For a little more than a year, a dedicated team of volunteers from Oak Park’s four Catholic parishes have been working with Father Carl Morello and the Oak Park and Austin communities to discern the next stage of life for the St. Catherine-St. Lucy rectory building on Austin Avenue at Washington Boulevard.
That new life is a new social ministry called Neighborhood Bridge, a kind of outreach to residents across Austin Boulevard that will launch by focusing on school families.
The goal is to host a range of services Austin residents reported they need, including mental healthcare, primary healthcare and financial counseling. These services would be provided by established organizations leasing space in the building.
Since the consolidation of the four Oak Park Catholic parishes in the Archdiocese’s Renew My Church initiative, the future of the SCSL rectory has been in flux.
Housing Forward is now leasing the property for its emergency shelter program through April 30, but the long-term plan for the space has been to create a community services hub, bridging the divide between Oak Park and Austin.
The SCSL School is a Big Shoulders School, and 85% of its students hail from the Austin neighborhood. Starting with SCSL school families and branching out to include the voices of others throughout Austin, a team of volunteers worked throughout 2023 to determine the shape of a program that will provide access to services to that families in Austin need.
Dan Doody, co-chair of the volunteer committee, summarized the past year’s efforts saying, “The essence is: We were a feasibility team doing a feasibility study. We did 20 public forums and got really strong community engagement. We also got five to seven great new volunteers with great skills. We shifted to a ‘let’s do this’ stance. We’re a business now. We’re a start-up.”
The Neighborhood Bridge’s purpose, he said, “is to connect people in need with the services that are available. The premise is that there are a lot of services and a lot of aid that our students and families qualify for, but there are a lot of barriers to getting it. The goal of the Neighborhood Bridge is to break down those barriers.”
Volunteers spent this fall presenting the ideas behind the Neighborhood Bridge at 20 public forums held at Oak Park, River Forest, and Forest Park congregations and at five schools in Austin.
The information and support gathered at those meetings informed the volunteers’ next step to incorporate the Neighborhood Bridge as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. The newly formed corporation has a three-person board made up of Doody, Jack Crowe and Kenna MacKinnon.
The three-person board is assisted by five volunteer committees: development, planning, communications, facilities and service connector.
Immediate goals include securing a master lease agreement with the Archdiocese and upgrading the lower level of the rectory to house some of the current ministries serving Austin residents and to be able to host adult educational programming and distribute needed household staples to families.
The planning committee is currently focused on hiring an executive director and a development director. A local family that wishes to remain anonymous has pledged to fund the renovations to the lower level of the rectory.
Doody said that the work of the past year has been made possible by the efforts of many throughout the community.
“It’s a really great group of volunteers. All of these people have tremendous professional skills. Everybody sees the prize: we have neighbors who live to the east of us who have very significant needs and we have the resources to connect them with the services they seek,” he said. “We are accompanying them on their journey.”
Father Carl Morello, who leads the four Oak Park parishes, noted that the work that has been done in the past year to create the Neighborhood Bridge is unbelievable.
“It’s a testimony to the community,” he said. “People here just have the mindset for social justice and ministry to others.”
He added that from his standpoint, he sees the Holy Spirit at work, motivating people to care for others. As a priest, he said that this endeavor puts a public face on what the Church should be doing: helping people in need.
The community at large is motivated at its heart by love and care for others, and Morello said that is evident in their support for ministry to migrants and for their desire to help their neighbors. “The Oak Park community and beyond have a mindset and a heart-set for service,” he said.
Doody and Morello agreed that community support and sentiment are strong and that the next step is to get financial backing to support the operating costs and necessary renovations to the building.
Doody, for one, is excited to jump in. “We’re working with five different schools. We can be getting to know the families and staff right away and focused on getting our executive director out into the community.”
He added, “If it’s going to be successful, it will be one case at a time. That’s how we will make change. One family at a time.”
In the interest of transparency: Jack Crowe, a GCM columnist, was also a co-chairman of the feasibility study committee for the future of St. Catherine-St. Lucy’s rectory. He was not involved with this article.