“To end poverty, people have got to figure out locally what’s the right thing to do,” says Dr. Bud Ogle ’64, “These universal problems are very local, and local problems are also very universal.”
This is the strategy behind Good News Partners, a faith-based organization that helps Chicagoans living in poverty to earn an education, obtain a job and own a home. Now in its 30th year, the organization has helped more than 100 formerly homeless families to achieve home ownership.
As a Macalester student, Ogle worked with an African American youth group at St. Paul’s Dayton Avenue Presbyterian Church, where he first realized his calling to end poverty and injustice. It was history Professor Yahya Armajani who impressed upon Ogle the imperative to work both locally and universally. Political science Professor G. Theodore Mitau helped him learn to wed diverse perspectives, a skill Ogle employs “to take the best of the conservative and the best of the liberal to figure out how we can really dig deep to solve problems.”
While serving as a campus minister at Northwestern University, Ogle initiated his mission to end poverty in the North of Howard neighborhood, a pocket of crime and destitution in northeast Chicago. He helped children to read by retelling their stories on paper, learning about life as they had to live it. “It became pretty clear that it wasn’t fair to the kids to put a Band-Aid on major hemorrhaging, that we either needed to deal with the hemorrhaging or go elsewhere.” With his wife Donna Sederburg Ogle ’64, Ogle moved into the neighborhood and started an emergency shelter. Through “a whole lot of miracles” they bought and rehabilitated the Jonquil Hotel—previously a haven for gangs, drugs and prostitution—and the mission expanded into Good News Partners.
Today, the Jonquil is a thriving community of 60 families and individuals. Good News has rehabilitated 300 units of housing and manages several buildings comprising 120 low-cost housing units. The organization provides tutoring, recreation and ministry programs for youth as well as drug rehabilitation, employment training and spiritual development programs for adults. In a particular point of pride for Ogle, they have partnered with more than 200 recovering addicts, who “were able to enter a 12-step program and turn their lives over to God and become strong, beautiful, free new people again.”
Throughout the 30 years of work for his community, Ogle has lived in one of the program’s housing projects; one of the goals of Good News Partners is to have key staff members living in each building. “We’re convinced that having that kind of real care at the center makes a big difference.”
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Collaborating to end poverty and spark hope in Chicago