On Feb. 29, when the village of Oak Park emergency order ends and our contracts with the Carleton and the YMCA expire, our new neighbors will have somewhere to go.
The road to get here from when more than 160 migrants sought refuge from the snow, the wind, and the bitter cold on Halloween night has been a bumpy one. There is no sugar-coating the many 4-3 votes over the past four months. If any of these votes had failed, more than a hundred migrants, including dozens of children enrolled in our local schools, would have been evicted.
Even before the migrants’ arrival in Oak Park, it was clear that the village would need to respond and that the most sustainable path was to be a pass-through connecting federal, state, and county funding with local nonprofits.
On Oct. 30, the village board took up a motion by Trustee Chibuike Enyia to establish a village task force, secure funding and coordinate with outside experts. That night the board approved one part of the motion, allocating $150,000 to supporting asylum seekers in a unanimous vote. Our greatest misstep was failing to establish a task force and secure outside expertise. Doing so would have facilitated stronger collaboration with community partners and likely provided an off-ramp from direct village involvement sooner.
When the migrants did arrive, Oak Park was presented with a stark choice: embrace our new neighbors in alignment with our stated values or lock and bar the door. We chose to live out our values and for nearly four months, the village has been directly involved in providing shelter and food to our new neighbors.
Many of us believed that Oak Park would receive state and county money to support our response. And this past week, village staff confirmed that the entire migrant response has either been covered by state grants or will be covered by Cook County reimbursement allocated for a suburban response to the migrant crisis.
This month we were faced with a simpler choice. We could accept grant money specifically allocated to supporting our new neighbors or reject the money and evict these migrant families. I, and the majority of my colleagues, chose the former.
The state, which is providing grant funding for transitional shelter and resettlement efforts, only gave staff a few days to submit the grant application. While an open-bid process would have been preferable, given the urgency, staff chose initiatives run by community volunteers who had been supporting the migrants for months.
Westside Services Connector is opening the Oak Park Family Transitional Shelter. This effort is entirely funded by state grant money. Because the budget assumes full occupancy, costs associated with the program will decrease as migrants are resettled, resulting in unused grant money being returned.
The resettlement effort is led by a volunteer task force supported by the Community of Congregations — a coalition of faith communities that has helped seed service organizations, including Beyond Hunger, Housing Forward and Celebrating Seniors.
Their efforts are receiving $150,000 from the village to supplement state grant money and provide a full year of stable housing. This will allow our new neighbors the time needed to receive work authorization and become self-sufficient. Every dollar goes directly to rental assistance with no overhead costs.
For months, volunteers have mobilized and organized, securing basic necessities for our new neighbors and advocating alongside them. Many of these volunteers are the same people who have advocated for Oak Park to live up to its spoken values for years.
On Halloween night, and in the four months since, Oak Park has been presented with the same choice: live according to our values or turn away from those values. I am proud that a majority of the board has consistently voted to live into those values and, as a result, our new neighbors will still have a roof over their head on March 1.
Brian Straw is an Oak Park village trustee.