Taller de José offers helping hand to those in need

For the roughly 1,300 people who seek help from Taller de José each year, the organization offers a listening ear and a helping hand as well as time on the phone and lots of shoe leather.

The mission of Taller de José is accompaniment, said executive director Elizabeth White. That means helping people find the resources they need, helping make phone calls and appointments, and, frequently, going with them to those appointments.

“We’ll sit with clients while they fill out paperwork,” White said. “With older clients, we go with them to a lot of doctor appointments.”

But before they even get to that point, they listen. They listen to the woman who says she needs to find help to get a new stove, only to learn that she also needs a furnace; the stove that broke was the only source of heat in her home.

“We have a 360 approach,” White said. “Someone comes to us and they have a problem they are hoping to be solved. In that conversation of intake, we are going to find out other things that are going on their lives. And if they want us to, we will pick up the phone and make the appointment, and we will problem solve. We don’t just hand them resources. We walk with them.”

That includes the person who needed to find a specific kind of notary to fill out forms they needed for their home country.

“The ‘compañera’ literally went and accompanied them downtown, and they went one place, and they said, ‘It’s not here, you go to the other place,’ and then they went there, and they said, ‘But you need this paper from the first place.’ The client has to go and do all of that, but we don’t just say, ‘Go to this place.’ We’ll accompany them. The team is really good at being tenacious, because that’s what it takes sometimes. And the compañera came back and said, ‘Now I know how to do that in case we need to do it again.’”

Taller de José, a newly independent non-profit, was founded 16 years ago as a ministry of the Sisters of St. Joseph to accompany people as they tried to find help, White said.

Now, rather than being a ministry operated by the congregation, it’s one of the sisters’ network of affiliated organizations, she said. It also has moved from its first home, on the campus of the former Assumption Parish in Little Village to space on the campus of St. Gall Parish, 5533 S. Sawyer Ave., in the Gage Park neighborhood.

The new site is in an area that is home to many of Taller de José’s clients, most of who either exclusively or primarily speak Spanish, White said.

“It’s a very concentrated area. We have to be accessible to public transit,” she said.

It’s also a “vibrant, active parish,” and they share a building with an office of Catholic Charities, one of the more than 160 partner agencies that Taller de José works with, and close to several other partner agencies and organizations.

The organization recently created a flyer with its new contact information and the top four areas in which its clients are seeking resources — legal, immigration, financial and health. After the flyer was distributed, five clients either came in carrying it or mentioned it in initial phone calls.

The biggest need Taller de José is seeing now is for housing, White said, especially since programs designed to keep people in their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic have expired and rents have increased quickly.

“There aren’t a lot of resources out there to help them now,” White explained. “We also have an aging immigrant population, who are starting to have more health issues. That wasn’t what we were seeing before. Then it was more young families. Now there are seniors, folks who have been here for a real long time. They struggle to access resources.

“For us, part of it is, we want to keep people in their housing. If we can find food for them, then they don’t have to put as much money towards food, so they can put more money towards rent.”

Other people come in looking for help finding a job to help pay for food and shelter.

“The economy that’s pressing on everyone is pressing hard on our poorest,” White said.

To better focus its work, White said Taller de José is hoping to revive its community advisory council, a group that went dormant during the COVID-19 shutdowns. Such a council would include clients and community partners who could offer insight on what needs Taller de José should be trying fill and how it can do that.

Because, in the end, Taller de José must work with limited resources just as its clients do.

Funding comes from grants and private donations. Most compañeras or compañeros are part-time social work interns or volunteers; it has a full-time staff of four, including White, although she is hoping to hire two more people.

Clients often come from word of mouth, sometimes from other clients, but often from partner organizations, or even from the social workers who did their internships at Taller de José.

“Say there’s someone who is getting medical services,” White said. “And a food issue comes up. They can’t help with that, but they know we can.” 

For more information, visit tallerdeJosé.org.