The Silver Fox Cafe and Office Revitalization: KOCO’s offices are expanding to create new community gathering spots as well as enhance economic development.The Silver Fox Café will be a destination for seniors to enjoy good food and meet new friends. It also will be another source for neighborhood jobs. The new upper floors will include business incubation spaces and other rooms where residents can gather to envision and implement plans for an even stronger Bronzeville.

KOCO led a 34-day hunger strike in 2015 which drew national attention and showcased community determination, forcing officials to reverse their closure plans.

Widespread media coverage in Chicago and nationally (including a New York Times video short) galvanized others around our actions. KOCO also gained evidence that an affluent North Side school was being expanded while Dyett was to be closed. KOCO confronted city officials with the evidence and stood up for our community.

A groundswell of support poured in and CPS ultimately reversed course. Today, Dyett remains a beacon of education for our students and community.

Read the Dyett Chronology and Other Documents:

• Dyett Chronology
• Coalition Proposal
• Dyett Proposal
• Washington Park Athletic Career Academy RFP
• Little Black Pearl RFP

In Chicago, in Illinois and across the country, half of all renters pay more than 30% of their income on rent. One out of 4 spend over half their income on rent, and rents have been rising faster than inflation. KOCO responded by helping form the Lift the Ban Coalition, focused on keeping renters in their homes in Chicago and throughout Illinois.

In 1997, Illinois passed a law that stops municipalities from controlling how much landlords can charge. That ban on rent control is what KOCO and the Lift the Ban Coalition are fighting against. The coalition is made up of Black and Latinx community organizations, unions and mobile-home associations. This fight is important to all of us because communities know best what we need to thrive.

We successfully worked in Springfield to introduce lift-the-ban legislation in 2021. We are keeping up the pressure privately and publicly because affordable housing is in our DNA.

KOCO was born in 1967 during Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Chicago Freedom Movement to fight for fair housing and an end to segregation. Working for affordable housing is a big part of what we do.

At age 13, Aziya Roberts went to KOCO to complain about how little governments seemed to be doing to find the group of people most likely to go missing in the United States: Black girls and women.

Believing in the importance of youth leadership development, KOCO worked with Aziya to create the first We Walk for Her march to bring attention to those voiceless Chicagoans. What started as a march has turned into a movement.

We Walk for Her has helped raise awareness to the fact that even though Black girls and women go missing more often, their cases are not publicized in the national media. While KOCO does not take full credit, things have changed in Chicago’s newsrooms and in the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.

In 2021, the sheriff’s office announced the Missing Persons Project, in which detectives would restart searches for a list of 170 missing persons, some missing for more than 80 years. Chicago media increased coverage of the cases of Kierra Coles, Viola Martin, and other missing Black women.

KOCO also created its Girls Lead initiative to give young Black women a platform to advocate for themselves on issues that affect them directly. Too often, well-meaning agencies and officials create well-intended programs that don’t adequately address the conditions that communities see and experience every day.

Girls Lead is one of KOCO’s answers to this mismatch of priorities.

Involved Seniors for Justice, a KOCO initiative, brings together seniors to advocate for one another in communities throughout Chicago. They campaign for decent living conditions, equitable treatment and respect from managers and administrators in senior living facilities.

Currently, Involved Seniors for Justice is compiling reports from residents in private and publicly owned senior buildings in order to create a Senior Bill of Rights. Once completed, the Senior Bill of Rights likely will be introduced to the Chicago City Council to get protections for seniors written into Chicago law.

Seniors so far have complained that some of their apartments in buildings have rats, roaches and bed bugs, that managers have been dismissive of their complaints and have treated seniors rudely. Some have even said they have been wrongly threatened with eviction.

Involved Seniors for Justice is gathering their grievances and creating a document that will be the basis for the Senior Bill of Rights.

KOCO has been a leader in engaging low-income and working families in working to shape public policy and calling for the reallocation of resources to sustain community-driven school transformation, the preservation and creation of affordable housing, and investment in youth. Our organization led the fight for community-driven school transformation models locally, and been in the leadership of this same effort nationally. Our organization has trained 50 local school council members who have been active in leading the fight for an elected representative school board campaign. Our organization has engaged parents, youth, and local school council members to present our plan for community-driven sustainable school transformation to the new Chief Executive Officer for the Chicago Public Schools (Barbara Byrd Bennett). Ms. Bennett has since committed to working with our leaders to revisit the decision to phase-out Dyett High School. Our leaders have also provided the leadership behind forming local and national coalitions that have won a municipal referendum measure for an elected representative school board, and a federal hearing on the impact of federal education policy on communities of color, respectively.

KOCO’s youth leaders have been working with their peers and adult allies to bring attention to the civil rights violations taking place at Dyett High School, and ultimately return investment to the school. KOCO’s youth leaders have been able to advocate for the adoption of restorative justice practices to replace the zero tolerance policies; and spearhead the adoption of innovative programming that led to the greatest increase in students attending post-secondary institutions, and the drastic decrease in suspensions and expulsions.