Bishops’ anti-poverty effort CCHD has roots in Chicago

When Catholics across the United States are asked to donate to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development the weekend of Nov. 23-24, they will be participating in the domestic anti-poverty program of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. It works by making grants to community groups that are working to address the systemic causes and effects of poverty in their own neighborhoods.

The campaign was founded in 1970 and has its roots in the Civil Rights Movement and the culture of community organizing that grew up on the South and West sides of Chicago in the 1960s, and in the emphasis St. Paul VI placed on the relationship between peace and justice, especially in his 1967 encyclical “Populorum Progressio,” said Danielle Bodette, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s senior coordinator for CCHD and Catholic Relief Services.

It was inaugurated by Auxiliary Bishop Michael Ryan Dempsey, who was coordinator of the archdiocese’s Inner-City Apostolate when he became a bishop in 1968. According to “The Bishop Who Dared,” a biography written by Bishop Dempsey’s sister Ann Dempsey Burke, Bishop Dempsey insisted on maintaining his residence at the West Side parish of Our Lady of Lourdes after becoming a bishop.

“The piece of CCHD which has stayed throughout its history is its grassroots emphasis,” Bodette said. “From the beginning, in order to be eligible, groups had to be led by members of the community that they served, and some percentage of the collection has always stayed local. Subsidiarity and solidarity are two founding principle of CCHD, and very much with us today as we move forward in our current context.”

That means that at least 25% of the money collected in the archdiocese each year is used to fund organizations and projects here. The rest of the money is distributed by the national CCHD office to organizations around the country, including in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Last year, CCHD distributed more than $12.7 million to non-partisan grassroots organizations that help poor or marginalized people across the country work together to rise above the obstacles to living wages, affordable housing and safe neighborhoods, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Five organizations are receiving local grants from the collection taken up in November 2023. They are: Arise Chicago, Center for Changing Lives, Genesis Cleaning Cooperative, Male Mogul Initiative and Voice of the People in Uptown.

Voice of the People in Uptown, which provides affordable housing, received its first CCHD grant decades ago, according to Michael Rohrbeck, its executive director. It was founded in 1968, one of many such community organizations dedicated to making the needs of people in neglected communities a priority.

As the need for affordable housing became clear, Voice of the People in Uptown took on the challenge, said Rohrbeck, who has been with the organization for six years.

“For a lot of the decades before, the feeling and the reality in the city was that the Loop got a lot of attention, and certain neighborhoods, but the majority of communities did not get what they needed in terms of resources and services,” said Rohrbeck, who moved to Chicago in the 1980s and worked for a different community organization on the West Side.

After years of opposing large-scale projects that community organizers believed would displace low-income people, and trying to get the city and developers to plan projects that would benefit community residents, Voice of the People in Uptown decided to get into the business of providing affordable housing.

“If we couldn’t wait on the city to do what they needed to do, we would acquire buildings, we would manage properties, we would involve low-income people in the management of their buildings, and in the community as a whole,” Rohbeck said. “It’s such a unique organization now, because it’s community-based and it’s controlled by the tenants of the buildings that we own. It used to not be a rare thing. It used to be a common thing. We put the lowest income people first in terms of power and as the beneficiaries of our programs.”

The organization now owns 14 properties with 214 households and a over 600 tenants.

The $20,000 Voice of the People in Uptown received this year is earmarked for the Resident Opportunity Services program, which offers education and training for tenants and other neighbors to take ownership of their own community, and the Owners Network, to bring together affordable housing providers to support one another in their efforts. That network is looking to innovate by, for example, creating a community land trust for rental housing to make sure that apartments remain affordable.

Rohrbeck said he gets sentimental about CCHD, which also supported the organization he worked for when he first moved to Chicago.

“For me, personally, as a Catholic growing up, going to Catholic schools and seeing what they taught, I got to see the church being very supportive in an active way, not just giving people handouts but giving people a hand up,” he said. “You need both.”

Bodette said Catholic social teaching on subsidiarity, or having decisions that affect people made within those communities as much as possible, and Chicago’s history of community organizing, come together in CCHD.

“We know Chicago’s the birthplace of community organizing. If you have a city that is the place for community organizing, and a city that is full of Catholics, particularly immigrant Catholics, then it’s a setup for the perfect storm to explode in a way that brings those things together to build the kingdom. It’s a beautiful fusion.”