After attending a training on faith communities helping with the migrant crisis, Grace Lutheran Church congregant Nancy Mathyer proposed hosting a migrant family in the church.
The congregation took it to a vote in October 2023, and the measure passed with overwhelming support.
“Part of Grace Lutheran Church is putting our faith into action courageously,” Mathyer said. “And this is it.”
More than 38,000 migrant individuals and families have arrived in Chicago since August 2022, according to the city’s New Arrivals Situational Awareness Dashboard. Some of these migrants have sought shelter in Evanston, but they’ve found few options.
With an already overcrowded houseless shelter system in Evanston, some local faith communities have stepped in to house migrants.
The Margarita Inn, a year-round Evanston shelter operated by Connections for the Homeless, is currently at its capacity of about 60 people and has a four-to-eight month waitlist, according to Nia Tavoularis, the organization’s chief development officer.
The Margarita Inn is currently hosting one migrant family.
Interfaith Action of Evanston’s emergency overnight shelter is also at its capacity of 30 beds with a waitlist of about 45 people, Executive Director Susan Murphy Berube said. No migrants have approached Interfaith Action, and its shelters don’t provide long-term transitional housing for families, she added.
Evanston has been actively searching for “suitable local shelter options for migrants,” according to a Jan. 8 news release.
Vacant buildings found thus far are in “such poor condition that they cannot be made safe enough for housing migrants,” Cynthia Vargas, community engagement and communications manager of the City of Evanston, told The Daily in an email.
While Evanston struggles to find housing for newly arrived migrants, some local faith communities have partnered with the Faith Community Initiative, an organization that provides immigration case management services and works with Chicago-area faith communities to house and financially support migrants.
The Faith Community Initiative has housed about 50 families, Program Manager Emily Wheeler said. The organization has been working with 16 different faith communities, including the Grace Lutheran Church and the Evanston Friends Meeting, she said.
The Grace Lutheran Church signed an agreement with the Faith Community Initiative in November 2023, committing to housing a Venezuelan family of four for a year in the church’s extra rooms and providing them $1,000 a month in Visa gift cards, Pastor Luke Harris-Ferree said.
The family — a mother and three children — were bused to Chicago in late summer 2023 soon after they sought asylum in Texas, Harris-Ferree said. They were sleeping in a tent outside a police station, and the youngest child — a 1-year-old — was falling ill, he said.
In addition to providing housing and financial assistance, the Grace Lutheran Church got the family on medical insurance and enrolled the two older children in Evanston schools, Harris-Ferree said. The 1-year-old is now healthy, and the family seems to be doing much better, they said.
“The mom just really wants a better life for her kids, a more stable life,” Harris-Ferree said. “Realizing the deep fear they did live under in Venezuela and how they were treated from some of the stories she shared was horrible.”
Local Quaker community Evanston Friends Meeting is also hosting a Venezuelan family of five in a two-room apartment at the back of its meeting house.
Before the recent migrant crisis, faith communities in Evanston had already been supporting migrant families, many of whom arrived from Afghanistan and Syria, Evanston Friends Meeting congregant Richard Graef said.
The value of helping one’s neighbor and those in need is at the root of all major religions, said Graef, the Quaker representative on Interfaith Action of Evanston’s immigration subcommittee.
“I hate when people talk about Christian values or Quaker values or Jewish values,” Graef said. “They’re all the same. They’re basic human responsibility — human values — which we’re talking about.”
The Faith Community Initiative still has many families that need shelter, Wheeler said.
The organization has been actively seeking out more faith communities to host migrant families, especially in suburbs like Evanston whose resources are not as overwhelmed as Chicago, she said.
“I think that our responsibility — more than just as faith communities, as Americans — is to fill in the gap that exists in the social services that our government provides, which are woefully underfunded and under-resourced,” Wheeler said.
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