Two years ago, Wheaton resident Deborah Suggs found herself unemployed when the day-care center where she had worked for seven years closed.
But Suggs, 53, saw the situation as an opportunity rather than a setback.
“I had wanted to change careers for a while and thought it would be a good time to learn a new occupation,” she recalled. “And I had always wanted to learn about computers.”
The following Saturday morning, Suggs visited a satellite location of the People’s Resource Center in her Marian Park apartment complex. There, she signed up for a six-week basic computer class.
“I had little experience with computers, but I knew that acquiring computer skills would make me more marketable jobwise,” she said.
Over the next few months, she learned about word processing, spreadsheets and databases. The center also gave her a used computer so she could continue to learn at home.
Within a few weeks, Suggs found employment at the Westbridge Assisted Living Center in Wheaton. She was hired as a receptionist, but the role required her to do computer work. Eventually she was tapped to help run an admissions/discharge computer system that keeps track of the patients at the center.
Today, Suggs is proud of her accomplishments.
“What I’ve learned has helped elevate me, as far as my career and job skills,” she said. “For that I am grateful.”
In fact, Suggs now volunteers at the resource center on Saturday mornings, helping others learn computer skills.
“It’s nice to volunteer, but I’m also still learning,” she said.
Suggs’ story is becoming more typical for DuPage County residents who receive social services from agencies such as the People’s Resource Center.
“The idea is not only to help people out but to help them move up,” said Mary Ellen Durbin, executive director of the center, whose main location is at 1506 E. Roosevelt Rd., Wheaton.
“Despite its affluence, there are certainly pockets of need in DuPage County,” said Jack Tenison, deputy administrator of the county’s Department of Human Services. “And help is needed in different ways.”
And the need is growing, Durbin and Tenison said.
“It has to do with the rapid growth of this county,” Durbin said. “As the population grows, so does the number of people who are living in poverty.”
Those needing assistance include residents who have lost a job or ended a marriage, losing their incomes, she said.
“We also have an increasing number of people who are new to this country,” Durbin said.
Many of those immigrants are working, she said, but in most cases their jobs are at the low end of the economic ladder–landscapers, restaurant workers, factory workers.
Those who live and work in the county also face high transportation costs, which is a drain on their incomes, said Dennis Smith, executive director of the Northern Illinois Food Bank in St. Charles, formerly the Bethlehem Center Food Bank. The food bank distributes 20,000 pounds of food a day to more than 200 agencies, most of them in DuPage County.
“There is little in the way of public transportation in the county, and to move vertically across the county–it becomes a challenge (because of the lack of north-south routes),” Smith said. “Even if both heads of the household are working, they probably need two cars, and that’s expensive.”
Not only has the number of requests for help increased, but so has the depth of services, Tenison said.
“We didn’t even have a human-services function when I started with the county 20 years ago,” he said.
“Fifteen years ago, we began offering senior services. Now we need to address areas such as domestic violence or emergency-housing assistance.”
Other programs of the county Human Services Department are:
– The DuPage Physicians Medical Assistance Program, which refers low-income residents to doctors for care at a reduced cost.
– A paratransit program that offers subsidized taxi service for visits to medical facilities and government offices.
– A housing assistance program that links county residents to services that prevent homelessness.
– A housing and emergency rental assistance program that helps people with their rent or mortgage payments.
– The Family Self-Sufficiency Program, designed to help county residents acquire or improve education, job and living skills.
– An employment and training assistance program.
There also are programs aimed at the county’s elderly residents, providing services such as home-delivered meals, nursing home prescreening and elder abuse investigation.
The People’s Resource Center, meanwhile, addresses other social-service needs in the county. The 25-year-old agency provides about 35,000 instances of assistance a year at its three locations and nine neighborhood centers.
A major service is a pantry that offers emergency assistance to 700 to 900 families per month.
“The need for the food pantry continues to grow each year,” Durbin said. “We serve a lot of immigrants who can’t depend on government assistance, and we also serve a lot of local residents who live in poverty.”
The center started as a pantry. “The first food pantry was a group of neighbors who brought food together and distributed it to those who needed it,” Durbin said.
As with the county’s services, the center’s services have expanded to address a growing and diversifying population.
“There are four special programs that we have developed to try to address some of the barriers that keep people in this unabated poverty,” Durbin said. “We’re also trying to address welfare-to-work people.”
For example, the computer-literacy program reaches about 200 students at any given time and has given away more than 550 computers for students to use.
There also is a one-on-one adult literacy program and an English as a second language program.
In the transportation program, participants are given an automobile to get to and from work.
“Transportation is a huge issue here,” Durbin said. “We’ve probably given away 150 cars in a year to people to create work opportunities. We’re also working with employers to try to develop shuttles and van pooling. And we try to help people with information on public transportation.”
Other center services are a dental clinic; a housing initiative that seeks long-term solutions for the county’s homeless; Women’s Wisdom, an arts program for women; and Du-Justice (DuPage Families for Economic Justice), a community organizing effort for low-income residents.
As the county continues to grow, Durbin and Tenison said their operations will face new challenges.
“Housing is always a looming issue,” Durbin said. “Now we have programs to help people with emergency rent assistance.
“When we analyze our population, we analyze how much of their monthly income goes into housing and it’s about 60 percent. So they become the working poor.”
For the county, Tenison said, growing needs will include reaching out more to minorities, a growing population base.
“Programs for Spanish-speaking people will be key,” he said. “Also, we’ll need to address individual medical needs as health care becomes costlier and more complicated.
“But we’ve got the resources–we’re working hard to continue to address the needs of the folks in the county.”
