One-Stop Shop

By: Jennifer ChenMoney kept disappearing from Maria Castillo’s bank account—money she could not have spent. Castillo, 61, had heard of identity theft and thought this might be it. But for a long time she did nothing. She told no one, and her bank statements lay untouched on her table.

“I didn’t know what to do, where to go because I don’t speak English,” said the Mexico native, through an interpreter. “What could I have done?”

But, on the way to the community organization where she volunteers, she saw the newly opened Illinois Welcoming Center, a one-stop location where immigrants and refugees can directly access state and local services, such as health care, housing, education, employment and legal assistance. Castillo, who came to Melrose Park in 2004, went in to see if they could help her.

At the center, a caseworker and legal specialist walked her through the process of dealing with identity theft. Weeks later, the problem was resolved.

“When you don’t know the language, you sometimes feel like the world closes on you,” Castillo said. “When I come [to the center], I feel like this is my home. I have somewhere to go.”

The center in west suburban Melrose Park opened in September, less than a year after a panel of state agencies recommended the construction of welcoming centers for Illinois’ more than 1.6 million foreign-born residents. Housed in a community college building, the center has classrooms, computer labs and a children’s play area, as well as offices for its administrators, state department liaisons, caseworkers and community organization co-locators. The center is run by the Office of New Americans Policy and Advocacy and the Illinois Department of Human Services, at an annual cost of $1 million.

In its first eight weeks, the center received about 450 visitors, said Rikeesha Cannon, spokeswoman for the Department of Human Services.

Silvia Villa, the center’s director, estimated that half of their visitors live around Melrose Park, a quarter from Chicago and the remainder from as far as Elgin or Gurnee.

From what she and her staff have seen, there is no single customer profile, Villa said. Some visitors are recently immigrated men, while others are divorced mothers, fathers eking out a living for their families back home, international students, families or elderly individuals.

The entire staff, which is composed of four state employees and eight colocators, is fluent in both English and Spanish because of the center’s location in Melrose Park, which transformed from a community of largely European immigrants to majority Latino in the past decade. The center also has access to 29 other languages thanks to affiliated community organizations and TeleInterpreters Service, a private interpretation services company used by the center, Cannon said.

To accommodate working schedules, the center holds unconventional hours, opening from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Rush hours for the center are usually from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

A visit can take five minutes or two hours, depending on what the customer wants, Villa said. Some people enter with a mission, such as a quick service referral. Others may request a full comprehensive service, which employs a unique intake system developed specifically for the center.

In the full service, a worker asks the visitor about 15 set questions based on the center’s five key areas of health, education, basic human needs, social services and citizenship. The customer’s answers then help a computer system generate an assessment of the individual for the caseworkers.

“We ask basic questions,” Villa said. “We’ll ask you if you speak English, and you say yes or no. We’ll ask you if you have food, and you say yes or no. We’ll ask if you have health concerns, and so forth. … The system will generate to a caseworker, ‘So-and-so needs [Englishas- a-second-language] classes and civic classes because she wants to apply for citizenship, and she needs food immediately and can apply for food stamps.’“



Traditionally, immigrants to Illinois chose Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods, such as Pilsen and Chinatown, as their points of entry, where there are a number of immigrant-focused community organizations. Today, nearly half of new arrivals choose to live in a suburb first, according to the New Americans Office’s 2006 report. The immigrant population outside of Chicago increased 89 percent in the last decade, compared with 34 percent in the city.

As immigrants continue settling in nontraditional areas, so grows the demand for such structures in these areas, said Maureen Hellwig, senior director of programs at Erie Neighborhood House, a community organization that serves large numbers of Latino immigrants. “Until fairly recently it was not perceived that houses like Erie would be needed there,” she said. “But the Latino populations in the suburbs have grown significantly in the last 20 years.”

When it came to finding a location for the center, Melrose Park fit the bill, Villa said.

Another reason why the state chose Melrose Park was because of the “incredible support” of local officials and leaders, from the community college president to police chief and local priests, Villa said. “Everybody has bought into it. If we’ve been successful, it’s because of this relationship-building,” she said.

Villa said she also wants to create a system for volunteers after hearing so many people express interest in doing so. However, she said state protocols will probably prevent anything definite from happening for a few months.

But the mere fact that the center exists puts Illinois ahead in the nation in terms of addressing immigrant integration, said Fred Tsao, policy director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which works closely with the governor’s office on New Americans efforts.

The New Americans executive order “is the first time a state has undertaken the creation of such policies and projects, and we’d like to think we serve as a model for other states to follow,” Tsao said.

“Illinois is way out in the front as far as laying [immigrant integration] out as a specific issue,” said Amanda Bergson- Shilcock, director of intake and operations at the nonprofit Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians. “Lots of states are doing interesting things in bits and pieces. … But Illinois is really notable in that it put everything under a big umbrella to encourage state agencies, small towns and mayors to see immigrant communities as part of the state and community, and not living in the outskirts or shadows.”

Without the Welcoming Center, Schiller Park resident Pedro Klaric said he probably would not have found the aging services he needed, nor enrolled in GED or English-as-a-second-language classes. The 60-year-old maintenance worker left Argentina six years ago because of the country’s crippling economic crisis. Klaric found out about the center by reading a local Spanish-language paper. He is now in level-three in the English program.

Still, not enough people know about the center, many immigrants said. Those who discovered the center said they heard about it from local churches affiliated with the center, local language media, or word of mouth.

The center has done no publicity of its own, according to Villa. Castillo said she wishes she could tell everyone about the center, and that she hopes more people will use the center— especially immigrant parents because they need to understand how to help their children make their way in the new country.

“I want to tell people who don’t speak English that just putting that piece of paper away doesn’t resolve the problem,” she said. “They need to find help and they can find it here.”