Seven educators on the West and South Side are being honored at Habilitative Systems Inc.’s 5th annual Race and Health Equity Awards on Dec. 12 at the Garfield Park Conservatory.
The event is a fundraiser for HSI, which provides behavioral health and human services to 17 Chicago communities, many on the West Side. In 1978, HSI launched in a Lawndale church and now offers programs for adult mental health, child case management, crisis counseling and emergency housing, among other services.
“I always say to folks, ‘I am because we are,’” Donald Dew, president and CEO of HSI, told Austin Weekly News. “Coming together, all these collaborative efforts, and doing what we’ve been able to do over the decades is what it’s all about. We’re trying to keep hope alive. We’re trying to keep the hope for a better future present and real.”
The first Race and Health Equity Awards were in 2020, among the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd and when the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus established its four pillars addressing health inequities. The same year, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law creating a statewide Healthcare Transformation Collaborative, which convenes health care providers and community partners to improve health care and reduce its disparities.
“I decided that maybe we should begin to recognize individuals who had been in the forefront of raising health equity for decades,” Dew said of why HSI launched the annual awards.
While the first two years and fourth year of the Race and Health equity awards recognized leaders in health care, the third year honored legislators. This year is the first awarding educators.
“A lot of people just don’t realize that education is really the driver of health equity. Education really influences health outcomes,” Dew said. That includes educating the community about healthy behaviors and educating health care professionals. He added, “Policy change often begins with education.”
Dew said Habilitative Systems chose awardees based on their impact, the needs of the community where they work, and how many people have been impacted by the awardee.
“These are individuals who have fought the good fight” for decades, Dew said. “There hasn’t been a story written about the impact of educational professionals on the South and West Side of Chicago who have impacted current and future generations.”
West Side leaders awarded at the 5th annual Race and Health Equity Awards include:
Paul J. Adams III, executive chairman and founder of Providence St. Mel School in Garfield Park
When the Archdiocese of Chicago withdrew funding from a private high school in Garfield Park in 1978, Adams led national fundraising efforts to keep it open. Following the successful campaign, the school became an independent nonprofit.
“Paul Adams taking that stand back in the day to say to the Catholic Church Archdiocese, ‘I’m not closing this school,’ that was revolutionary,” Dew said.
In 1996, Adams became Providence St. Mel’s president, presiding over preschoolers through high schoolers. Today, Adams serves as executive chairman of the school. About 80% of the school’s students live on the West Side.
Over the last 47 years of Adams’ leadership, 100% of Providence’s graduating seniors have been accepted to four-year colleges and higher learning institutions. The stat is what Adams said he’s most proud of.
“It’s a great feeling,” Adams told Austin Weekly News. “Most of these colleges are some of the top colleges in the United States.”
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Since Providence St. Mel became an independent nonprofit, Adams said there have been regular financial challenges. The school has to raise about 80% of its $6 million annual budget.
“The challenge is raising those funds, and we are very happy that we can,” Adams said. “I think if we maintain a record of sending these youngsters to the best colleges and universities, we can continue to do the same thing.”
In order to improve education on Chicago’s West Side, Adams said schools and their staff need to embrace artificial intelligence. A professor from the College of DuPage teaches AI curriculum at Providence St. Mel, where Adams said staff and students use programs like Chat GPT and Gemini.
“It’s going to help the students who have the most difficulty in learning,” Adams said, allowing educators to individualize material. “It’s not going to be effective if your teaching staff is not embracing it, so we have a very aggressive approach” to AI.
Adams said he’s pleased to be honored by his kinfolk with this year’s race and health equity awards: “It’s always nice for people in the community to recognize you.”
Bernard Clay, executive director of Introspect Youth Services, Inc. in Austin
In 1975, Clay was a founding board member of Introspect Youth Services, which offers programs and services for middle schoolers and high schoolers on Chicago’s West Side and the near western suburbs, aiming to promote their development and success. Introspect Youth Services has helped tens of thousands of young people, primarily from low-income communities, to pursue higher education opportunities and employment.
Clay was Introspect’s first executive director and is celebrating the organization’s 50th anniversary in November. He said he’s most proud of Introspect’s success rate in young people pursuing education after high school.
According to Clay, the U.S. Department of Education verified that Introspect Youth Services has helped over 78,000 young adults enter into post-secondary education. Introspect operates eight programs funded by the department, including Upward Bound, ones focused on math and science, and talent search programs.
“I was extremely honored. I was around when Habilitative Systems started,” Clay said about being recognized at this year’s awards. “It’s always challenging when you serve first-generation, low-income students who are nontraditional college students.”
Clay said these students, who Introspect serves “first and foremost,” make up about two-thirds of the 2,500 children that the organization serves every year.
“Talk about an unsung hero, who’s been sending thousands of kids to college and creating these great opportunities,” Dew said of Clay.
Clay is also chairperson of the Chicago Westside Branch NAACP Education Committee and said he hopes that public education on the West Side, and across the state and country, survives.
“We’re all in a battle to make sure access to opportunities for low-income students are available,” Clay said. “It is really frightening now that access to opportunities everywhere, but particularly in low-income areas, can be denied.”
“In Illinois, we really have to look at the way we fund public education,” Clay added, including both kindergarten through twelfth grade and post-secondary opportunities. “We have a lot of students that go out of the state to get an education, and we should do a better job trying to keep those students.”
David Sanders, president of Malcolm X College
As president of Malcolm X College, Sanders oversees about 14,000 students, 900 employees and a budget of over $70 million.
Previously, Sanders served as deputy chief operating officer for the City Colleges of Chicago, which Malcolm X College is a part of. In that role, Sanders managed daily operations for the seven City Colleges. He was also the lead executive project manager for the new Malcolm X College and School of Health Sciences, which opened in 2016.
Now, Sanders is helping develop Malcolm X’s West Side campus in Austin, which he expects to open in the spring.
“I’m humbled by these things because, obviously, not only one person can achieve greatness,” Sanders said of winning the HSI award. “I think this is really reflective of all the faculty, staff and the administrators that work here every single day.”
Since working at Malcolm X College, Sanders has led the school to 10-year reaccreditation and created an internal department to manage the accreditation process. Under Sanders in 2021, Malcolm X College had one of its highest retention rates at 72%. It also has the highest enrollment among community colleges in Chicago.
“President Sanders just recently indicated that Malcolm X is graduating more nursing professionals than any other educational entity in the state of Illinois,” Dew said. “That’s just amazing, and that’s the kind of thing that we want to highlight.”
“We’ve made Malcolm X a destination place, a place where people want to come,” Sanders said. “That’s obviously evidenced by our enrollment, but it’s also inspired by our employees, the culture that we’ve built here, and the morale that’s here.”
But it wasn’t always that way. Sanders said a decade ago, he heard negative comments about Malcolm X, that it didn’t have a clear vision or mission. Now, Sanders said he’s recognized out-of-town for Malcolm X’s successes.
In addition to overcoming negative public perception of Malcolm X, Sanders said he’s proud of the buy-in he’s gotten from the college’s staff to transform the institution by treating every student as their own.
“It doesn’t matter where they came from, doesn’t matter what their background is, doesn’t matter who didn’t give them what,” Sanders said of Malcom X’s students. “When they walk through that door, they’re our child. We must take care of them. It doesn’t matter whether they’re 11 or 90, they’re our responsibility. And let’s do that as if that was our own child. That actually brought everybody together.”
Sanders said his goal is for Malcom X is to be the No. 1 college in the country in pass rates — which are determined by independent evaluations by Malcolm X’s licensing bodies — and reputation.
“Reputation means that you have not only impacted your operations and culture, but you’ve impacted the community. They see you as a viable educational institution. They see you as a beacon of light. They see you as people who are going to do the best by their children,” Sanders said.
When it comes to education on the West Side as a whole, Sanders said, “I want to see every single student reach their destiny. That’s our goal. We have to do that.”
“That means we have to come to work every day, and we have to drop the things that may be causing us trouble or concern. We have to drop those at the door and focus on our mission to allow every single student to achieve their academic objectives,” Sanders added. “If we do that, not only will we continue to be a beacon of light for the City of Chicago and beyond, but we’ll also achieve our own personal goals and objectives.”
Dew hopes that educational opportunities increase for young people on the West Side.
“No person can grow beyond the environment, just like no flower will grow beyond the flower pot that it came contained in. You expand upon that flower pot, you expand upon the growth potential of that flower. The same thing is true when we create educational opportunities for fertile minds.”
Other educators honored at this year’s HSI Race and Health Equity awards include:
- Creasier Finney Hairston, Ph.D., professor and dean of the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois Chicago
- Haki Madhubuti, MFA, Ph.D., an award-winning poet, the founder and publisher of Third World Press and distinguished professor emeritus at Chicago State University
- Carol D. Lee (Safisha Madhubuti), an Edwina S. Tarry professor emerita at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy
- Lisa W. Rollins, the regional development director of the Chicago Region for United Negro College Fund
Funds raised from the awards will go to HSI services, Malcolm X College for its community health workers program, and to Jamaicans impacted by Hurricane Melissa. Lester Barclay, an Honorary Jamaican Consulate and Chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority, will also be at the awards.
The HSI 5th annual Race and Health Equity Awards are on Dec. 12 from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N. Central Park Ave. in Chicago. For event tickets and sponsorship opportunities, visit www.habilitative.org.