Friday, January 27
Jane Addams Hull House Association
In her book Twenty Years at Hull House written nearly a century ago, Jane Addams wrote, “One of the first lessons we learned at Hull House was that private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city’s disinherited. We also quickly came to realize that there are certain types of wretchedness from which every private philanthropy shrink and which are cared for only in those wards of the county hospital provided for the wrecks of vicious living or in the city’s isolation hospital for smallpox patients.” In describing the smallpox epidemic taking place in the early part of the twentieth century, Addams stresses the importance of “governmental responsibility.” What would Jane say about events today?
On Friday, January 27, 2012, Jane Addams Hull House Association will officially close and file for bankruptcy as it can no longer financially continue to keep its doors open. Founded in 1889, Hull House Association has evoked a huge outpouring of emotion, outrage, and shock not only in the Chicago area and throughout the state, but throughout the country. A variety of efforts to save Hull House have been initiated. These are all commendable. However, the closure of Hull House is symptomatic of the ongoing financial challenges and pain that human service providers and the persons they serve are facing in Illinois. Provider bill backlog still remains in the billions in large part because Springfield has failed to address the backload. The scenario is all too familiar—providers not being paid for months for services rendered.
Increased stress on the state budget has translated into job losses in the private sector as well. According to Illinois Partners for Human Services, state fiscal woes forced nearly half of its surveyed nonprofits to lay off staff during this past year. Unfortunately the state has accepted unpaid bills as an ugly necessity to muddle into the next budget cycle and has failed to address the needed debt restructuring.
As the date of Governor Quinn’s FY13 budget address quickly approaches, we must make it clear that human service agencies can no longer serve as short-term lenders to the state in providing services without compensation. If not, we will continue to see more agencies be forced to abandon their missions—the “governmental responsibility” of serving the less fortunate—that Jane Addams wrote about close to a century ago.
