All the migrants staying at St. Edmund School and those who had been staying at Grace Episcopal Church, have been resettled into stable housing situations, officials said.
Colin Knapp, president of Community of Congregations, said they’ve housed approximately 201 migrants.
The village has provided support since many asylum seekers arrived in late October 2023 during a snowstorm. For several months, many of those families and individuals were staying in three village-sponsored shelters: The Carleton of Oak Park Hotel, the West Cook YMCA and Grace Episcopal Church.
In February, the first two shelters closed. Those families were moved to St. Edmund School, which was transformed into a shelter operated by West Side Service Connector, doing business as the Oak Park Family Transitional Shelter. Grace closed its shelter doors March 15, a result of a lack of funding and resources.
Community members, volunteer groups, faith-based organizations and village officials provided “incredible support” to reach this outcome, said Kira Tchang, the village’s human resources director.
“Being able to house all of these folks and put them on the path to their next steps has been a tremendous success due to that collaboration across the board,” Tchang said.
At first, some families and individuals were resettled into parish apartments with churches providing support, Tchang said, but many others more recently have moved into traditional apartments with signed leases.
A few families and individuals have found housing in Oak Park, Tchang said, but a lot more have found homes in the surrounding communities that have a lower cost of living. The Oak Park Resettlement Task Force, sponsored by the Community of Congregations, assisted by finding available housing and offering landlords a fully paid, 12-month lease.
Knapp told the board that period was intended to give migrants time to get work permits, find jobs and save money to support themselves after that initial lease ends.
“One of the goals of the resettlement task force was to put people into rental agreements that would be sustainable for them once they were working, and taking in an income, and could take on the lease payments,” Tchang said.
The village has not been as directly involved in resettlement beyond funding the efforts, Tchang said. Village board members allocated a total of $650,000 in unspent American Rescue Plan Act funding for the migrant response, Tchang said. The village also received $1.9 million in Supporting Municipalities for Asylum Seeker Services grant funding for those efforts.
From that grant funding, $360,000 was allocated for legal services and support, which the village will continue to provide. Officials hired a legal firm, Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd., to help migrants apply for asylum, temporary protected status or employment authorization permits. That funding must be spent by June 30 and services will end then.
Because the shelter at St. Edmund was also initially funded through June 30, the village has leftover funds. There’s no plan yet for how that money will be allocated, Tchang said, but those dollars will be returned to the general fund. The village also intends to work with state and county funding partners to explore reimbursement for services, she said.
During the next few days, the OPFTS will work to shut down the shelter at St. Edmund, Tchang said. After that’s done, the village does not yet have a plan for the building’s use.
Village officials have learned a lot about how to operate in a situation like this, Tchang said, as well as about how to help asylum seekers, as a result of public, private and nonprofit partnerships formed through this endeavor.
“We’re all appreciative of efforts of so many parties throughout this process,” Tchang said.
In February, Jack Crowe, executive director of the OPFTS, said “we will be an abject failure if in June there are still 100 people there [at St. Edmund].”
They met that goal two months early.