Since 1986, Community Services West has provided a variety of education and job services for disadvantaged mature adults and for at-risk young adults. Our mission is to provide therapeutic and enabling social services that empower Chicago’s west side youth and their families to become self-directed individuals. Our overarching goal is to help young people to “grow up” well and to assist them and the adults that we work with to re-enter the mainstream as productive, critical thinking, and caring members of society.
CSW is a collaboration of two school partners, the Academy of Scholastic Achievement (ASA) and the Community Christian Alternative Academy (CCA). Both are independent community-based high schools that came out of the era of the alternative schools movement, providing a “second chance” to former high school dropouts,
CSW has a history of successfully working with retrieved (former) dropouts and high-risk youth and adults in the community. Since 1997, ASA and CCA have been participating members of the Youth Connection Charter School (YCCS). The schools were both started in 1978 and are operated by their founders: Gladys Simpson and Myra Sampson, respectively. ASA and CCA are trendsetters and have earned the reputation of being two of the oldest and best alternative high schools in the city. ASA became the first school to operate a parent-child center. CCA became the first community based alternative school to earn state recognition and the right to award the high school diploma. Gladys Simpson and Myra Sampson are co-directors of Community Services West.
Our targeted population – disadvantaged youth living on the west side of Chicago – tend to have low academic achievement and inadequate social and life skills, which would ordinarily make them poor candidates for the 21st century workforce. However, they bring such a hunger for learning and succeed in spite of the odds.
Funding Experience
Over the years, CSW has secured a mix of public and private funds to support its programs and initiatives. CSW has successfully managed public grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Illinois State Board of Education, the Chicago Board of Education, the Illinois Department of Human Services, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and the City of Chicago.
In 1996, CSW established the Academy Bakery, a not-for-profit training bakery, in the Lincoln Park community of Chicago. When CSW moved the program “back home” to the West Side of Chicago, CSW raised $1.3 million to finance the move that included major capital renovations and expansion. The Academy Bakery became the first bakery to return to the community since the riots of the 1960s and offered a high school culinary arts program to train students to become certified food service managers. Major grantors included the Chicago Community Trust, the Kinship Foundation, the Steans Family Foundation, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunities, and the City of Chicago Empowerment Zone.
Significance
CSW programs are designed to strengthen youth and adults so that they can set and reach formerly unattainable goals. Our students learn, they grow and they become contributing members of society. They have become nurses, lab technicians, bankers, entertainers, security officers, ministers, doctors, lawyers, military personnel, barbers, cosmetologists, entrepreneurs, social workers, child care providers, and long-term employees who are at the same job for as many as 20 years. Our history of success speaks volumes about our ability to conduct the proposed 21st Century project that can enable young people who have severe obstacles to success to move in the direction toward becoming productive and contributing citizens.