AS AN ITALIAN Catholic girl growing up in St. Genevieve`s parish-a white, ethnic working-class neighborhood on the Northwest Side-Nancy Abbate remembers watching television and identifying with the Lone Ranger and Sky King because ”the men got to do things.”
By the time she graduated from Immaculata High School in 1967 and entered Mundelein College, Abbate figured she probably would major in history and become a schoolteacher. Her parents wanted her to teach because they considered it a very proper and secure profession. But after her first history course, Abbate realized that history held little appeal for her. About the same time, she read a notice in the college newspaper about theology being opened up as a major course of study.
”I went to a meeting held by the theology department, and from listening to the people speak, I thought, `This is what I want to do,` ” Abbate recalls. ”They talked about wanting to pursue certain questions-ultimate questions of God, and of being, and of what this meant in your life.”
After her sophomore year, Abbate was still interested in theology but realized she would not relish either teaching religion or becoming a nun. ”I had to figure out what I was going to do with it,” she says. ”I thought maybe I wanted to do something on a church level, a parish level.
”I was very ambitious. I typed up 75 letters and sent them to Catholic churches. I only got five replies. Three of them wanted me to tutor little kids in English or something; one said, `No, thank you`; and the last one was from the pastor of St. Philomena Church, and he said: `We`re starting some avant-garde things. We`ve turned our convent into a home for the aged, the nuns are living in apartments and we have this teen ministry. Come and talk to me and see what we can do.` ”
ABBATE DID SO, ended up working with teenagers in the parish and, in this somewhat unlikely turn of events, eventually found her life`s work. She is the founder and executive director of Youth Service Project Inc., a social-service agency that has been a fixture in Greater Humboldt Park for more than 15 years, despite its temporary-sounding name.
Humboldt Park is home to a heavy concentration of Hispanics and blacks, many of whom live below the poverty line, and it is plagued by such social problems as teenage pregnancy, street-gang activity, a high dropout rate, drug abuse and one of the highest juvenile crime rates in the city. More than half the population is under age 24.
Abbate presides over the Youth Service Project, headquartered in shabby offices above two storefronts housing a children`s clothing store and a Navy recruiting office at 3942 W. North Ave., like an offbeat CEO with a Sixties-style social conscience who favors dramatic eye makeup and spike-heeled shoes.
While YSP has a low profile in the city`s scheme of social agencies, it enjoys an excellent reputation in Humboldt Park and is regarded as a model American youth agency, visited often by international student delegations.
The seeds for YSP were sown during Abbate`s days as a college student when she walked into St. Philomena`s in 1969, got a group of teenagers together and began meeting with them every Sunday in the rectory. ”We would go to plays and movies and discuss what happened in them and make it relevant to their own lives,” she says. ”We would make banners (for the church), we would have speakers come in, lots of different things. And the kids always wanted to expand it to include all the kids in the neighborhood.”
A YEAR LATER, WITH A HANDFUL OF ADULT volunteers, she started a drop-in center, called The Catch, in the church basement and began writing a weekly column in the church bulletin.
After Abbate graduated from Mundelein and during the year before she began work on a master`s degree in philosophy at De Paul University, her work at St. Philomena`s expanded to include four more parishes in the Humboldt Park area. The programs, run by adults from the community and youth volunteers under Abbate`s leadership, eventually were organized under the all-volunteer Hermosa Community Association for Youth. When she entered De Paul, she went back to working with one parish, St. Philomena`s.
During this time it was becoming more and more apparent that rap sessions and recreational activities really weren`t meeting all the pressing needs of the young people who were increasingly getting involved with drugs, dropping out of school and having problems with their families or on the job.
Abbate wanted to start a program for youth that she believed had to function at a grassroots level-in the streets, the schools, the home and other community institutions. In 1973 she attended a so-called ”community congress” in the neighborhood that spawned the group, United Neighbors in Action, and she was appointed adviser on youth affairs to that organization`s education committee.
”It was kind of like, `That`s Nancy`s thing, and that`s fine-go ahead and do it,` ” Abbate says. ”They never thought it would amount to anything. Their major issues were housing, crime and all the rest.”
While under the aegis of United Neighbors in Action, Abbate obtained her first grant-$5,000 for one year-from the Illinois Dangerous Drugs Commission in December 1974 to start a substance-abuse program. And soon there was $500 from Pioneer Bank and $7,500 from the Illinois Humane Society.
But the money could stretch only far enough to pay for one counselor, so Abbate worked with the fledgling organization on a part-time basis. By then she had finished school and to support herself took a string of jobs with the political campaigns of independent Democrats running for state and local office on the lakefront.
In July 1975 YSP was incorporated, assembled its own board of directors, and a year later it spun off entirely from United Neighbors in Action, becoming the group`s only program successful enough to do so, and Abbate had, in a way, created a career for herself.
”You have to realize that at the very beginning, I never really wanted to do this at all,” she says. ”I was going to finish my master`s degree in philosophy, go back and get a Ph.D. in theology and teach at a university level. That was it. I really wanted someone else to take this whole thing over, but I saw very rapidly that if I wasn`t there pushing, no one else would do it. You can`t transfer that type of commitment to someone else. So that`s it.
”I`ve got to say that I felt like Job at times and wondered why I was doing it. I was trying to learn how to write grant proposals, trying to meet with all these people in government offices. Some were cooperative, some not at all.
But the grants, albeit small ones at first, kept coming through. And the programs slowly evolved. As YSP counselors went to schools to work with teenagers at risk for drug involvement, the students told them they needed summer jobs, and that led to a summer and after-school employment and activities program.
Now there are nine separate programs, including ones for teen parents, gang members, counseling for those with adjustment problems, literacy, job-readiness training, another one to encourage Hispanic girls to finish high school and go on to college or other training and community organizing to provide assistance to local block clubs and other community organizations. The programs take place in the community`s churches, schools, libraries and homes. And the majority of YSP staff members are recruited from the community.
The agency serves more than 3,000 young people 12 to 21 years of age and their families each year and has grown to a full-time staff of 40 with some 100 volunteers. And Nancy Mary Abbate, the former theology major who jokes that she has never held ”a normal job” in her life, now manages an annual budget of $1.5 million.
”Did you ever watch the old `Ed Sullivan Show`?” Abbate asks.
”Remember the guy who used to spin the plates? He was spinning all these plates, and all of a sudden it looked like he was going to drop one, and the audience would be screaming. He smiled through all of it, wearing a tuxedo and looking great. Sometimes I feel like I`m that guy.”
But she never gives up. ”If there is anything that belongs on Nancy`s business card describing her, it would be the characteristics `resourcefulness and persistence,` ” says George Graham, president of InnerChange Inc., a consulting firm, and a member of the YSP board of directors for 10 years.
”Nancy hangs in there through both thick and thin. If she encounters a roadblock, she tries to find some other way to get something done. She just won`t quit.”
Abbate has been called ”arrogant and brash” a few times, but she notes that years ago, a city official took her aside and told her: ”You know what your problem is? You want everyone to like you. Well, it`s not going to work that way. If you`re going to get something done, not everyone is going to like you.” She took it to heart and now says, ”I would much rather have on my tombstone `She got things done` than `Everyone liked her.` ”
ABBATE GETS THINGS DONE BY JUGGLING AN array of federal, state, city, corporate and private-funding sources for YSP, handling the nuts and bolts, the important detail work that allows the social work to proceed.
”I`m good at handling the business end,” she says. ”I`ve seen many places go under because the person at the top had great ideas, was great with kids but could not understand the business end.
”It`s a lot of orchestration. Getting grants is one thing, and the other end of it is understanding what you can and can`t do with those grants.
”With most of our programs it`s all the same stuff that we do, giving kids and families some type of assistance so that they can live whole lives. Maybe that`s help in school, maybe that`s linking them up to some other resource, maybe it`s having a counselor sit down with them on a structured basis to talk.
”But then what we have to do for funding sources is say: `This is juvenile delinquency, this is gang-diversion work or whatever. So it involves these labels-teen mom or gang member. You get into real problems when people like me and other people start believing this stuff, because then you`re not talking to Jose Morales or whoever anymore, you`re talking to the multiple offender who is a teen father and maybe sometimes a substance abuser.”
What Abbate never loses sight of is who and what YSP is for. Taped to the wall in front of the old wooden desk in her cluttered little office is a cartoon that tells the story of the stages a program idea goes through. The first frame pictures a tree with a rope-and-tire swing hanging from it. The following frames show what the planner proposed, what the plan specified, what was designed, what was funded and what was implemented-each increasing elaborate and unworkable. The final frame, labeled ”what the recipient wanted,” pictures a tree with a rope-and-tire swing hanging from it.
”Whether we call something `parenting` or whether we get money from a federal grant or the city, the most important thing is that we`re really addressing the community`s needs.
”My stance is different from a social worker`s. I don`t see that they`re problems as much as that this community holds a lot of unlocked, untapped potential. A social worker`s stance is that these people are sick, ill, misguided-blah, blah, blah-and you`ve got to treat them. I think people have their own answers. It`s in themselves. It`s in their culture. It`s in their extended family. You just provide a structure whereby it can come to the fore. Kids need assistance in that, and that`s what we do.”
If there`s anything that gets Abbate angry, it`s when somebody labels people in the inner city as ”disadvantaged.”
”I get upset when the lakeshore people call Humboldt Park a terrible rotten community,” she says, her voice rising. ”It`s not. It has some other problems that an affluent community doesn`t have, but if you have that much unemployment in Lincoln Park, it`s going to be just like Humboldt Park.
”The people in Humboldt Park want the same thing for their kids that Lincoln Park residents want. They want their kids educated well. They want their kids to have a better life than they have. They want to live in a safe, crime-free area. And they`re trying to do that.”
Some of the people of Lincoln Park, where Abbate lives in a high-rise condominium, are frequent targets of her scorn for their shallowness. ”I could never have gone into something where I got an MBA and made money or traded commodities,” she says. ”I know people like that-and my Lincoln Park neighbors are going to love me saying this-they don`t have anything else in their lives besides figuring out what color Mercedes to get and which restaurant they`re going to tonight. I don`t understand people like that.”
People who know Abbate frequently describe her as a workaholic, and she herself admits that work is always in the back of her mind and that she feels ”as if I`m always sort of working.”
IN ADDITION TO RUNNING YSP, she teaches a course in the causes and prevention of juvenile delinquency in De Paul University`s sociology department and sits on numerous boards and committees, recently being appointed chairman of the Illinois Secretary of State`s Literacy Advisory Board. She makes frequent trips to Springfield and Washington, D.C., sometimes to give testimony on youth issues but usually to walk the halls of government in search of leads for grant money. ”I am always looking for money,” she says, wryly. ”I`m looking for money 24 hours a day. I dream about looking for money.”
If she doesn`t have business downtown first thing in the morning, she takes two buses to get to Humboldt Park, reading the newspapers on the way to save precious time.
The rest of her day-and each one is different-can best be described as a sort of endurance race, governed only by the college assignment notebook, full of little yellow Post-It notes, that she uses as an appointment book. She typically fields phone calls, makes more calls, confers with staff members, writes out letters and reports in longhand on scratch paper salvaged from the waste basket and maybe dashes out to meetings combined with business errand-running.
”When I meet with Nancy, it`s like a whirlwind,” says attorney Howard Rubin, YSP`s general counsel. ”She comes in the door, we talk about what we need to talk about, and she`s out the door and on to the next thing. She`s always covering her bases to ensure that the funding flow is there so they can keep on doing the work they`re doing.”
Abbate almost never goes out to lunch and does not take conventional vacations. What she considers a vacation is a four-day weekend business trip to Washington, D.C., because she says it makes the airfare and hotel cheap for the agency and ”maximizes” what she`s doing and gives her a bit of free time to walk around.
”I could never take a week or two weeks away,” she says. ”I`m worried there`s some deadline (for a grant application) that`s going to pass. And I have to keep up with the phone calls because people are still going to be calling me and there`s going to be something that maybe has to be taken care of today or tomorrow. And even if I ask someone else to do it . . . .”
But she denies that she`s a workaholic, insisting that she has ”a healthy relationship” to her work. ”People who don`t have a healthy relationship to their work burn out. I realized a long time ago that it`s important to-and this is a cliche-stop and smell the roses along the way. A simple example: If I have 20 minutes or so between meetings downtown and there`s not something I have to do, I may go to the Cultural Center and look at the new display of photographs.
”I like plays, and I finally figured out that I have to buy series tickets so I`ll be locked in for that night, put it down on the calendar and go. I have series tickets to the Goodman, De Paul and the Body Politic. I don`t have time to socialize much, but if people invite me to something, I`ll put it down on the calendar, and I`ll make an appearance.”
She is a self-described ”boring person” who doesn`t ”smoke, drink or take in caffeine.” She gave up the caffeine 10 years ago and carries caffeine-free tea bags in her purse for rare business-related lunches in restaurants where she`ll order a cup of hot water and make her own brew. ”I used to live my life on tea and chocolate, and I never realized how chemically sensitive I am until I gave up caffeine. I became much calmer. I`m high-strung to begin with. Can you imagine me with caffeine? I`m bouncing off the wall.” As the only child of Joseph and Rose Abbate, she says that, of necessity, she developed self-sufficiency. ”I used to have imaginary friends,” she says. ”I had to create my own play, my own fun. I had a rich fantasy life, and I think that helped me in what I`m doing now because if you cannot imagine yourself making that next leap, taking that next step, you`re never going to do it.”
Always a serious student who worked very hard, she says that she was affected deeply by the activist climate of the 1960s and her study of theology.
”Because I`m living, there`s got to be a reason for it,” says Abbate, who describes herself as a ”cultural Catholic” who has ”intellectual problems” with organized religion.
”I think you really have to continually examine your life and figure out why you`re here. I know that people are not meant just to make lots of money, drive BMWs and lie in the sun on the roof of the East Bank Club.
”The answer comes from within, and I believe that God is inside all of us. In the continual exploration of finding out what you`re supposed to be doing in life, you are gaining more insight into yourself, and, hence, you are gaining more insight into who God is. Struggling with the question of God is central to my life.”
Besides her spiritual philosophy of life, Abbate also credits her mother`s influence. For a time until her daughter was born, Rose Abbate managed her own father`s gift-box company. (Nancy`s father worked for the federal government in several capacities, including general engineer.) ”In those days there were a lot of scripts in women`s minds that you had to get married and you had to have a child,” says Abbate, who is single.
”I think my mother could have run General Motors had she been born in another era. After I started school, she had a series of part-time jobs, but when she was home with me, she would tell me stories about her days in business, how she would greet clients, what the factory looked like, how you do certain things. The company went down the tubes without her.
”I think I took the road she might have taken, following the entrepreneurial tradition, although I`m doing it in the not-for-profit sector as opposed to the for-profit.”
For Abbate, the best part of her work is the creativity involved, not only in terms of creative financing and the marshaling of resources but also the opportunity ”to create programs from what the people in the community are saying (about their needs and wants). I get to see people hired and the programs actually working. It`s entrepreneurship in terms of assisting people.”
Although she no longer has daily contact with the people YSP helps, she knows she`s successful when ”the staff people who work with the kids see that they`re changing. They see that families are coming together. They see that kids who never thought about going to college are now in college. They see kids in our literacy program moving from one grade level to the next and the next.”
Not bad for someone with no background in social work. ”In some ways, my background is very odd to be doing what I`m doing,” Abbate allows. ”But in other ways it isn`t, because if I had majored in something like social work or sociology, I would have known that it would be impossible and difficult for me to do what I did. So I didn`t have that barrier of thinking it couldn`t be done.”
