In 2009, Joy McCormack lost her son, Frankie Valencia, a DePaul honors student who was shot by a gang member upset at being told to leave a Halloween party. To honor his life, McCormack founded Chicago Survivors to support the families of homicide victims trying to manage the shock of their loss.
In 2021, Chicago Survivors found itself facing multiple crises.
On one front, the organization was facing a sharp rise in the number of killings in Chicago during the pandemic.
“The need is so drastic,” said Executive Director Oji Eggleston, citing everything from victim advocacy during the criminal-justice process to ongoing mental health services for the survivors. “Since I started with the organization two years ago, homicides have increased by 60 percent and our staff has increased by four.”
On another front, a state grant that was a source of roughly half the organization’s more than $2 million annual budget had disappeared due to a change in the grant’s focus, he explained.
Scrambling to save money by temporarily eliminating two programs, Eggleston and his colleagues have since managed to replace the lost funding and then some. One of the backers to fill the void was Southland RISE (Resilience Initiative to Strengthen and Empower), a collaboration between Advocate Health Care and UChicago Medicine to grow the capacity of organizations providing violence prevention and community resiliency services.
“Huge, huge, huge,” said Eggleston. “The Southland RISE fund was actually the first funding source for our Tree of Life program,” which the organization is now working to bring into Chicago Public Schools.
Part of a full counseling portfolio, Tree of Life in that initial iteration was a youth summer camp that brought together children from 6 to 18 – in age-separated groups – who have lost family to homicide and helped them find positive narratives and positive attributes to focus on. Its model, out of DePaul’s College of Education, uses a tree metaphor as a kind of visualization tool.
Chicago Survivors, too, has been branching out.
The organization has responded to over 1,300 homicides in the last two years, provided some 2,000 hours of counseling, and given grieving families $30,000 in crisis funds, said Eggleston.
But its work goes beyond the immediate families. It provides new Chicago police officers training in how to interact with families. “The training came about because CPD can benefit from understanding what it's like to be a crime victim,” he said, “and then use that information to become more empathetic to the families that they're trying to talk to.”
And Chicago Survivors – headquartered in Bridgeport, with a staff of 25 and planning to add three people by summer – is now in three schools with the Tree of Life model for trauma counseling, he said. It is working to bring it to more by becoming an official CPS vendor, said Eggleston – again, because of how very many people have been impacted by homicide and how great the need is.
“We still are looking for additional support to allow us to expand to meet the true needs of families,” he said.
Local not-for-profit, community-based organizations are invited to apply for the Southland RISE Collaboration rapid-cycle grant initiative by May 20. Click here for more information.
