The Englewood Women’s Initiative (EWI) is a program through a coalition of 8 organizations in the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago connecting women in the neighborhood with pathways to incomes over $40k/year through job training, business development, and financial and job readiness skills. CURL is evaluating the pilot and collaborating in creating a database tracking system and benchmarks.
Read More
CURL worked with the Jane Addams Senior Caucus (JASC) to develop the Jane Addams Senior Housing Bill of Rights. The project spanned 12 months and engaged over 250 seniors in a participatory process to identify key concerns and solutions in senior housing in Chicago.
Read More
CURL is performing research and evaluation for HEART Women & Girls’ 2017 initiative. The initiative is composed of a series of trainings for Muslim college students and student leaders on up to five college campuses. The students will come together to understand sexual violence, learn how to support victims, and develop victim-centric approaches, polices, and best practices that address and prevent sexual violence in student organizations.
Read More
Chicago's Fifth House Ensemble (5HE) partners with local non-profits to offer music education residencies to vulnerable populations throughout the city. Recent residencies include Teen Living Programs, a homeless youth services provider; Deborah's Place, homeless women services provider; and Nancy B. Jefferson Alternative High School, an alternative school located within the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. The Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) and Brian L. Kelly of Loyola University Chicago, School of Social Work, are working together to evaluate the benefits of these residencies, by measuring their effects on participants' mental health, professional skills, engagement with the community, and other dimensions of social and personal life.
Read More
Instituto del Progreso Latino (Instituto) has developed a new model for providing ESL training to its community of learners. They are combining the best of online educational practice with intensive one-on-one and in-person classroom mentoring to fully meet the needs of their students. CURL evaluated this pilot program which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
Read More
Chicago Public Schools launched the Global Citizenship Initiative (GCI) in 2012-2013. GCI provides rigorous curriculum aligned with high standards, supports high quality pedagogy that meets the needs of diverse learners and reflects best practices in civic education, and generates multiple external learning opportunities throughout the city of Chicago.
Read More
CURL started an evaluation partnership with Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI) focusing on their recently awarded multi-year grant from the Kellogg Foundation. The process evaluation examined the implementation of COFI’s parent leadership program - Family Focused Organizing - in four Illinois communities that are building collaborations to improve access to and quality of early learning programs. Family Focused Organizing develops parents as leaders in their communities so they may advocate on behalf of themselves, their families, and their communities.
Read More
The Family Court Enhancement Project is a collaborative project of the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), the Battered Women’s Justice Project, and the National Institute for Justice.
Read More
The Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) worked with Organizing Neighborhoods for Equality: Northside (ONE Northside) on a participatory research project to further document and analyze the Organization of the NorthEast (ONE) and Lakeview Action Coalition (LAC) merger process that created ONE Northside. The impact of the merger is of interest not only to researchers and policy makers focusing on non-profit organizations, but also to other similar organizations seeking to be more effective in their advocacy impact and their financial efficiency. Outcomes of this merger have implications for other organizations in Chicago and the nation.
Read More