For 20 years, Loyola’s Center for Urban Research and Learning has built lasting partnerships that have led to impactful social change • BY SCOTT ALESSI
When talking to people in Chicago who had recently experienced homelessness, researcher Christine George kept hearing the same com- plaint again and again. Individuals who found themselves in need of housing or shelter had attempted to contact the city’s 311 helpline, only to be told they should find a nearby hospital or police station. Instead of directing callers to ser- vices that could help with their housing dilemma, operators were telling them to turn to someone else for assistance. So George, an associate research professor at
Loyola’s Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL), and her research team decided to test the system themselves. They placed 100 calls to 311, each time presenting the operator with a crisis scenario. And just like the people they’d interviewed, the researchers were given vague and unhelpful directions. For people in real emergency situations, the helpline was clearly not serving its purpose. The finding was part of an extensive evaluation
of Chicago’s 10-year plan to end homelessness, a study commissioned to find where the city was succeeding in its efforts and where it could improve. A group of 550 people experiencing homelessness were tracked over a period of one year, with researchers looking at what worked and what didn’t when it came to getting people into stable housing. Like all of CURL’s research, the project was a collaborative effort between researchers, students, and community leaders aimed at finding ways to address urban issues. It also sparked a significant change. When
George and her team presented the results of their study at an event hosted by the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness, the failings of 311 caught the attention of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. While Emanuel was pleased to hear that many of the city’s efforts to end homelessness
were leading to progress, he pledged to deal with the 311 problems immediately. Sure enough, improvements to the system
were quickly implemented. “Our report was the basis for that,” George says. “It helped to move forward a bunch of important pieces in address- ing homelessness.” It is this type of success that has made CURL,
one of Loyola’s Centers of Excellence, a respected partner in the local community for two decades. “We are the go-to people,” says George. “We have formed these partnerships, and people really trust us.”
POWER OF
PARTNERSHIPS Those partnerships are the heart of CURL’s unique research model. Founded in 1996, the center was designed to bring together members of the University and leaders in the community for col- laborative projects geared toward not just study- ing urban issues but finding solutions. “The simple view is that there is knowledge in
the university, but there is also knowledge in the community,” says Philip Nyden, the founding di- rector of CURL. Nyden, a sociology professor who joined Loyola’s faculty in 1979, says university researchers might not get the full picture of what is happening in a community when conducting research on their own. But the community can also benefit from the expertise and credibility that comes from working with representatives of a major university. “The model in many ways is highly logical,” Nyden says. “But around the academic world, that was a radical idea.” Nyden first tested this approach in 1989 when
he helped to form the Policy Research Action Group (PRAG), a collective of local universities and community groups in Chicago. PRAG proved
“You put a face on these problems and sometimes that’s disturbing. But there’s also a lot of hope there, too.”
— PHILIP NYDEN, DIRECTOR OF CURL
SPRING 2016 23
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