Chicagoans to send ‘Memo to the Mayor’ via ‘On the Table’ conversations Tuesday

Like so many residents of Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods, Jennifer Barnes, co-owner of South Shore Brew, a brand new coffee shop in South Shore, believes economic development should be a top priority of the new mayor.

Further south, Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza (10th) sees infrastructure as a key issue for Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot after she is sworn in next week.

Criss-cross over to the West Side, and Rufus Williams, president & CEO of the Better Boys Foundation, echoes economic development while adding education and jobs as issues Lightfoot should prioritize.

And at another West Side organization, Brenda Palms-Barber, founder & CEO of the North Lawndale Employment Network, says it’s jobs, of course, but also mental health.

These were only some of the perspectives gleaned on a recent tour of the city with a team from the Chicago Community Trust that was signing folks up to host one of the hundreds of On the Table conversations taking place across the region on Tuesday.

“Economic development. Public safety. Environment. Education. Those are kind of the benchmarks people wanted to spend time on,” Barnes said on a recent afternoon as the coffee shop — which plans to host two On the Table conversations Tuesday — hummed.

“We’ll be hosting two separate organizations from within the neighborhood. We’re excited to be part of a meeting space where people can share their ideas and come together,” said Barnes, who with her husband opened their small business in February.

Maudlyne Ihejirika/Sun-Times photo

The theme this year of the forum designed to elevate civic engagement, foster new relationships and inspire collaborative action — through mealtime conversations — is “Memo to the Mayor.”

With no shortage of ideas circulating on what Lightfoot’s priorities should be, the Chicago Community Trust decided the program that’s now in its sixth year presented a natural avenue to collect some of those ideas, especially since the new mayor took to Twitter to invite suggestions.

“This is absolutely the right time to use our day of civic conversation to create a Memo to the Mayor,” said the Trust’s President & CEO Helene Gayle. “There is power in gathering people together to generate formal recommendations about issues their tables feel must be addressed. The result will be memos filled with actionable ideas that will become a people-generated plan for the new administration’s first year in office.”

In past years, as many as 100,000 folks throughout the metropolitan area have participated annually in On The Table, with as many as 6,000 breakfasts, lunches and dinners held around diverse topics, among both friends and strangers.

“In regards to the 10th Ward, infrastructure is a major issue. We have five movable bridges, the highest number, next to downtown, and when our bridges go out, it takes months and months to repair them,” Sadlowski Garza said during a visit to her office on 105th Street & Ewing Avenue.

“The 92nd Street bridge was out for 18 months, while the 106th Street bridge has been up in the air since November, and it’s still not fixed. So we’re neglected,” the alderman said. “We have the biggest planned manufacturing district in the whole city, and if people can’t get to and from work and home, then we’re going to be defunct as a city. We have to start investing in infrastructure, not just downtown, and not just $1 billion to Lincoln Yards.”

We tagged along with the Trust as it fanned teams out across the city to sign up individuals and organizations for the May 14 conversations and found not many surprises in terms of the major issues Chicagoans in beleaguered communities want addressed.

Still, it was interesting to see how priorities ranged from one side of the city to another.

“We’re going to explore the issue around financial health and mental health, as we know there is a very clear connection,” said Palms-Barber, whose workforce development organization will be hosting an On the Table breakfast for North Lawndale stakeholders.

“Workforce development is really about social and economic justice. At the end of the day, our work is about bridging that racial wealth divide and addressing income inequalities,” said Palms-Barber, whose group has created jobs in innovative ways, like bee-keeping.

“We love this opportunity to share with the mayor-elect that correlation between financial and mental health, how mental health resources have been withdrawn from the community while trauma and other mental health issues are now prolific,” she said.

On the Table participants will forward to the Chicago Community Trust thousands of memos on their recommendations, which will then be data-captured into one “Memo to the Mayor,” to be presented in June to Lightfoot and other elected leaders.

They’ll be guided by how their On the Table jibes with the goals of transparency, equity, accountability, diversity and transformation set forth by the city’s only third new mayor in 30 years, and its first African American woman and first openly gay mayor.

“It’s important to have these conversations around the city about what’s important. We’re in one of the more challenged communities in the city,” said Williams, whose youth program is also based in North Lawndale.

“One of the things that we know is really important here is bringing resources to the folks here, really trying to create the same opportunities for them that you get in Lincoln Park, that you get in Edgewater, that you get on the Gold Coast and in some of those other places. We’d just like to make sure the mayor knows that people here have potential too.”