When Lisa Morrison Butler was wooed away from her nonprofit job last year to lead Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services, she worried she wouldn’t find the same commitment level she’d grown used to.
Those who were on her team at City Year Chicago, a nonprofit that helps at-risk kids graduate from high school, where she served as executive director for 11 years, “live and breathe and eat” their cause, she said. Would government workers be as passionate?
Far and away, they are just as invested, she found.
“One of the things I was really struck by was that these folks feel like a nonprofit on steroids,” Morrison Butler, 59, said.
As commissioner of the city’s human services agency, Morrison Butler oversees a $405 million budget that funds more than 300 nonprofits wrestling with some of the city’s stickiest social challenges, including homelessness, domestic violence and at-risk youth. The agency, the biggest social services funder in the city, serves 300,000 Chicagoans a year.
Morrison Butler, who started in August 2015, said she was drawn to the job “like a moth to a flame.” Before City Year, she had worked in the corporate sector and as an entrepreneur who founded her own marketing consulting business, so “it felt like the natural next step to continue this multisector journey that I’ve been on.”
Morrison Butler — a self-described Army brat who grew up in 10 cities and three countries as her dad, a career Army officer, followed military transfers — received her bachelor’s degree in public policy at Indiana University.
Sitting in her West Town neighborhood office, with a clear view of Chicago’s skyline one shouldn’t dare pry away from her — “I would fight anyone for this view,” she joked — Morrison Butler discussed her agency’s work.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was the big challenge facing the Department of Family and Support Services when you assumed the role?
A: I spent my first 90 days on a listening tour. I had learned the hard way not to assume that I had the answers when I walked in the door. One of the things that stands out is that the team here wants to make sure that no matter what happens with funding in the future, that we will be able to meet the demand and need for our services.
Q: What’s your department’s role in tackling the youth unemployment crisis in Chicago?
A: We provided more than 31,000 summer job opportunities for youth (through the city’s One Summer Chicago program) this summer. We started in 2011 with 14,000 summer jobs, so to go to 31,000 is huge. (Mayor Rahm Emanuel) also launched the mayor’s mentoring initiative. This is a $36 million initiative over three years focused on 22 communities and 7,200 boys and young men in eighth, ninth and 10th grades.
Q: Is there anything you wish people understood about these youth?
A: While we only hear about the bad news, the truth of the matter is that there are some phenomenal programs on the ground in these communities doing great work. And all of our young men and boys of color in Chicago are not troublemakers and perpetrators of violence, and I do get very passionate wanting to make sure people see these communities, and the people that live in them, for what they really are. They’re just real folks like us.
Q: What needs to happen that isn’t happening to improve the situation?
A: I think one of the things that’s challenging in a city of our size is the sheer number of initiatives that are going on in any one time. The city is a big partner in this, the nonprofit sector is a big partner in this, philanthropic organizations, businesses, and there are so many conversations going on that it makes it hard to connect the dots. We spend a lot of time trying to drive people to come to one table or one conversation because we can’t see each other if we’re not in the same room talking together. In Chicago there are 44,500 opportunity youth (young people who are not working nor in school). How do you really ever bring the resources to bear that it would require to actually make a difference in the lives of 44,000 people if everyone wants to run off and do their own thing?
Q: Why has it been so hard to bring everyone to the table?
A: Each organization comes to the relationship thinking, I’d like to have this particular outcome, I want to concentrate on this geography or this subset of the population. When we work that way it’s very fragmented. It’s very difficult to bring all those players together and say let’s have one conversation and be transparent about what we’re doing. Think about in the corporate world: Nobody expects Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar and Tesla to sit down at the table together and share information on their customer base and their production and manufacturing facilities.
Q: But you see efforts moving forward?
A: Just this year, Thrive Chicago (a nonprofit working to align efforts of youth service providers) convened a conversation with all of the funders and nonprofits that serve opportunity youth and they are working to create the citywide strategy that will address the problem.
Q: How much does it cost to do this well?
A: Our after-school programs are about $1,000 per kid. Our summer jobs programs, $1,800 to $1,900 per child. Even the mentoring program, the new one, will be about $2,300 per child. When we looked around the country to see what programs we saw that were successful with this harder-to-reach population, there was a program out in California. They run a fellowship for young men, most of whom have already had some justice-involved background. What they see is that they need not only a job, they need a job plus some wraparound supports that enable them to be successful. And the early indicators are that it’s about $25,000 to $30,000 per person. That seems incredibly expensive. And yet $25,000 to $30,000 per person is a whole lot less than the average costs associated with a person once they are involved in the criminal justice system.
Q: What do you think a Trump administration will mean for Chicago and the people you serve?
A: I don’t think that we know yet. But I’m really glad that as a department we have gone ahead and done the work of trying to figure out how to continue to deliver the products and services that we deliver even if funding stays flat or decreases.
Q: Is there a certain population that needs more attention than it’s getting?
A: The mayor spoke this morning and mentioned that every year 17,000 ex-offenders return to Chicago. I do think that as we think about a city of this size and the percentage of people who are living here that might have backgrounds with criminal history, trying to bring additional resources to that group is needed and very important.
aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @alexiaer
