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Introduction
Alaka Wali and Madeleine Tudor
The exploration of issues relevant to organizations and people in the communities of Chicago moves forward in this second volume of papers from CCUC's Urban Research Initiative. It includes the work of its ethnographers while also providing a critical venue for feedback from partners in the participatory research process. Dialogue with community partners and researchers has uncovered three recurring themes that remain useful in thinking about the contemporary city: the meaning of community, the meaning of place in Chicago, and the meaning of being American. It is through these interrelated, complex, changing themes that the following research is best understood.
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Creating Brand New Beginnings
Rebecca Burwell
The Women's Empowerment Project (WEP) has been successful in fighting for affordable housing for homeless Chicago women. Rebecca Burwell's research with these women, whose organization is an outgrowth of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH), reveals the power of grassroots organizing, training and action when the stories of participants are taken seriously and decision-making power is granted to those involved. Encouraged by their success in forcing the Presidential Towers development in the West Loop to offer seven percent of its units at affordable rates, WEP moved on to the Brand New Beginnings Project (BNB), through which they developed a low-income rental property from an abandoned building for women and children on the South Side.
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Building Participation and Relationships in a Complex Community
Joel D. Bookman
Citizen involvement in community 
organizations has been declining nationwide. The North River Commission (NRC), while having an impressive record of positive neighborhood change dating back to 1962, has felt the effects of this trend. Joel Bookman, former Executive Director of NRC, discusses the complexity of both the components of urban revitalization (economics, public safety, health) and the task of encouraging meaningful community cooperation and participation across changing cultural lines. By taking the perspective that these issues are best approached through a "wide-angle view" that values this multiplicity and the process of change itself, Bookman is working towards meeting these challenges. The findings of Field Museum researchers Gretchen Fox and Huber Izienicki, who worked with NRC, provided a valuable addition to the community-building process through the creation of multi-ethnic focus groups. Citizens who met to discuss a proposed informational web portal ended up forming new bonds based on common concerns.
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Identifying Assets and Facilitating Social Networks in the Diverse Communities of Albany Park
Gretchen Fox and Hubert Izienicki
Gretchen Fox and Hubert Izienicki's work with the North River Commission resulted in a detailed picture of the assets and challenges faced by the culturally and economically diverse neighborhood of Albany Park. Ethnographic research in this continually changing area showed that locals see youth, safety, services, affordability and diversity as both social assets and challenges. Having investigated the depth of these issues, the researchers set out to connect the organizations, businesses, religious institutions and school programs that operate in their midst with each other and with individuals in the community – many of whom had been unaware of the number of resources available to them.
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Preserving Heritage in the Face of Change: Russian Jews and the Gentrification of Uptown
Rabbi Philip Lefkowitz
One of the challenges of leading the Agudas Achim North Shore Congregation, Rabbi Philip Lefkowitz observes, is the difficulty of measuring success. To this and other ends, Victoria Hegner examined the "synagogue community" and "Russian community" in an attempt to better understand religious and cultural assimilation in the area's elderly population. Rabbi Lefkowitz values both the finding that immigrants adapt more easily to American life if part of his synagogue and the usefulness of Victoria's report in applying for institutional funding.
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Imagine Englewood ...If! Working to Collaborate, Communicate, and Connect
Jean Carter-Hill and Kathryn Haines
Although often oversimplified as 
being crime-ridden and impoverished, residents of Englewood have organized as a way of strengthening the positive aspects of their environment and of working against existing problems. Neighbors in Bloom, a block club from 56th and Paulina streets, joined forces with Imagine Englewood...if! in 1999. Soon their focus on collaborating, connecting and communicating with their neighbors led to progress in transcending the divides created by the seven ward city classification system. Gardening and leadership workshops led the way to cleaner, safer, and more empowered neighborhoods.
