Street lights and a community garden on 71st Street got the most votes, with other winning projects ranging from sidewalk repairs and security cameras to public murals.

Ald Leslie Hairston was one of  three aldermen implementing participatory budgeting this year, four years after it was introduced here in the 49th Ward, and thirty years after the concept was pioneered by the Workers Party in Brazil.

A core of volunteer community representatives spent months winnowing down 150 ideas raised in brainstorming sessions last October into specific, feasible projects.

Only 104 residents turned out in the 5th — more than 400 voted in the 45th and 46th, and 1,427 voted in the 49th — and volunteers later discussed ways of improving outreach and turnout next year.

In New York City, where participatory budgeting was introduced on a small scale last year, organizers have succeed in boosting the participation of low-income residents — far above their turnout rate in local elections — as ITT reported in a previous installment. That article charts the history of participatory budgeting around the world, where it’s been deployed with varying degrees of success.

Maria Hadden of the Partipatory Budgeting Project points out that, while voter turnout matters, the opportunity throughout the process for residents to “develop a community voice and learn how to use it” is just as important.

“When I’m driving around the city, I’ll say, ‘Oh, they’re doing this here,’ or ‘they’re doing that there,’” one participant told ITT.  “I’ve always wanted to be a ‘they.’

“Communities always have things put upon them,” said Angela Sims, an intern with UIC’s College of Urban Planning, who volunteered for the project. Participatory budgeting “can bridge the ‘they’ and the community,” she said.

Series author Joel Handley will lead a panel discussion of the lessons to be learned from the Chicago experience for the Illinois Humanities Council on June 11 at the Cultural Center; more information here.

Forty residents are serving on committees to sift through suggestions from the public and come up with proposals to be voted on in May.  At this point, ideas range from the mundane — more streetlights — to the fanciful — a heated driving range at Jackson Park’s golf course.

Invented by the Workers Party in Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting was introduced in Chicago in 2009 by 49th Ward Alderman Joe Moore.  Residents discuss and vote on proposals for spending the $1.3 million in aldermanic menu money each ward gets annually for small infrastructure projects.  This year, three additional aldermen are implementing the concept.

“In a city not inclined to involve the public in decision-making,…the democratization of ward menu money is a small step, but a significant one,” writes Joel Handley.

The article is the first installment in a series that will follow the process through the final vote.

And while Hadiya’s death gained national attention, symbolizing the epidemic of violence that has swept Chicago, the aftermath of Antonio’s killing may be more typical.

President Obama spoke of Hadiya in the State of the Union Address, and Michelle Obama attended her funeral, along with an array of public officials.  A $40,000 reward was established for information about her killing, police set up a hotline for tips, and an intensive investigation yielded the arrest of two men suspected of involvement with shooting Hadiya within two weeks.

After Antonio was shot in what reports suggest was a random act, friends and community members decorated the site of the shooting, and his funeral was standing room only, according to a February 13 WBEZ report, part of an ongoing effort by Columbia College journalism students to track the homicides of young people.

But no public officials have spoken out about the killing, and with little media attention, police hadn’t even contacted Fenner’s family since his death.

A police spokesman told WBEZ that there are hundreds of murder investigations underway in Chicago, and investigating officers may not have felt it was necessary to speak with the family.  Police had no idea of a motive in the shooting and no leads.

Fenner’s stepfather, wonders whether police are even trying to catch Antonio’s killer.

He describes the attitude of police toward young people in Garfield Park: “They’re just going to kill each other, and our job is just to come by and clean up.”

In a related report, Austin Talks explores the impact of violence.  They talk with Tali Raviv, a psychologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital who trains teachers, counselors, and community members to identify and help children traumatized by violence.

Without such help, children exposed to violence are prone to becoming violent themselves, she says.

Noting the high rate of young people in the juvenile justice system who have trauma histories, she says we are “creating this multi-generational violence loop.”

Austin Talks also speaks with David Elam of Fathers Who Care, a group that holds monthly meetings where teens can explore issues and connect with mentors.

“The angle on Hadiya Pendleton is really because she embodied so much of the promise of youth, but all of these youths should be viewed that way,” says Raviv.

Each project will receive $5,000 to support original reporting or data analysis from the Community News Matters program of the Chicago Community Trust.  The program is backed by CCT, the MacArthur Foundation and the McCormick Foundation.

Issues to be covered include subsidized housing, participatory budgeting in one Chicago ward, health care challenges facing veterans, the community impact of redevelopment of the U.S. Steel site, domestic violence and mental health in Back of the Yards, the impact of incarceration on Chicago communities, and school reform in Humboldt Park and Bronzeville.

Recipients range from established outlets like the Chicago Reporter and In These Times to grassroots projects like the Neighborhood Writing Alliance and Austin Talks, and include several freelance journalists.

The initiative is a response to findings of the 2010 Community News Matters study that found that residents of low-income South and West Side neighborhoods felt that traditional news outlets do not cover relevant issues in their communities.

To keep up with the latest output from the Local Reporting Initiative, follow the Community News Project blog.

Here are the recipients of the 2012 Local Reporting Awards:

1. Chicago Reporter, to investigate Chicago’s Section 8 housing program;
2. Windy City Times, to investigate the realities facing the LGBTQ community in the criminal legal system;
3. In These Times, to explore participatory budgeting on Chicago’s 5th ward;
4. Health and Disability Advocates, to document health care difficulties facing local military veterans;
5. Bill Healy, to enhance the content and distribution of projects by fellow award winners;
6. Kari Lydersen, to explore community impact of South side steel site redevelopment;
7. The Gate, to explore domestic violence and mental health in the Back of the Yards community;
8. Latinos Progresando, to document monologues by youth regarding Latino and American cultural perspectives;
9. Austin Talks, to produce a video documentary about homicides of Chicago youth;
10. Carlos Javier Ortiz, to produce a video documentary of youth violence at Stroger Hospital;
11. Neighborhood Writing Alliance, to document the impact of incarceration among West and South side Chicago residents;
12. Kalyn Belsha, to investigate leadership support for Latina women in Chicago;
13. Amandillo Cuzan, to produce a video documentary on Bronzeville area schools;
14. Westside Writing Alliance, to document the impact of school reform in the Humboldt/Garfield Park area.

Lead poisoning can cause a range of health problems including neurological damage and learning disabilities.  Looking at data from CPS, the study showed that even lower levels of lead poisoning can affect test scores and other measures of achievement.

One expert calls it “the low-hanging fruit of education reform.”

But efforts to combat lead poisoning have lagged as funding for prevention has been cut. The Centers for Disease Control’s budget for lead poisoning prevention was reduced by 90 percent this year.

In Englewood, which has the highest lead poisoning rates in the nation, the community group Imagine Englewood If works with parents and landlords to increase awareness.  The group is also pushing for restoration of state funding to test schoolchildren.

The Metropolitan Tenants Organization is preparing an ordinance requiring testing of all apartments for lead levels (currently they are tested if a child is found to be poisoned).  But the group has not yet found an alderman to sponsor the ordinance.

“Lead poisoning is one of the few causes of social and learning problems that we know how to solve,” said Anita Weinberg, director of Lead Safe Housing Initiatives at Loyola University.  “We can resolve this problem within a generation, but it’s not a priority for the city.”

In the fifth part of In These Times’ series on “The Other Chicago,” Joel Handley talks with experts and sources on the street who argue that today’s black street gangs are highly unorganized, with no top-down control — and rarely involved with criminal activity.

The 8-Tray Stones on 83rd Street is one of the loose block-by-block groupings that are typical today.  It’s a Black P. Stones “set” with somewhere around 400 members consisting of young kids to grandfathers. “At an early age, the men in the neighborhood learn the Stones handshake or gang sign, but that’s the extent of their affiliation.”

The traditional criminal enterprises engaged in by street gangs are less of an option now – extortion has suffered as small businesses have closed and construction has dried up; drug sales are less lucrative as the wholesale price of illegal drugs has risen.   Perhaps 10 percent of today’s gang members are involved in those activities, according to Lance Williams of NEIU.

More than 70 percent of self-described gang members are chronicially unemployed, Williams estimates, in a city where 50 percent of working-age black males are jobless.

“People don’t just go to the streets,” says John Hagedorn of UIC. “They’re getting marginal work, losing it, coming back to the streets. There’s a huge set with one foot in and one foot out. Former gang members are trying to move on and having a hard time of it. People that were working their way up got pushed back down.”

And much of the violence categorized by police as gang-related is not that at all, Handley’s sources maintain.  Von Stone, a hospital case manager, says it’s easy to “sweep it under the run” by calling a shooting gang-related “when they have no idea.”

Much of this violence is actually interpersonal, reflecting a “Wild West mentality,” says a member of the 8-Trays.  He argues (as we previously noted Whet Moser arguing) that the proliferation of violence is tied to the demolition of high-rise projects and the focus on incarceration as a crime deterrent.

Stone, himself a shooting victim, founded Hip Hope, a program that helps surviviors of violence find housing, rehabilitation, and support services.  “Everybody talks about how many die, but nobody talks about the survivors,” he says.  Last year the program lost its state funding.  Now it’s looking for donors.

Princeton Park tenants are organizing and have taken the landlord to court, alleging among other things that he charges tenants for routine repairs, in violation of the Chicago Landlord Tenant Ordinance.  Metropolitan Tenants Organization tells their story in a new article at Progress Illinois.

In Woodlawn, Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY), organized by Southside Together Organizing for Power, carries out direct-action campaigns around housing, health care, police brutality, and other sociall and economic justice issues.  They recently joined a sit-in at the mayor’s office to defend the city’s mental health clinics.

And motivated by the shooting death of a founding member, 18-year-old Damien Turner, they’ve fought for a trauma center at the University of Chicago Medical Center.  Turner died at Northwestern Hospital after being shot blocks away from UCMC.

Rappers Carlos and Young DBoy Low work with Project Spitfire, which uses music to help young people break free of the cycle of gangs, drugs, and violence.  It’s not at all easy, says DBoy, especially since “rival gangs don’t care about you wanting what we call ‘out.’ They don’t care about you changing your life and wanting to raise your kids in a different environment….

“See, you can try to erase your own past, but you can’t erase the pain someone else has suffered due to the hands of your gang sign.”

DBoys songs tell the stories of his life, featuring “delicate images mixed with harsh realities.” Check out the lyrics to “Too Young To Die.

Information from a FOIA request showed that more police cars are routinely dispatched in response to 911 on the North Side compared to Austin – though Austin has three times as many violent crimes. For calls about “shots fired,” more than two times as many cars are dispatched on the Near North compared to Austin.

The Central Austin Neighborhood Association and the ACLU sued the city in 2011, charging that disproportionate allocation of police resources violates the civil rights of Austin residents, she reports.

Writing at Projecto Latina, the editorial director of Extra reports that Latinas have a much higher chance of developing diabetes – and of dying from it.

She says one challenge for Latinas is that they’ve been raised to “help everyone but yourself.”