The line outside the Irving Park Community Food Pantry stretched down the block one morning last year. A new program launched by Heartland Alliance, in partnership with the city, uses “financial navigators” to help people in need find available services and aid, as well as manage their finances.
Mitch Dudek/Sun-Times
Bread lines across the city grew as the pandemic triggered an economic downturn, but a new financial program hopes to ease the burden Chicagoans face.
Led locally by Heartland Alliance in partnership with the city, the program connects residents with financial advisers to help manage expenses and find available federal or local aid.
Evanston Fight for Black Lives organizer Maia Robinson said she wants all community members to feel a “sense of pride” over the community fridge EFBL will install in the upcoming weeks as well as a responsibility to take care of it.
As a form of mutual aid, she said the guiding principle for the fridge is to “leave what you can, take what you need.”
“It’s not trying to point out who’s the one in need and who’s the one volunteering,” Robinson said. “That, to me, is what mutual aid is, doing whatever you can to take care of the community. That fits well with abolition, because the whole foundation of abolition is to look after one another and not depend on the state or the government to do life-affirming things. They should, but if they’re not doing it, we can do it ourselves. We can take care of one another.”