Casa Central

casacentral.org

Every year, Casa Central serves more than 20,000 low-income Chicagoans, representing a highly diverse cross-section of the city's residents, but with a special bicultural emphasis on the largely Latino communities of Humboldt Park, Logan Square and West Town.

The agency epitomizes a "continuum of care" approach that starts with home- and center-based Head Start programming and continues through after-school and parenting programs, provision of emergency food and clothing, family preservation support, mental health services and an Adult Wellness Center, focused on the needs of seniors.

Sometimes, though, such critical services hang on something as simple as transportation.

The Adult Wellness Center provides a broad range of services, from health care monitoring to social activities, but the positive good these services might provide is entirely inaccessible for the home-bound elderly—or would be, without Casa Central's fleet of 15 vehicles.

"We transport at least 80 to 85 seniors every day who come into our Adult Wellness Center," reports Ann R. Alvarez, Casa Central's president and CEO. "And their quality of life goes up immediately. They've been home isolated, because their adult children are working or they live alone, but when they start participating in our programs, they have a fully balanced breakfast, snack and lunch, exercises, nursing attention and the social aspect as well. We see the transformational impact of the program literally overnight."

The cost of fueling and maintaining 15 vehicles is enormous, however, and dependent on the vagaries of the oil market.

"Our buses go out to the whole city, and the reimbursement we get from the city's Department on Aging doesn't cover that," Alvarez reports, "especially when the price of gas goes up, or for the process of finding drivers with the right credentials."

The Trust's support for ongoing operational expenses is a lynchpin in maintaining such vital programming, as well as the crucial nuts-and-bolts of other services like Casa Central's technology center—which provides bilingual computer and job search training—or the expansion of the agency's reach into more of the neighborhoods in which many of its clients live.

In this way, the Trust plays a central role in enabling Casa Central to achieve its goal of building a strong community, across life stages and generations, one family at a time.

See the Trust's recent grants to Casa Central

Learn more about our grant making in Basic Human Needs