In April 2012, Chicago’s former mayor Rahm Emmanuel closed half of the city’s 12 public mental health centers. The closures affected mostly Black and lower-income locals, who were no strangers to disappointing legislation. In fact, the mayor’s blow to their existing social safety net was just the latest instance of socio-economic and political disregard. Decades of inequity and disinvestment, lack of job and educational opportunities, housing injustice, and more had been met with unfulfilled promises of social programming that came and went with grant funding.

After years of frustration, West Side residents in the North Lawndale, East, and West Garfield Park, and Near West Side neighborhoods, decided they’d had enough. Instead of waiting around for a solution, they would create one—from the ground up. The result was Chicago’s Encompassing Center.

Centrally located to public transportation, the Center opened in the fall of 2019, but collective efforts had begun years earlier. In 2016, the Coalition to Save Our Mental Health Centers (CSOMHC) approached Father Larry Dowling and a few of his parishioners with a proposal to open a community-focused, community-created mental health center on Chicago’s West Side.   The Coalition spawned from a citizen’s initiative to contest Mayor Emmanuel’s earlier directive. In a show of organizing triumph, they’d led a successful grassroots campaign to pass legislation allowing any Chicago community to open its own Expanded Mental Health Services Program (EMHSP).

The Encompassing Center would be their second victory. Their first success story came while helping Albany Park, a northside community, open their own community-based mental health service, The Kedzie Center.

Under the direction of the Coalition and the Institute for Community Empowerment (ICE), an organizing and leadership training group, West Siders from four parishes and other organizations knocked on doors, petitioning residents for support of a community-controlled mental health center.

Read the full article about community-centered health by Tina Jenkins Bell at Shareable.