COVID Relief Efforts
Since July 2020, Thrive has coordinated COVID response efforts across the city as part of a national initiative spearheaded by the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) and the Audacious Project. The initiative focuses on concentrating recovery efforts and investments in places where people of color have been disproportionately impacted by COVID. We made the decision early on to focus our efforts at the community-level where possible, so that we could address potential gaps in systemic processes, especially for our city’s most vulnerable populations. Thrive partnered with local neighborhood organizations to distribute resources in a number of ways.
- Emergency Cash Relief: Thrive partnered with nine organizations that focus on supporting boys and young men of color to distribute $250,000 in emergency funding to youth and families in need. Participating organizations include Butler College Prep, I Am A Gentleman, Inc., Male Mogul Initiative, C.H.A.M.P.S. Male Mentoring Program, New Life Centers, Project One Ten, Guitars over Guns, Public Narratives, and Metropolitan Family Services. Together, Thrive and these partners provided emergency cash relief to youth experiencing financial hardship as a result of the COVID pandemic. Eligible expenses included rent, phone and utility expenses, healthcare expenses, transportation, food, clothing, personal care items, funeral/burial expenses, and emergency tuition assistance.
- Bridging the Digital Divide: Thrive collaborated with seven organizations to distribute laptops and other digital devices: Comp-U-Dopt, Phalanx Family Services, Centers for New Horizons, Central States SER, Lugenia Burns Hope Center, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, and St. Sabina. To date, more than 1,000 donated or refurbished laptops have been distributed, and more will be available to families in the coming weeks.
- Providing Personal Protective Equipment: Thrive worked with seven organizations to distribute PPE: Claretian Associates, Phalanx Family Services, Centers for New Horizons, Central States SER, Lugenia Burns Hope Center, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, and St. Sabina. The staff at these organizations have collaborated to distribute more than 27,000 PPE items to individual community members, including masks, wipes, hand sanitizer, household cleaning items, and personal care supplies.
Holistic Support for Black and Brown Youth
Our work throughout this past year has demonstrated the outsized toll COVID has had on communities of color and has highlighted a history of structural inequalities in education, housing, health, and other systems. However, the most consistent and persistent findings have been around the need for mental health supports, social-emotional learning, and trauma-informed care. If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that a focus on social and emotional learning (SEL) is more than a “nice to have” and, instead, it should serve as a critical component of the teaching and learning that take place in schools.
Guided by this vision, Thrive has worked with community and nonprofit partners to co-design holistic strategies to meet the unique needs of young people during this critical time — both in response to the specific challenges of the moment and with an eye towards the future.
- Social-Emotional Learning: Between January and March 2021, Thrive hosted a series of four Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Learning Sessions for youth development professionals to learn about COVID and its impact on youth mental health. Sessions featured guest talks by community mental health researchers at the University of Chicago, SEL experts from the American Institutes for Research, violence and mental health department heads from the Chicago Department of Public Health, and HCZ staff. Session topics included research and applied learnings about mental health, with a focus on youth of color. Participants learned about resources and SEL frameworks to use with the youth they serve, and heard about the importance of supporting youth, their families, and the staff within organizations that are doing the work while experiencing their own COVID-related trauma and stress. Following these sessions, Thrive partnered directly with 37 organizations across the city to bolster the SEL and mental health supports they provide to K-12 students in Chicago.
- Free Mental Health Resources: Thrive engaged three organizations in Chicago that provide mental health services to young people: Phalanx Family Services, Central States SER, and Ladies of Virtue. These organizations provide no-cost access to individual and small group counseling for young men and women. Thrive partnered with NAMI Chicago to develop and administer peer-to-peer mental health training for young people. These trainings have been co-developed with Thrive’s Youth Advisory Board, and will begin this spring. Thrive also worked with Young Invincibles and Streetlight Chicago – a bed booking site for youth experiencing housing instability – to add mental health resource information to their website.
