LIFT-Chicago's Mission Statement

LIFT-Chicago's mission is to help individuals in the Chicagoland area achieve economic stability and an overall greater sense of well-being. We would like to extend such basic rights and opportunities to all individuals and make drastic improvements in the solutions to enduring poverty in our country. Since its foundation in 1998, LIFT has expanded to run centers by trained volunteers in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D. C. to serve individuals and families who are at or below the federal poverty line (to put this into context, a family of four is below the federal poverty line if its members earn less than $22,050 a year*).

(Image from the Huffington Post) Kirsten Lodal, co-founder of LIFT--check out her Huffington Post Blog Entry

What We Do

According to the 2010 U. S. Census Bureau, over 46 million Americans--that's 1 in 6 individuals--live below the poverty line, a statistic that LIFT is ready to reduce.** LIFT is conscious of the fact that poverty is a multi-faceted issue that affects multiple generations of American families.

Student Advocates are trained to deal with a number of issues that arise from the complications of poverty and attend bi-weekly trainings throughout the year to prepare for changes in our society and public policy in order to better serve our clients.

(From the LIFT-Chicago Facebook Page) LIFT Advocates with clients at the Client Advisory Board Meeting
 

On a short-term scale, we work one-on-one with individuals to help them find jobs, secure stable housing, apply for public benefits, obtain healthcare, and provide emotional support. Our services are completely free and without eligibility requirements, and clients can track their own progress with us during and outside of our meetings. Outside of the office, we sponsor events for clients, such as client appreciation dinners, as well as resume and emotional health workshops, which are formulated based on client feedback.

From the LIFT-Chicago Facebook page: a picture from the Uptown Office's first ever Community Picnic/Family Portrait Day at Chase Park in April.

Additionally, exposure to various client situations and needs is transformative for LIFT Advocates--ideally, when LIFT Advocates go on to various careers, we will use what we learned at LIFT and continue to advocate for the eradication of poverty through public policy. In our own university and within the city of Chicago, we sponsor events such as Poverty Awareness Week and attend public policy rallies in order to better educate ourselves and our peers about the consequences of poverty and what we can do to provide solutions.

From the LIFT-Chicago Facebook Page: "03.29.2012: As part of Poverty Awareness Week, LIFT hosted a panel discussion on "Reexamining Opportunity" at Loyola University Chicago. Panelist included a LIFT Advocate, LIFT client, Loyola University Professor, a Chicago Organizer for Serve Next and a LIFT Site Coordinator." I helped facilitate this event last year with two of my fellow Advocates.

Worldview

In terms of Keith Morton's paradigms of service, LIFT is primarily an organization committed to social change, though it does embody all three paradigms in some way.

Our core involvement, the client-Advocate relationship based on client need, is charitable in the sense that we are providing a path to an immediate solution for the individual's problems resulting from the larger issue of poverty. The organization itself is structured more as a project, with different people playing different roles in order to accomplish some measure of progress among the clientele and obtain more money and resources to keep the organization afloat.

However, the ultimate goal of LIFT is for our direct service to clients to prompt the individuals themselves to be involved in making a change for themselves, their family, and others. As Morton suggests, the social change we create "comes about when otherwise ordinary people find ways to being their values, their actions, and their world into closer alignment with each other."***

(From the LIFT-Chicago Facebook Page) Our Spring 2012 Advocate Team

*The 2009 HHS Poverty Guidelines: One Version of the [U.S.] Federal Poverty Measure,”  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
**Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010,” U.S. Census Bureau
***Morton, Keith. "The Irony of Service: Charity, Project, and Social Change in Service-Learning." 28. Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning, 1995.

For more information, please visit our website (note: all statistics retrieved from here)

Want to know even more? LIFT knows how to use social media! Here's our Twitter, our official blog, and LIFT-Chicago's Facebook page