Featured Video

For more Multimedia, click on any of the links below:

When the City Turns Cold: Healthcare for the Homeless 

When the City Turns Cold: Breakthrough Urban Ministries

When the City Turns Cold: Man on the Streets

About The Project

Twelve student journalists, 16 weeks, one city. Thousands of people homeless in the Windy City alone. This spring, at Roosevelt University, where we embrace a mission of social justice, students in the capstone undergraduate journalism course, the convergence newsroom, set out to chronicle homelessness in the city of Chicago in a project entitled, “When the City Turns Cold: Homeless in Chicago.”

Against the backdrop of a national mortgage crisis and rising home foreclosures, increasing joblessness and poverty, and the lingering misperception of homelessness in America as being mostly a portrait of indigent men, we examine homelessness in Chicago. The objective over the spring/winter semester was to take a literary and microscopic look at homelessness during the most brutal months of the year here—winter.

Embracing the traditional approach of public affairs reporting and the tools of convergent media, Roosevelt University journalism students took to the streets where the homeless often dwell in the shadows of downtown’s lower Wacker Drive on icy nights and cower in blankets in the darkened doorways of buildings in an effort to seek shelter from the wind; to homeless shelters, among them Pacific Gardens Mission, perhaps Chicago’s most well-known haven for the homeless that has operated for more than 100 years; to a suburban church, where a program known as PADS (Public Action to Deliver Shelter), is seeing a burgeoning number of middle class families turn to them for shelter amid mounting foreclosures and an unforgiving and relentless economic downturn.

In addition to the written narrative, the student journalists also sought to document through the use of digital media, the voices and faces of those most affected and those working on the frontlines to combat homelessness and hunger as well as those who provide a lifeline.

To that end, our stories as presented here, take the form of written narrative, as well as a collective multimedia project. Additionally, posted are podcasts by students on their reflections of covering the story, an American story, one that we cannot afford to ignore, one that is crystalized by the reporting, writing and storytelling of these student journalists.

Professor John W. Fountain

Faces and Voices

Reflections - "As Might I"

By Kristin Bivens
I have never been homeless. I’ve always had a warm bed to sleep in and food waiting in my refrigerator for me whenever I want it. But, living in Chicago over the past two years, I’ve seen my fair share of homeless people. People I walk past without giving them a second thought.
Like so many living here in Chicago, I’ve become almost immune to their existence. I walk right past them downtown on my way to and from class, without the courage to look them in the eye as they jingle their paper cups and create the sound of spare change.

I grew up in Niles, Mich., where it’s still very rare to see anyone begging on the streets. I was raised by a single mom since I was eight after my dad died. And despite my mom’s struggles to make ends meet, I have always had a place to call home.

Reflections - "Makes Me Feel Good Inside"

By Morgan Amos
The change in a homeless man’s cup clicks back and forth as he says “hey, pretty lady, can you spare some change?”

The sun blares down on individuals' faces as they pass him by as he sits on a square and gravel stoop that is filled with cigarette butts, soil, and dirt along Michigan and Congress.

The aroma of hazel nut coffee and an array of baked goods drift from the Dunkin Doughnuts shop right along Michigan Avenue. The smell is suddenly over shadowed by the smell of cigarette smoke, thanks to a man that walks past me as I passed the Dunkin Doughnuts.

Reflections - "Seeing the Invisible"

By Robert O’Connor
When Studs Terkel passed away last October, I attended a memorial service put on by his friends at the Community Media Workshop. Rick Kogan, who wrote the obituary for Terkel that appeared in the Tribune, spoke about what Studs taught him.

“Because of him,” he said, “I remember the bus driver who takes me to work, or the kid that delivers the papers.” At Kogan’s job, he would talk to politicians and business leaders, but because of Studs, he would remember ordinary people’s concerns and consider their own thoughts as equal to those in the moneyed halls.

Reflections - "From One Mother and Daughter to Another"

By Kristen Strobbe
At the corner of Madison and Dearborn, a mother and a daughter stood asking for money. A yellowed Starbucks coffee cup held outstretched, two small voices spilled out into the brisk evening air.

“Please spare some change to help me and my daughter,” the older woman said as her eyes moved to look a few inches to her left and at least four inches below.

The eyes finally settled on the young girl whose head reached her mother’s elbow. The girl didn’t respond and she didn’t look forward, she kept her head down and stared deep into the sidewalk at her feet, as if her shoes could somehow persuade the concrete to transport her to another time and place.