The Youth Summit for struggling neighborhood teens is mostly planned out -- the date's been chosen, the workshops are coming together. All that's left is a location.
What about the parks, where these things usually are?
A collective grumble rises from the small conference room: they're too expensive now. "These days you gotta pay for the security, you gotta pay for the tables, you need to tell them exactly how many chairs," someone says. "Who can afford it?"
The nine attendees at Thursday morning's meeting of the Healthy Hermosa Coalition shake their heads knowingly. Each of their organizations, serving the largely Puerto Rican Hermosa neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side, is facing the same struggle: money's drying up. It's a struggle that jeopardizes the entire coalition, and the lives of the low-income people and families it serves.
The City of Chicago, like so many municipalities around the country, is facing a staggering budget deficit. Mayor Richard M. Daley faced a shortfall of $550 million when he prepared his budget for 2010. And with sales taxes already higher than any other major city in the U.S., and property taxes always a touchy subject, there's no way to close the gap with revenues.
"We see cutbacks occurring not only of city services, but resource centers as well," said Alderman Ariel Reboyras. Parts of Hermosa and other neighborhoods fall in the horseshoe-shaped 30th Ward that he represents on the city council. "It hurts our community, and it has hurt the relationship with our constituents."
Not helping matters is the state of Illinois' $13 billion deficit. So far, the legislature has contented itself with simply not paying bills to cities like Chicago, rather than making an unpopular tax hike in an election year.
"We rely on the state budgets so they can come back with some grants to assist us with the programs that are already in place," Reboyras said.
Which brings us to the Healthy Hermosa Coalition. The new park expense is just one instance of a problem facing nearly every human-services provider: the city is demanding more and more money to use its facilities and services, while operating budgets, from government and private grants, keep shrinking.
Inevitably, the result is diminished services for the people of the neighborhood. "The people who need it the most are the ones who are being denied," said Herminia Vanna, a Chicago Department of Public Health employee and the part-time coordinator of Healthy Hermosa.
The coalition is a big tent, bringing together groups that fight teen drinking, gang violence and Type II diabetes to help make the neighborhood a safer and healthier place. But its initiatives, like the Youth Summit, are teetering on the brink as organizations fall away.
"We've lost a lot of really key people," Vanna said. "Their jobs have been lost, they've been transferred to other positions, whatever it is."
Even her own role with the coalition was borne of fiscal necessity, Vanna admits. When the group was founded eight years ago, it was run by a Hermosa native who was deeply involved with community issues. But when she was hurt in a tragic accident, her job was eliminated entirely. Vanna was put in charge of the coalition part-time; she also runs four other similar organizations around the city.
For those groups that are still with Healthy Hermosa, budget cuts have affected their services in every way imaginable.
Elsa Chaparro is the community outreach coordinator for The Miracle Center, an organization that uses the arts and creativity to improve the lives of children and youth. She said that program cuts have cost children spots in things like the Young Entrepreneurs Program, which is eliminating half of its enrollment.
But just as painfully, many of the volunteers who used to come teach can't make it anymore. Chaparro told the story of a woman who worked with The Miracle Center, whose name she omitted out of discretion.
"The person that used to come here is no longer working. She had a government job. Right now her priority is looking for work, she can't come to the coalition. We let her know what's going on by e-mail, but emotionally and mentally, she's under too much stress."
With everyone at the table squeezed from all sides by budget cutbacks, an air of uncertainty lingered in the conference room. Even plans for this coming summer were made tentatively, as no one could say for certain if and when any money would be coming in.
And lest anyone underestimated the gravity of the situation, the meeting was punctuated by heartbreaking stories of gang violence and needless death, the kind that the Healthy Hermosa Coalition is trying to stop.
Herminia Vanna, the coalition's director, had the last word, poignant in its simplicity, on the work her group is doing.
"I don't want to go to any more prayer vigils," Vanna said.