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It's a common dilemma for residents and workers in urban
hubs everywhere: an obviously homeless person asks for some change.
People want to give, but many of them don't feel safe or worry that
the money might be used to feed a habit at the core of this person's
problems.
Created by a number of local churchers, headed by the North Loop institution
Holy Name Cathedral, 730 N. Wabash St., in 1993, and based on a program
invented years ago in Berkeley, CA, Chicago Shares is finally starting
to produce an easy answer.
A share, which can be bought at participating churches, stores, by mail
an on a web site, represents a 50 cent coupon, which canbe redeemed
at participating restaurants and a few stores. They can only be
used to buy food, prescriptions and drug store supplies, shoe repairs
and non-alcoholic beverages.
Hand a homeless person one or two of these shares and you can be pretty
sure that they won't be used to buy drugs or alcohol.
"We recognize that the homeless have a lot of problems," said Rich Kaczmarek,
Lake Point Tower resident, retiree and co-executive director of Chicago
Shares. "We are not trying to solve all these problems. We have
decided that this is our niche in alleviating part of the problem."
The program is booming. This year, at the current rate, they expect
to sell 50,000 shares, meaning $25,000 in shares will be circulating.
Last year the program sold only $15,500.
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Chicago Shares is staffed totally by volunteers and has no overhead.
Shares are reimbursed at 100 percent their face values and purchased
without surcharge. Nonetheless, throughout the program's history not
all shares sold are reimbursed - only about 70 percent.
Kaczmarek said that at the end of the year the board of directors determines
how much money they have in their accounts which represents coupons
that won't be redeemed, and that amount is donated to a social service
dealing with the homeless locally.
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For more information, visit www.chicagoshares,org
or call (312) 573-4469. Vouchers may be purchased by mail in booklets
of 10 at Chicago Shares, 730 N. Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611. Make
checks payable to "Chicago Shares".
by Sean Cermak.
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