Related Links

The two phones in Clara Kirk's Englewood office rarely stop ringing. Calls to the white phone by her desk can almost always wait. Kirk hardly notices when it rings. But calls to the black phone near the door aren't just important. They’re the reason she comes into work each morning.

Her face falls each time she answers the black phone. It has been ringing every day since 1987, and every time it does, there's a woman on the other end with nowhere to go.

Despite losing the majority of their funding two years ago, Kirk's organizations – Clara's House and Clara's Place – continue to be havens for abused and homeless women and children. It’s a role they have been playing in Chicago's struggling Englewood community for 22 years.

“Battered women have come [to the shelter] cut up, shot up, beat up,” said Kirk, a petite woman whose passion for her work often brings her to the point of tears. “There are women that live here that lost their jobs and don't have money. I can't put babies in the street.”

Though staff members haven't been paid since November 2008, the doors of both shelters on the city’s South Side have remained open, and new women continue to be accepted. The question isn't if the shelters, which include 13 long-term apartments and 35 temporary beds, will stay open. The question is how.

“The homeless plight in this neighborhood has only gotten worse,” Kirk said of the shelters’ neighborhood around 62^nd and Ashland. “The community was once alive. Today the stores have closed, togetherness has diminished. The schools have not produced the kind of young people they used to.”

Kirk moved to Englewood in the early 1970s. At that time, she said, most people in the community had jobs. A decade later, she said, the nearby steel mills and factories had closed. People were losing jobs and homes, she said. The community was falling apart.

“People were living in garages, cooking over garbage cans and living in abandoned buildings,” Kirk said. “I started [West Englewood United Organization] to find a place where we could help people when they needed soup or a sandwich or just a place to be for the day.”

At the time Kirk, a mother of five with a part-time job at the Illinois Board of Education, saw a “tremendous need” in the community. She had never run a community center – Englewood did not have one. She'd never run a shelter; she had never even seen one. But, she said, she was tired of seeing children on the street.

Kirk wasn’t sure where to start, but by 1983 she had convinced the Archdiocese of Chicago to donate the vacant rectory at St. Thomas Church, 1650 W. 62nd St. It would become Englewood’s first women's shelter.

“Mayor Harold Washington had a team of people in the community,” Kirk said. “They convinced me to use the building for a shelter. A volunteer from the 8th Day Center for Justice decided to name it Clara's House in honor of me.”

For years the shelter was funded by state and federal grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. However, in 2007 Clara's House lost all funding.

According to a 2007 report from the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness, West Englewood United, the umbrella group that runs the shelters, was unable to raise matching funds required by its government grants. The grants, totaling nearly than $487,000, were not renewed.

“For the past two years we have been surviving on donations and fundraisers and what we can do to get by,” Kirk said. “But the community can't take care of Clara's House. It can't take care of itself”

Helen Tempson has been living in Clara's Place, the long-term housing branch of Clara's House, for nearly six years. Her jobs with the organization have been her only form of income during that time. However, she and the rest of the staff have not been paid since Nov. 15, 2008.

“We did what we had to do,” Tempson said. “We just pitch in.”

She works as a secretary and administrative assistant in the office, trying to gain the skills she needs to get a job on her own.

“I live here and I get unemployment so it’s OK for right now,” she said. “Working here was good, no car fare. You come out the back door, and you're at work. There are good days and bad days now but we'll be OK.”

Other staffers who don't live on the premises have also stayed on. Judith Thomas still shows up each day at 9 a.m. to answer phones and receive residents' guests, just as she had for 11 years before funding was lost.

“We just keep going,” she said.

Though the organization still does not have a professional grant writer or fund raiser, they plan to stay open. Kirk said she has faith that somehow things have to work out.

“Women and children need a place to go, they need a place to stay,” Kirk said. “Clara's House is an icon in the community and we can't let it close.”