and the “best performing domestic SRI mutual fund to date,” according to Morningstar.
Appleseed also joined the “one percent or More for Community Investing” campaign. Launched by the Social Investment Forum and Co-Op America, it encourages individuals and institutions to put money to work for underserved communities.
“Community investing is the smallest part of SRI and the fastest growing,” Teplitz said. “With cutbacks on federal programs, community investing becomes even more important to provide job training and to start up day care centers and other small businesses.”
Shareholder advocacy is another SRI approach that works for corporate accountability and transparency. Being brought to the forefront are supply chain issues, divestment from businesses in places such as Sudan and excessive CEO compensation. “More companies are taking steps to address sustainability across a broad spectrum of products and practices, and this bodes well (for all of us),” Teplitz says.
— Keri Lynch
Photo: The Living Tower;
Courtesy Atelier SoA Architectes
Let’s Get Vertical
Are “living buildings” a step to agriculture in the skies? Vertical farming reads like an idea from a 1950s science fiction novel: dedicate the top six or ten stories of a skyscraper to agriculture, use the building’s own redistributed greywater to fertilize the crops, and then transform the biomass waste from the farm into pellet fuel that, in turn, powers the building. Besides being carbon neutral and self-sustaining once it gets up and running, vertical farming’s other implications — less actual land needed for farms, less fuel needed to transport food — are far-reaching and inspiring. Last month, a story on the possibilities of vertical farming in New York magazine set the eco-blogosphere on fire — not bad for a concept that some architects claim is at least fifteen years away.
Clearly, the very idea of vertical farming scratches an itch in the imagination of a lot of green-leaning thinkers. But is it even possible? “Most of the technology already exists,” says Cory Stoerker, a designer at Seattle firm NBBJ. “Living buildings are right around the corner, but none of these buildings will do all of the things (that vertical farms do) all at once.” Today’s buildings are getting greener from the roof down — Chicago leads the nation in green roof projects, incorporating rooftop gardens into the design of new and preexisting structures. And many green designers, such as organicARCHITECT in San Francisco or Rana Creek in Los Angeles, consider sustainability as integral to the idea of a building as doors or windows.
The median step between the energy-wasting skyscrapers of yesterday and the vertical farms of tomorrow seems to be the “living building” — a sustainable building that interacts with its ecosystem in a positive, non-invasive way. At “Living Future ’07,” a recent architectural conference in Seattle, hundreds of area architects gathered to discuss buildings that would “harvest all their own energy and water” and “function as living batteries.” The standout conceptual work of the conference was a project dubbed “The Center for Urban Architecture,” planned for the heart of Seattle. The giant multistory glass structure includes a café in the base that would utilize edible plants growing on each level. While it wasn’t quite vertical farming, it was certainly breathtaking — and a sign of exciting changes to come.
If the idea of vertical farms or living skyscrapers scratches your green itch, check out:
• VerticalFarm.com. A crash course in urban agriculture, packed with illustrations and links to other pertinent websites.
• CascadiaGBC.org/resources/living-buildings/living-building-challenge. The home of the Living Building Challenge, providing information and rules for the construction of eco-friendly buildings.
• Organicarchitect.com. Home to San Francisco’s organicARCHITECT, this site features the organicAWARDS prizes given to eco-forward-thinking individuals and organizations.
• LivingTower.new.fr. This plan, which could be constructed in the very green-friendly French city of Rennes, is the closest to a real world example of a vertical farm.
• SustainableABC.com. An online hub for all things eco-architecture, the site even provides sales listings for on-the-market green homes.
— Paul Constant
The Doctors Are IN
The Health Freedom Expo returns to Chicago June 22-24 bringing a line up of over 60 local, national and international speakers and dynamic workshops and seminars. Over 150 exhibitors will be showcasing the latest in alternative and natural health care products.
The Health Freedom Expo is supported by a not-for-profit lobbying group that works year round to protect consumers’ rights, defends practitioners who use natural and nutritional cures and lobbies against laws which remove the individuals freedom to make informed health care choices. Now, more than ever the public needs to be informed about upcoming legislation that will curtail the public’s right to make their own health care choices.
It’s economics, really. The more natural health products people use, the fewer drugs they buy. The pharmaceutical industry is taking steps to slow the inevitable shift toward natural health care. With the support of the medical establishment, Big Pharma is striving to gain monopolistic control over the use of drugs and make them the only measure available to treat illness.
Special guest speakers and seminars include: Kevin Trudeau, best-selling author of The Weight Loss Cure and Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You To Know About; Chicago’s own Dr. Joseph Mercola, Osteopathic Physician and best-selling author of Take Control of Your Health and Dr. Mercola’s Total Health Program; international actress and activist Daryl Hannah, author of Health and Happiness: Five Ways to go from Surviving to Thriving, Right Now.
Held at the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel and Convention Center in Schaumburg, admission is open to the public and parking is free. The cost is $10 per day or $25 for the weekend. Both two-hour workshops with Kevin Trudeau and Dr. Joseph Mercola are available for one fee of $35.
— Roni Ambrister
Don’t Get Mad, Get Active
Help Shut Down the Nation’s Last Horse Slaughterhouse
Last month a federal court allowed the last operating horse slaughterhouse in the United States, located in DeKalb, Ill., to temporarily resume butchering horses for food after a March 28, U.S. District Court order shut down the business.
The Cavel horse slaughter plant is owned by a Belgian company, and slaughters about 1,000 horses a week to export its meat, mainly to Europe. It is the only U.S. facility still processing horse meat for human consumption.
It was discovered in the initial trial that slaughterhouses were paying the U.S. Department of Agriculture to cover costs of their health inspections, which developed after Congress cut off funding for inspections in 2005. The Humane Society of the United States sued, arguing that the funding arrangement was an obvious conflict of interest. In March the State of Texas closed their two remaining slaughterhouses, leaving only the DeKalb plant in operation.
In April the Illinois House of Representatives passed a measure banning the slaughter of horses for human consumption. The legislation is now under consideration in the state Senate’s Public Health Committee. Contact your state Senators and let them know you don’t want horses slaughtered in our back yard. Visit ilga.gov/senate.
Update!
On May 24, Illinois Gov. Rod blagojevich signed a bill prohibiting the slaughter of horses in Illinois for human consumption. The bill effectively shuts down the Cavel plant in DeKalb, Ill.
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