On August 13th we convened about sixty-five Chicago organizations that work with mothers, and spent the day on one question: who actually catches a pregnant woman when her housing falls through?

The honest answer is that a lot of people try, and most of them are working alone. In one room were clinics, parish outreach programs, doulas, diaper banks, WIC staff, recovery programs, workforce programs and half a dozen other maternity homes. Nearly everyone in the room had turned a woman away in the last year for want of a bed, and nearly everyone had sent her to a number they were not sure still worked.

What we took away from it

• The gap is housing, not services. Chicago has a great deal of help available to a mother who has somewhere to sleep. It has very little for one who does not.
• Referral paths are informal and fragile. They run on individual relationships, and they break when a person changes jobs.
• Nobody in the room was competing with us. Fifteen apartments will not saturate this need; they will barely register against it. That was clarifying.

We came away with working relationships we did not have in the morning, and with a clearer sense of what our own intake has to look like. When a woman reaches out to us and we cannot house her, we should be able to hand her a real name at a real organization rather than a wish of good luck. That is part of why the Need a Place to Stay page now says plainly that we will try to point her somewhere else if we are full.

Thank you to everyone who came, and to the organizations who traveled across the city to spend a working day on somebody else's problem.