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Transcript of Community-Based Research Paper
8/3/2019 Community-Based Research Paper
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LIFT-Chicago 1
Running head: LIFT-CHICAGO
Organizational Action Research on Lift-Chicago
Meghan Donaghy, Adam Garrison, Mark Lamb, Jennifer Severyn, Tameer Siddiqui
Loyola University Chicago
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Background/Content
In the fall of 1998, Yale University students Kirsten Lodal and Brian Kreiter founded
LIFT, a growing movement to combat poverty and expand opportunity for all people in the
United States. Both Lodal and Kreiter started out as active volunteers in a variety of child
services programs but then noticed the difficult obstacles the children’s parents were facing.
Parents were often working multiple low-wage jobs, paying their taxes, and sending their kids to
school, yet still were unable to afford sustained shelter, food, and clothing for their children.
LIFT was established with the intention of helping underprivileged adults through a variety of
social services including finding jobs, securing housing, obtaining public benefits, and making
connections with other social service agencies.
With LIFT’s first center firmly established in New Haven, Lodal and Kreiter soon
discovered that student leaders on college campuses across the country were dialoguing about
the same issues related to poverty and opportunity and were eager to get involved with these
issues. Lodal and Kreiter recruited passionate student leaders to replicate sites of their
organization around the country. LIFT now serves thousands of families each year in Boston,
Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Today, LIFT has become one of the
most active voices in the call to bring domestic poverty to the forefront of our nation’s
consciousness (Our History).
LIFT-Chicago focuses on five asset areas — basic necessities, employment/financial
stability, housing, education and training, and health care — that are vital for individual and
family success on the path out of poverty. By working one-on-one with LIFT volunteers to find
jobs, secure safe and stable housing, make ends meet through public benefits and tax credits, and
obtain quality referrals for services like childcare and health care, LIFT clients are able to
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holistically address their immediate and long-term needs while making concrete steps towards
realizing their greater dreams and aspirations. In the process of working toward their goals, LIFT
clients develop an important internal “toolkit” for progress and resiliency that enables them to
move forward independently and bounce back from challenges and setbacks. With the support
of LIFT volunteers, clients strengthen their goal-setting abilities, problem-solving skills,
knowledge of key community resources, self-confidence, and ability to advocate for themselves
and their families (Path out of Poverty).
Research Question
Our community-based research project seeks to address the issue of housing. Firstly, we
are interested in studying the prominent issues facing clients at LIFT-Chicago in regards to
housing and what resources LIFT-Chicago volunteers can provide to their clients to best support
the clients’ needs. The second part of our research project focuses on advocacy and how we can
assist the clients, particularly with finding stable housing. By understanding the various issues
that create problems for LIFT-Chicago’s clients, we are better able to make a positive difference
with efforts to enhance housing conditions. Our effort to make a lasting impact for the clients at
LIFT-Chicago has come in the form of a telephone survey as well as a flowchart. The telephone
survey we created has been used in an effort to speak directly with hundreds of LIFT-Chicago’s
clients regarding housing issues. Based on their responses, we were able to examine the issues
carefully and then search for resources that would resolve the clients’ housing issues. For
instance, many clients reported bedbugs in their apartments, so we researched low-cost agencies
that can help resolve this problem. All of the housing issues we heard about from clients, as well
as the resources we found to help resolve these issues, has been put into a tangible flowchart
which the client will be able to access at the office of LIFT-Chicago.
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This flowchart is imperative because currently, many LIFT clients are faced with housing
issues that they cannot adequately resolve due to their economic situations and social position.
For example, a client may complain to his landlord about a cockroach infestation, but the client
has no social or financial power to convince the landlord to fix the problem. In such a situation, a
client may be forced to move out of his apartment, which is expensive and time-consuming for
the client and also does nothing to resolve the issue at hand, meaning someone else could move
into that roach-infested apartment later. Even if the client does not move, he will likely have to
silently stomach his shoddy living conditions with few other options, thus going without the
basic human right of a decent place to live. This is why our research project culminates with a
flowchart of resources, which LIFT-Chicago’s clients may access. Such resources will help
directly solve the clients’ housing issues and improve their present living conditions so that A)
their homes are more adequate for a human to live in, thus fulfilling a basic human need, B) they
do not need to go through the rigorous, costly, and time-consuming process of finding new
housing that they can afford, and C) housing conditions will be improved for those who live
there in the future.
Data Collection
To collect our data, we surveyed clients who had come into LIFT-Chicago in the past
year regarding their own housing conditions (See Appendix). LIFT’s site coordinator gave us a
list of 282 clients to call, and we divided this list evenly among our five group members. Each
client was called up to three times if he or she did not answer the phone. This experience
demonstrated how difficult and varied this form of data collection can be. The two main
challenges presented were that clients did not want to take the survey, which is rather typical of
any phone survey, and that myriad phone numbers we called were disconnected or invalid. After
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calling each client three times and thus determining we had the maximum number of responses
possible, a total of 74 clients affirmed that they currently faced housing issues or had faced them
in the recent past.
The 74 clients who affirmed that they have housing issues reported 82 cases of housing
issues in total. We broke down the reported cases into six subcategories: economic issues, bed
bugs, pests, sanitation, safety, and appliances/aesthetics. Below are the six subcategories
containing the specific problems of the reported cases, followed by a breakdown of the cases by
number.
Results and Findings
It appears that only about a quarter of LIFT-Chicago’s clients are in the midst of
housing issues. The organization’s clientele seems to come to LIFT in search of resources for
different issues, most notably finding work, but this does not mean that housing issues are to be
taken lightly. In fact, housing issues seem to go hand-in-hand with many other social issues. Of
the 74 people who claimed to have housing issues, over a third of them cite economic woes as
the source of their housing struggles. Present economic times are difficult, and it seems that the
lack of available jobs in the market is one of the biggest influencing factors on the housing crisis.
People are forced to either live in the place of residency of family members or in conditions that
are sub-par at best. These places, usually SROs or apartments that are rather run-down, are where
the other housing issues can be found. These include faulty appliances or aesthetic problems,
such as plumbing, climate control in the building, the décor, etc (See Appendix). The people
residing in places with these issues often have a hard enough time making rent, let alone
throwing out money for repairs for such problems, and the landlords rarely step in to help, so the
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issues persist. One out of every five clients that reported housing issues claimed that appliances
were the source of their concerns, if not one of several.
Pests, bedbugs, sanitation, and violence were also issues of concern to the LIFT clients.
The aforementioned dilapidated housing structures are host to a variety of creatures that, due to
the inaction of landlords or inability to afford exterminators, force the residents to simply tolerate
them and deal with them as they can. It is a horrific thought to have to share your home with
cockroaches and bedbugs while being helpless against them, and yet roughly one out of nine
Chicagoans live this reality.
Once again, these issues tie back into the financial struggles faced by the clients, and
unfortunately this was outside of our domain in regards to our research project. However, it is
clear that residents have trouble affording the services to repair their housing or a better place of
residency in general. Thus, we set out to find companies that would be willing to work with the
organization in resolving these issues and that could be added to LIFT-Chicago’s comprehensive
resource guide.
Implications
The implications of our findings can be summed up simply as the housing issue is not a
singular thing, but rather a web of interconnected problems that cannot be fixed by a simple,
single cure-all solution. There are a plethora of problems faced by each client and they need to be
deconstructed layer by layer, and the underlying causes and issues each need their own
resolution. To take all of them on would be overwhelming, and while some of the issues may
overlap either in action or between clients, any organization that attempted to take them on
would be spread too thin, both on manpower and time.
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Making changes and fixing the problems people face isn’t going to be a fast or glorious
process. However, if it is taken one step at a time and each issue is actually solved rather than
given a Band-Aid solution, the housing problems people face will be greatly reduced. (Complete
eradication of the issues is ideal, but impossible.) Fixing the problems will also require the
coordinated efforts of many people, from the landlords to the residents to the organizations and
companies involved, all on benevolent principles of helping residents.
Suggestions for Further Research
Our study did not control for race, gender, economic status, or age; thus, we suggest that
future community-based researchers develop a concrete way to control for such moderating
variables that have the potential to bias or induce shortcomings for the overall research.
Additionally, it would be important to focus the survey questions so as to have a more tangible
list of predicaments and narrow in on several of those. If that were done in the future, it might be
possible to pair residents with specific problems to specific organizations and companies that
could offer help to alleviate their problems. In contrast, we took the phone survey and never
followed up with the participants, disallowing further help to be offered and provided. Lastly,
our research was done via self-report, which has limitations in that certain effects of hazardous
housing conditions could have been over-generalized or forgotten during the brief phone
conversations we had with clients.
In future studies, we argue the importance of utilizing trained researchers in an effort to
offer a more realistic portrayal of the issues clients face in terms of housing. This portrayal
would come from one-on-one conversations with various clients that could be performed over a
longer period of time, which would result in more detailed depictions of certain conditions and
more realistic achievement of goals set by the researchers. In terms of goals, it might be useful to
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hone in on two or three specific goals of the project, including one concerning following up with
participants, which will likely induce more change than simply locating organizations that will
offer low- or no-cost services. While there are companies that are willing to offer low- or no-cost
services to families and individuals who are constrained economically, future researchers could
bridge the gap between individuals in need and those who could potentially provide them
necessary services, which is something that working- and lower-class families and individuals
often have trouble doing.
Conclusion
LIFT-Chicago is a resource center for people in need of employment, education, public
benefits, and stable and secure housing, among other things. Our research project has attempted
to maximize the efforts of LIFT in connecting clients to assistance with an array of housing
problems by first conducting a survey of LIFT-Chicago clients to deduce the most often faced
housing issues and then locating resources within the community that can help resolve some of
these issues so that the clients’ current housing conditions may improve for their sake and the
sake of those who will live in their buildings in the future. We found that the most prevalent
housing issues among the people that we surveyed could be divided into six categories —
economic issues, bed bugs, pests, sanitation, safety, and appliances/aesthetics — and we were able
to locate resources that LIFT-Chicago had not been aware of before that could help with these
problems. Economic issues such as doubling-up with relatives or being unable to afford market-
rate housing were by far the most cited by the 74 respondents with housing issues as their
number one problem with their current living conditions. This is mostly outside the scope of our
intended project, as economic issues are complicated and cannot be addressed in the same
concrete way that bedbugs can be, for example. However, the frequency with which economic
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issues were mentioned is indicative of the complexity of housing problems as well. Housing
issues are not simply tangible violations of human standards of decent housing, such as pest
infestation or lack of sanitation, but rather all of these issues seem to be symptoms of a much
more widespread social plague: poverty.
We were able to find resources to help combat poverty on an individual level, which is
vital to the well-being of people in the here and now, but in order to ultimately solve housing
issues to the utmost degree possible, we need to directly address poverty and its root causes.
However, LIFT’s goal is to assist people with present needs and so the organization may
continue this admirable mission by further studies which control for factors like race or gender,
have more extensive yet focused conversations with clients to define the housing issues they
have, and personally link clients to the resources they require. Ultimately, such research will aid
individuals with housing problems or economic issues in the present while discovering methods
for preventing such issues in the future, which in the end helps to fight poverty.
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References
Our History | LIFT. (n.d.). LIFT: Combating Poverty and Expanding Opportunity | LIFT .
Retrieved September 29, 2011, from http://www.liftcommunities.org/about/history
Our Volunteers in Chicago | LIFT. (n.d.). LIFT: Combating Poverty and Expanding Opportunity
| LIFT . Retrieved October 4, 2011, from http://www.liftcommunities.org/chicago/our-
work/volunteers
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Appendix
Number of Clients Who Do and Don't Have Housing Issues
Number of Clients Percentage of Clients
Do 74 26.24%
Don’t 208 73.76%
Total 282
26%
30%4%
40%
Confirmed housing issues
Inavlid Numbers
Refused to answer questions
Other
LIFT-Chicago Sample
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Survey
Hi my name is _________________ and I am a student at Loyola University Chicago doing a
project for LIFT Chicago. We are contacting everyone who has been to LIFT for help withhousing in the past year. We are trying to research helpful organizations in the community about
prevalent issues regarding housing and hoping to use the information to make significant future
changes. If you have a minute or two, I have a few questions to ask you.
1.) Are there currently any specific problems in terms of your housing conditions?
2.) If so, what kinds of problems have you encountered? If not, have you experienced any
problems with housing in the past?
3.) Are you aware of anyone else in your building who has had to deal with similar or other
housing issues?
4.) How are the problems you and/or others have experienced or are experiencing been resolved?
What has the time frame been like in terms of how quickly issues are attended to?
5.) Would you be interested in getting involved with a community organizer who works
specifically with housing advocacy efforts?
Economic
Pests
Bed Bug
Sanitation
Safety
Appliances/Aesthetics
Thematic Analysis of Housing Issues
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