¡La Villita Cuenta! Video Pitches the 2010 Count

Little Village is serious about capturing all the public money it can. With a series of interviews of local leaders, it makes the case to residents that every person counted will make a big difference in how much money is allocated locally -- the equivalent over 10 years of another top-notch facility like Little Village Lawndale High School.

The leaders repeatedly stress that Census data is completely confidential and that it is not shared with any other government agency (such as immigration, a big reason that some residents haven't filled out the forms in the past). One priest even suggests that not being counted is a "social sin, a sin of omission."

It's in Spanish with English subtitles, and was produced by Enlace Chicago's Dahriian Espinoza, with help from Jaime de Leon. Check it out.

Stimulus, Neighborhoods and Schools

A couple of recent news items from the Chicago Public schools related to stimulus spending have caught my attention. First, today's hot CPS story is the announcement of details about the district's $30 million, stimulus-funded plan to reduce youth violence. WBEZ's Linda Lutton did a good overall piece on it, which you can read or listen to here. Back in September when the plan was first announced, Englewood pastors loudly complained about a Philadelphia-based agency taking on the task of, and the pay for, working with at-risk youth. For the next five months, the district's chief executive officer, Ron Huberman, zipped his lip about the plan.

According to the Catalyst Notebook blog, Huberman unzipped his lip at a press conference at Englewood's Robeson High School yesterday just enough to let us know that the work with high-risk youth will now be split among community agencies, plus the Philadelphia group, Youth Advocate Programs. Looks to me like the pastors' voices were heard. The Philadelphia group will be paid to work with the 250 highest-risk students, while community agencies will be hired to work with another 2000 students. The two efforts will eat up $10 million, or one-third of the total funds available. Another $2 million will go toward community patrols to ensure students have safe passage to and from school, like the effort Huberman helped kickstart last March in Little Village, which I wrote about here.

I certainly hope this will be an opportunity for NCP neighborhoods with strong antiviolence work in place, like Little Village and Auburn Gresham, to put more gas in their tanks, as well as helping other neighborhoods plant new efforts or help their seedling projects grow.

Second, last week Mayor Daley and the district announced significant new bonds for school construction made possible through stimulus. According to the press release, CPS used approximately $22 million for emergency repairs at Bond, Caldwell, Ebinger, Harlan, Gallistel, Schneider, Sumner and Yale schools, plus $7 million to renovate four CPS turnaround schools: Bethune, Dulles, Fenger, and Johnson. While urgent repairs are key in an underfunded system with decades of deferred maintenance, and turning around a school ought to include needed repairs, only one of these schools (Ebinger) is on the heavily overcrowded Northwest Side. And none of the early spending addresses the long-neglected problem of overcrowded schools on the Southwest Side. (Full disclosure: I'm a Southwest Sider, though I don't live in the bull's-eye of the overcrowding zone.) Back in 2005 a colleague and I analyzed where the kids were and where CPS capital dollars went; the numbers didn't match up well. You can read our analysis here.

Back then, the district cried poor, saying there was no money left to address overcrowding. Well, there's new money now. Unfortunately, there's a lot of new faces in district leadership, which means new priorities and lost institutional memory. Let's hope some of it gets spent this time on longstanding overcrowding in places like Chicago Lawn, Gage Park and Brighton Park. Jimmy Dispensa (head of demographics for CPS), can you put a bug in Ron's ear on this?

Youth Noise: B-Ball on the Block Is Back

Got an email from Cesar Nuñez this morning turning me on to a $500 fundraising challenge for Beyond the Ball, the group that's using basketball and soccer to bring youth onto the streets on Friday evenings in Little Village and North Lawndale.

BBall on the Block has been going for three years now and it's great to see that they're still innovating – adding soccer, for instance – and that they've connected with Youth Noise and Nike on this fundraiser. They need another 32,600 clicks to get that $500, and you can click all you want, so get on over there and help make it happen.

Trina Chiasson, Chicago blogger for Youth Noise Play City, caught some great quotes in that video above. Here's one of them:

"I grew up in this neighborhood, I've seen a lot of violence and poor choices," says Ken Alvarado, soccer director. "And then just getting older, you see that there aren't that many opportunities to escape those places."

BBall on the Block provides that opportunity: "You know you're safe, you know there is nothing to worry about, we have food, you have nice people working here too, so it's just a blessing for the community. And I'm definitely taking it as a blessing for myself as well."

Channing Reddit, Social Justice Class of 09, One of Eight to Win Roosevelt Scholarship

Yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times reported that eight students from The School of Social Justice, one of four small schools within Little Village Lawndale High School, had been awarded full four-year scholarships worth $80,000 to Roosevelt University. Channing Reddit, singing a duet in the photo above as part of a play honoring Black History Month, was among them. Channing, an accomplished singer and pianist, told me he plans to major in music education. He has already spent a fair amount of time at Roosevelt, from orientation when he first arrived as a freshman to a writing course he took on campus last summer, staying overnight.

As an 8th-grader at Mason Elementary in North Lawndale, Channing originally thought he would apply to Curie High School. Having sung and played piano in church since he was very young, he liked Curie's music program and strong academic reputation. But when he heard there was a new high school opening nearby, he was so intrigued he changed his mind. “It was brand-new. I wanted to be in the history of the school as one of the first graduates,” he said.

Channing's 8th-grade dream came true last Friday night. When he and his classmates crossed the stage, they made history as members of the first graduating class of Little Village Lawndale High School. Hunger striker Manuelita Garcia, who helped push the Chicago Board of Education to make good on their promise to build a new high school in Little Village, spoke during their commencement ceremony.

Students coming to Little Village Lawndale choose which of the four small schools they wish to attend: Social Justice, MAS (Multicultural Arts School), Infinity Math & Science Academy, or World Language Academy. Soon after Channing chose Social Justice, he discovered that Roosevelt University had pledged to award scholarships covering tuition, room and board to any student in Social Justice's first two graduating classes with at least a 3.0 GPA and an ACT score of 20. “From the very beginning I knew I was going to do that." Always an honors student, ”I knew it would be easy for me to meet the requirement," he said. He graduated with a 4.0 and earned the 20 after just one retake.

Though Channing says it was easy for him, statistics say it's generally pretty tough for young African-American men like him to make it through both high school and college. Recent research shows that for every 100 African American boys who start ninth grade in Chicago's public high schools, only about 11 will hold a bachelor's degree ten years later.

Not only has Channing made huge strides in beating those odds, he's helped his peers along the way. He has a circle of friends who, like him, are African American young men on track to graduate from high school, some of whom joined him for lunch or stopped by his table while I interviewed him earlier this year. “I'm always helping all of them when they need help with their work.”

Channing added that Social Justice has made a big difference in his friends' likelihood of graduating. If they had gone to a different school, he said, it was unlikely they would all have made it with him. “Other schools seem like they don't care about their students that much. This one does.”

UPDATED 6/10: I received word from Katherine Hogan, English department chair at Social Justice, that of the original 85 students who entered as freshmen, 66 graduated last Friday night, and 50 of them have been accepted to postsecondary programs. Hogan says six more students are expected to graduate in August.

Full disclosure: I taught briefly at Social Justice High School back in 2006 and had the privilege of meeting Channing when he was in my advisory (homeroom). We had not kept in touch until I talked with him this spring about his postgraduate plans.

In Little Village, Rapid Response to a Shooting

I've heard a lot over the years about how CeaseFire uses its street networks to mount rapid responses to violence to help minimize or even prevent further incidents and retaliations. Below is a close-up look at how it actually gets done.

This is an excerpt from an email sent today by Michael Rodríguez, the violence prevention director at Enlace Chicago (formerly Little Village Community Development Corporation).

"On Wednesday of last week just before 2:30 p.m., three of our Enlace-CeaseFire staff were in the New Life Church van driven by our Enlace-Safety Net Works staff member. They were on the way to drop a young person off and head to a Community Schools cookout at Eli Whitney school, with all the cookout materials in the rear of the van.

"As they were heading west on 26th Street they witnessed a young man who had been shot lying on the ground. They jumped to action and took the young man, shot twice in the arm and the stomach, to Mt. Sinai Hospital where he was treated in their trauma unit and underwent surgery immediately. Just a few hours later, while at the Eli Whitney cookout, we heard five retaliatory gun shots. The shooting occurred on Harding and 31st with two young men shot in the leg.

"In response to these shootings, Enlace-CeaseFire Little Village organized a rally where about 150 members of the community, friends from other CeaseFire locations, and members of the Violence Prevention Collaborative came together in prayer for peace. I just learned that also in attendance was the young man shot on 26th and Central Park.

"We would like to thank the following organizations for contributing on the day:

• New Life Church
• YMCA Street Intervention Program
• Alderman Ricardo Muñoz (22nd Ward)
• CeaseFire Brighton Park, Humboldt Park, Lawndale and other areas
• SER, Jobs for Progress
• Beyond the Ball
• Little Village Environmental Justice Organization
• Enlace Chicago CeaseFire, Safety Net Works, and other staff

"Rep. Mendoza sent her well wishes while she was in Springfield. Also 10th District Commander Ruiz called yesterday to thank us for our efforts. During an Enlace CeaseFire meeting yesterday we recommitted to increasing our efforts in the area to Stop the Shootings, Stop the Killings; please be on the lookout for future actions and please remember to refer to us the most troubled youth for mentorship.

"One last thought is that these things happen very quickly and word does not get out as fast as we would like. For a few of you this might be the first time hearing about this. We will be setting up a mass text list to assist in getting word out quickly in addition to our email efforts.

"Also, one last pitch ;) CeaseFire is not in the state budget currently. If you plan on being in Springfield , or have a call planned already, or now have something to call about, please urge legislators (particularly in the Senate) to support HB 4431 introduced by Yarbrough and Mendoza, which would fund CeaseFire . . . Please call Senator John Cullerton, (217) 782-2728, and your home district senator."

So there you have it: the brutal, heartbreaking and sometimes exhilarating work of building safer communities. My hat is off to those involved in the day-to-day struggle.

Pocket Parks Turn Little Village Green

On the same day that Little Village residents engaged in a planning charrette to flesh out ideas for a new park on the Washburne Trade School site, more than 50 others were implementing a shorter-term solution: planting and sprucing up four "pocket parks" on and around 26th Street. (Slideshow below.)

Christina Bronsing, health manager for Enlace Chicago, said local youth, residents and students from DePaul University planted 1,000 flowers donated by Hampshire Farms, spread a truckload of mulch provided by the city, created art boards to post at the sites, and made more than 100 "seed bombs" (balls of dirt with a clay shell that have seeds inside and can be thrown into spaces in need of green -- mostly tall, bright plants like sunflowers).

"I was thrilled to see everyone out, finally getting our hands dirty!" wrote Bronsing in an email. "After a year of talking and planning, coming up with designs, this was the first step in these spaces coming to life and being activated by the community.

"It's the beginning of a big process, but even during the course of the day we were able to see the project grow as folks met other neighbors, explained the pocket parks idea, and invited them to be part of it. We were able to integrate many components of the vision beyond just planting and transforming the landscape. We had art going on, hands-on projects, learning through experience and creating seed bombs to spread the green all over the neighborhood."

The vision, Bronsing said, is to include murals, workshops, and multiple layers of community involvement, starting in May and June with screenings of classic Mexican films at the four sites, which are at 26th and Kolin (Manuel Perez Plaza), 26th and Trumbull, 25th and Keeler and 27th and Kildare.

Where those seed bombs ended up is anyone's guess. Keep your eyes open for sunflowers on the neighborhood's industrial edges.

Photos by Juan Francisco Hernandez for Chicago Neighborhood News Bureau.

What's Next for Washburne Trade School Site?

It's been holding the corner of 31st and Kedzie since 1910, a whale of a building and a nice-looking one, too. The prairie-style factory was designed for Liquid Carbonic by Nimmons and Fellows, the same architects as the original Sears Tower in North Lawndale.

It became, of course, the fabled Washburne Trade School, which trained tens of thousands for good jobs in a powerful industrial city, with 17 different unions hiring the graduates. That changed as integration came to the all-white school in the 1960s. By the 1980s most of the unions had pulled out, and Chicago Public Schools closed Washburne in 1993. It reopened briefly under City Colleges of Chicago, but closed for good in 1996.

Little Village neighborhood leaders have been pushing to convert the 11-acre site into park and community space for years, and that dream is now closer. A 1930s building fronting on Kedzie was demolished in 2006 and discussions were well along to rehab the historic building and create park space behind it. But a four-alarm fire on Feb. 15, 2009, ruined that scenario. Demolition, underway now, will leave a clean slate.

"What do you want to see? Que quieres ver?" asks a new flier circulating through Little Village, inviting residents to three community meetings on Saturday, Monday and Wednesday, May 2 to 6, at three locations. "Field House, Indoor Track & Field, Soccer Field, Community Center, Affordable Housing, Retail, Day Care Center, Student Teacher Dorm, Baseball Fields, Computer Room, Trees, Flowers, Skate Park, Grass, Green Technology, Health Care..."

Those are the possibilities. The meetings are sponsored by Enlace Chicago. For more information, contact Edgar, 773-542-9233, x21, or Cesar, 773-542-9233, x14.

Photos below by Juan Francisco Hernandez, taken in 2004 and 2008.

You've Come a Long Way, Farragut High School

Last Saturday, Farragut High School in Little Village achieved another milestone in its slow evolution from a school of last resort to a true community resource. The school played host to the second annual Little Village Youth Forum: Building Community, Fighting Violence. Between 75 and 100 current Farragut students and graduates served as volunteers at the event; many had been involved in the planning from the very beginning. "Everything was smooth; everybody worked together," said Farragut senior Janet Soberantis. And as you can see in the photo above, everybody got lunch.

Holding this year's youth forum at Farragut sent an important signal to the neighborhood that the school has become a welcoming place. Both persuading the administration to host the event and bringing in turnout from all parts of the neighborhood and beyond were important organizing victories for SITY Ollin, the youth arm of the Telpochcalli Community Education Project, main sponsor of the event. "The administration were very open to new ideas about working with youth," said lead organizer Henry Cervantes, a Farragut alum.

"I'm really happy we had so many people, especially considering the challenge we had convincing people that it was safe to come here," said SITY Ollin organizer Paulina Camacho, who is based at Little Village High School. A number of people I spoke with said this was the first time they had set foot inside Farragut.

For decades, Farragut was the Chicago Public Schools equivalent of Fort Apache, both the army outpost featured in a John Wayne 40s Western and the South Bronx police station depicted in a 1981 movie starring Paul Newman. To those who worked at Farragut, it had the feel of a lonely army outpost in foreign territory, like the original Fort Apache. To those who lived in the neighborhood, and often, to its own students, Farragut was a forbidding place full of incompetent and possibly corrupt staff who didn't understand the community, like the precinct station in the South Bronx film.

Farragut students come from both the Little Village and North Lawndale neighborhoods, and the racial and gang tensions between them have often surfaced at school. To this day, Latino and African American students leave school through separate doors to prevent fights at dismissal.

As early as 2003, Catalyst Chicago was writing about positive changes at Farragut. Violence is down, graduation is up, and academics are improving, though not as rapidly as one would hope. What has really moved forward in the last five years is the strength of student organizing, thanks especially to SITY Ollin and the Mikva Challenge. Though Farragut, like neighborhood high schools across the city, still faces tough challenges, it has come a long way.

Video: Why Kids Enjoy Neighborhood Sports

A lot of community agencies and sports programs have been working flat out preparing for Spring Into Sports, which runs April 4 to 11 at four Chicago high schools (Crane, Little Village Lawndale, Englewood and Orr). Learn more at Neighborhood Sports Chicago, but first, take five minutes to view this video fresh from the smoking-hot computers of Sarahmaria Gomez and Alex Fledderjohn of TuMultimedia.

It will make you feel good, I guarantee it.

(If this video doesn't feed well for you, try the YouTube version.)


Neighborhood Sports Chicago! from Tu Multimedia on Vimeo.

Youth Sports--and Sportswriters

Curie's not the only place where we're starting a great partnership with young people telling their stories. Over in Little Village, young athletes with Beyond the Ball have already put together a five-minute video showing how their so-called open gym at Little Village/Lawndale High School works. Watch the video and you'll see it's a lot more structured than the typical open gym:



Beyond the Ball founder Rob Castaneda says some of the players have formed a team off the court to keep stats and document games and programs for the organization's web site. This video is their first production. They are eager to explore lots of media: interviews, web stories, and photos as well as more video. We look forward to seeing more of their work!

Emerging Arts in Little Village

Rather like siblings, the adjoining communities of Little Village and Pilsen are sometimes pigeonholed. With bustling 26th Street at its heart, Little Village is all business; neighboring Pilsen's National Museum of Mexican Art and wealth of galleries make it the artsy one.

Also like siblings, sometimes neighborhoods have to break out of those neat little boxes. A new artists' collective, Villarte, is doing just that by showcasing the vibrant emerging arts scene in Little Village. They got a big boost during the Little Village Arts Fest, held the third weekend in October, when storefronts and apartments around the neighborhood hung giant banners to welcome visitors. One storefront owner along 25th Street is even donating the use of his space for an entire year as a gallery. It's pictured above.

On opening night at Cafe Catedral, the festival's hub, young patrons sporting tattoos and piercings mingled with older folks and children. While visual arts were prominent, spoken word, theater, a book signing and even skateboarding were among the weekend's highlights.

It was fun walking the streets and finding the stop-sign banners everywhere from Cafe Catedral to Henry Cervantes' walk-up apartment, where he showed off some of his paintings to family and friends on Saturday night.



Arts for a cause also played a role. Photos of the megamarches to support immigrant and worker rights filled up a wall of the cafe. On Saturday, Victor Cortés signed copies of his new book, La Marcha, which also chronicled the movement. Throughout the weekend, members of the Colectivo la UVA. sold handcrafted jewelry and displayed photography of their neighborhood.

Best of all, lots of young people got to show off their talents, like graffiti artist and stenciler, "Blis," shown here creating her trademark tag.

Art shows indicate neighborhood strengths

From the evidence at archaeological sites and art museums around the world, one might conclude that arts and culture are outgrowths of strong and healthy societies: that it takes a thriving and culturally advanced community to foster a high level of creative output among its residents.

If that is true, some Chicago neighborhoods might be stronger than traditional economic and social measures suggest. The arts are thriving across the South and West Sides, and this weekend the evidence will be on display in South Chicago, East Garfield Park, Little Village and Pilsen.

It's all part of the citywide Chicago Artists Month, but what impresses me is how individuals and organizations in neighborhoods have very consciously cultivated and promoted and participated in the creation of art by local residents -- and in public gatherings that honor that creative work.

So my hat is off to the organizers of these events:

Garfield Park: Alpha Bruton alerted me to this exhibition, part of the Phantom Gallery series.

EXAMINING THE STATE OF OUR ENVIRONMENT
INSTALLATION ARTISTS EXPLORE BY BUILDING SITE SPECIFIC INSTALLATIONS:
Fred Owens, Helen Jones Myers, Vivian Vissar, Jamin Jadda, Gabriel Patti, Kat Silverstein, Nancy Zook, Students from Chicago Christian Academy, Loveitta Simpkins, Dewitt Quayim

Garfield Park Market Place (just north of the Garfield Park Conservatory on Central Park Avenue)
Friday, Oct. 17, 2008, noon to 8 p.m. Reception 5 to 8 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 18 and 19, noon to 5 p.m.
Learn more at westsidearts-chicago.blogspot.com

South Chicago: Claretian Associates is promoting a whole series of events including a gallery in their own office space, a knitting workshop at Villa Guadalupe, cartooning for kids and a performance by the 63rd Street Drummers.

Friday, October 17
Knitting Basics by Marisa Arevalo of Studio KOI
Villa Guadalupe
3201 E. 91st Street
6:15pm - 7:15pm
Participants must bring their own supplies or project.

Saturday, October 18 Saturday, October 18
Sweetest Day for Artists, Performers, and Musicians by The 63rd Street Drummers with Ms. Yakiri, Flo Mills, and Artist Friends Pilgrim Baptist Church 3235 E. 91st Street 2pm - 4pm

For the full schedule, go here: http://www.claretianassociates.org/ChicagoArtistsMonth08.htm

Little Village Arts Fest:

Villarte, an emerging arts coalition in Little Village, organized two days of free art exhibits, performances and workshops that kick off Friday night, October 17, from 6 to 10 p.m. in the Second Federal Savings parking lot at 25th Place and Pulaski. Get the official map and program at Catedral Cafe (2500 S. Christiana) or download it here.

Pilsen Open Studios:
Bigger than ever, this Saturday and Sunday event features dozens of artists and locations throughout the neighborhood (see map below by Salvador Jimenez). Many of the artists will be at the kickoff from 5 to 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 17, at Prospectus Art Gallery, 1220 W. 18th Street.

By any measure, that's a pretty convincing display of cultural strength, don't you think?

Solutions to violence: complicated and layered

About 15 years ago when my kids were attending Kilmer Elementary in Rogers Park, a teenager was shot and killed less than 50 yards from the school, which is across the street from Sullivan High School.

It was a traumatic event for the community and it triggered an all-out safety effort among parents and administrators at the two schools. I won't ever forget the months that followed when other parents and I stood on sidewalks and corners after school, wearing orange Parent Patrol armbands. I worked a particularly vulnerable corner with a mother who knew how to talk to teenagers, and I learned from her how to ask groups of older teenagers – in a voice that was both respectful and firm – to move on until after the little children had made it home from school.

The fear and determination I felt in those years has come back to me often in recent months as I read the ongoing reports of killings and beatings near schools across the city. Violence that takes our youth away from us is debilitating at multiple levels: on the blocks where it happens, within the affected families and school communities, and for the city as a whole. How can we consider Chicago a strong city, after all, if children are killed on the streets and we can't stop it?

The fact is, we have many of the tools needed to prevent or reduce violence, and many examples of effective partnerships among community groups, youth programs, the police and violence-prevention groups. Maureen Kelleher just wrote an excellent report on youth-led efforts in Little Village, in which she captured powerful lessons from youth who have been affected by violence.

So I asked Maureen: "Shouldn't there be comprehensive efforts at the neighborhood level that create a level of protection for kids?" She answered with a question: "What would that program look like?"

That's the life-or-death question that a new University of Chicago study will try to get at, but it seems to me that an academic study isn't where the answers are going to be found. They'll be found on the street by committed youth, organizers, police, school administrators and others who work together to create a resilient web of safety.

The question remains: What would that program look like?

Video of Little Village Boxing Gym

Photo by Alex Fledderjohn

This just in: the TuMultimedia video about the Little Village Boxing Gym.

During a winter when Chicago Public School students face gang violence and death on the streets, most recently at Crane and Gage Park High Schools, the people behind this gym are creating a real alternative. As one of the youth participants, Semajay Thomas, points out in the video, "For me to not fight on the streets, that's good for me."

Says Robert Ramos, executive director of the gym, "There's never any positive that comes from street violence."



Thanks to Sarahmaria Gomez and Alex Fledderjohn of TuMultimedia for the terrific video.

Teens spread the word about school health clinics

Little Village/Lawndale High School opened its health clinic last fall, to much fanfare. Getting there was quite a job and took many partners, from CITGO to Alivio Medical Center to the Little Village Community Development Corporation.

One of the side benefits of the organizing last year to prepare for the clinic is that LVCDC organizer Christina Bronsing got to know two Little Village/Lawndale students who wanted to learn more about health and make a difference. Lupe Alvarez and Eric Cerda both joined the Illinois Coalition for School Health Centers' Youth Advisory Board and lobbied in Springfield last year for more money to support clinics like theirs.

"My dad has diabetes. ... I started getting interested in health problems," Lupe told me. She wants to become a nurse and has learned more about health conditions from serving on the youth board. Through their activities, "we were able to discuss what we really thought with adults."

Eric joined the youth board to grow as a leader. "If I helped people learn more about the health center, it would probably be good experience for me. It would be a good way to showcase my leadership skills," he said. So far, his strategy has worked out just as he planned--he introduced the clinic to hundreds of people at its grand opening in October.

Both Eric and Lupe are also getting a chance to hone their media skills. They're part of a youth team developing a call-in show for CAN-TV that will teach more teens how they can get a school-based health center in their neighborhood. The show will air on CAN-TV Channel 21 on February 26 at 3:30 p.m. The call-in number is 312-738-1060.

For more on how the Little Village/Lawndale school health clinic is being received by students and teachers, see this story on the New Communities Program web site.

A basement full of hope...

Photo by Alex Fledderjohn

Let me tell you a little story about something huge happening in Chicago's La Villita (Little Village.)

If you haven't walked down W. 26th St. on a Sunday afternoon, don't boast yourself a Chicagoan quite yet. The storefront windows showcase everything from fine ostrich-skin cowboy boots to lace-layered quinceañera dresses. People are always out, no matter what the weather--residents love getting together over a big, traditional meal in the many restaurants lining the streets. In my opinion, as a multimedia journalist, the sights and sounds don't get any better than this.

Some of the best stories I've encountered in my career have been found in those nooks and crannies that most people overlook, or that don't know exist. Maybe because they don't have neon-lit storefronts or music blaring from outdoor speakers.

Chicago Youth Boxing was literally built from the bottom up.

Photo by Alex Fledderjohn

My partner, Alex Fledderjohn, and I have been documenting the construction of this boxing gym since it was just a dark, empty basement in La Villita Community Church.

Robert Ramos is head of the effort, and his dedication to the project is unwavering. We were there for the opening of the gym, where hundreds gathered for a boxing demo (fought upstairs, where the church holds services no less!). We also caught him on those days when he'd text-message his volunteer troops for a flyering campaign, and he and his son were the only ones who showed up. Such is the life of a man with a dream. Oh, and he's not getting paid to do this.

Photo by Alex Fledderjohn

Ramos is now starting up an after-school boxing program for kids in the area. When he was teen, he found a better-way-of-life in the kick boxing gym. He wants the same for the kids of Little Village.

The video with the full story will be finished in a few weeks. Stay tuned!