|
HPKlFC
Happenings Services for the Poor/Homeless |
A Brief History of the Hyde Park & Kenwood Interfaith Council |
The Council was founded on February 7, 1911, as an ecumenical Protestant organization. A community Thanksgiving Day Worship Service was initiated that first year, with the offering to benefit United Charities. Among the efforts during the first decade were outreach, helping an African Methodist Church buy land and start building a church/community center near 55th and Kenwood, and supporting “dry” candidates in an effort to promote Prohibition.
During the 1920s the Council worked to bring weekday religious education to youth in several local public schools. In 1927 the annual Thanksgiving Day Worship Service began being held in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. It has been held there each year since, except for 1933 and 1950, when it was held in local Jewish Synagogues.
During the Depression of the 1930s the Council sponsored a Leisure Time Institute that offered job training and retraining to 400 unemployed men and women. In 1939 the first Jewish congregation joined the Council, which was renamed the Council of Hyde Park and Kenwood Churches and Synagogues.
During WWII the Council lent assistance to displaced Japanese-Americans that the War Relocation Authority brought to Chicago. One of those Japanese-Americans went on to become the minister of a local congregation and President of the Council. During the late 1940s and 1950s the Council worked to advance urban renewal in the neighborhood. During the late 1950s and 1960s the Council supported desegregation efforts and the Civil Rights Movement. An annual interfaith and interracial Brotherhood Dinner was held. Programs such as “Jobs for Teens”, helping provide emergency assistance when welfare checks were being withheld, and providing funds and personnel to help start the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization were other efforts of the 1960s.
In 1963 St. Thomas the Apostle and St. Ambrose became the first Roman Catholic members of the Council. In that same year the Council began a series of monthly interfaith conversations. Such interfaith conversations have been held periodically since then.
During the 1970s the Council supported the work of the Inter-religious Task Force on Soviet Jewry. In 1977 the Council developed and distributed a Community Resource Guide. In 1981 the Council began funding a local food pantry, and in 1985 the Open Kitchen meal program was begun.
During the late 1970s and 1980s some more conservative Christian congregations joined the Council, as did a local Hindu temple. At the 1992 annual meeting Muslims were brought into the interfaith dialogues.
Since 2000 the Council helped fund the start of the Hyde Park Transitional Housing Project. Later in the decade it spun off the Hunger Programs, while taking up funding for the N.J. Sanders Free Medical Clinic and a Employment, Housing and Health Care Services Coordinator, both serving the community out of Kenwood United Church of Christ.
