Fifty years ago, concerned religious leaders and community members banded together as the Edgewater Community Council (ECC) to safeguard and im prove the quality of life in their neighborhood.
Since those first meetings in 1960, ECC has fulfilled this mission by fighting absentee landlords and drug houses, preserving hundreds of units of affordable housing, helping to form more than a dozen other community organizations, working to secure historic sites for public use as neighborhood parks, organizing mass property assessment appeals to help homeowners, and coordinating neighborhood cleaning and greening activities, among many other efforts.
Today, ECC continuse to identify and address community priorities in a range of ways: through volunteer-powered committees covering a wide range of issues, as a central hub for community information via our website and other means, and by providing needed services to vulnerable members of our community and the public, including immigrant and senior outreach, housing information and resources, and youth arts programs.
Through ECC’s leadership, such community icons as the Edgewater Library, Broadway Armory Park, the Edgewater Historical Society, the North Lakeside Cultural Center and Berger Park mansions, theEdgewater Development Corporation, and the Edgewater Chamber of Commerce came into existence. ECC pioneered the CAPS program with the Chicago Police Department right here in Edgewater, worked to clean up crime, drug activity, and slum buildings along Winthrop and Kenmore and other areas, and preserved hundreds of units of affordable housing.
ECC’s program to provide food and clothing to those in need, Care for Real, has been serving Edgewater for more than 40 years. With cooperation from religious institutions, businesses, individuals and many volunteers, Care for Real serves over 3,000 people every month.
Today, ECC also offers senior citizen, immigrant, youth, housing, and safety programs, many of which also serve low- to moderate-income residents of Edgewater. In addition, our Edgewater Beautiful Committee works to clean and beautify the neighborhood, while the Edgewater Environmental Sustainability Project aims to make Edgewater the “greenest” community in Chicago.
