History
The Northwestern University Settlement House was one of the major contributions in Chicago history to creating American social reform, as part of a broader, international movement. Advocates of the Settlement movement such as Samuel Barnett and Arnold Toynbee in the UK, and Lilian Wald, Harriet Vittum, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jane Addams in the U.S., influenced the social policy arena. Among the many achievements in changing public institutions, they promoted fair salaries for workers and improvement of poor neighborhoods, turned feminism into a social force, advocated the concept of juvenile court, brought about recognition of the child as a person with rights, and developed vast programs to integrate immigrants and promote multiculturalism.
In January 1891, the President of Northwestern University, Henry Wade Rogers, his wife Emma, and two faculty members founded the Settlement Association. They modeled the house on the University Settlement model, developed by Toynbee Hall in London, even featuring designs from portions of the Jane Addams' Hull House. The Northwestern University Settlement House formally opened its new building at 1400 W. Augusta Boulevard, in 1901. Northwestern University Settlement House provided the poor of Chicago's West Town neighborhood with educational and recreational programs. Its mission was to provide resources that empower its "neighbors" to take personal responsibility for overcoming the obstacles of poverty and improving the quality of their lives. It was one of the first to aid Polish immigrants in the late 19th century to the early 20th century.
Today, Northwestern University Settlement House continues to run a traditional settlement operation, providing holistic educational, experiential, arts and emergency services to the entire family, currently serving more than 40,000 individuals annually.
Read more about this topic: Northwestern University Settlement House
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“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)