One of the city’s leading social service organizations, beset by a pair of financial crises that last year engulfed its housing and health care divisions, could be on the verge of splitting up.
The turmoil at the Heartland Alliance, a sprawling nonprofit encompassing five divisions providing a vast array of social services, threatens to upend important safety net programs at a time when Chicago is experiencing an influx of migrants, many of whom need help with health care and housing.
Heartland Alliance’s housing division, which grappled with inflation and declining rent collections during the pandemic, ceased operations last spring and needs buyers for the roughly 1,000 affordable units it operated in Chicago and Wisconsin.
Heartland’s health division, struggling to cover escalating health costs and expenses associated with a surge of migrants in its shelters, indefinitely furloughed more than 150 employees between September and November and cut back programming. It’s now considering spinning off into an independent organization, according to a written statement from Mary Kay Gilbert, interim executive director of Heartland Alliance Health, and Chief External Affairs Officer Ed Stellon. Health care centers in Englewood, Uptown and the Near West Side remain open.
“(Heartland Alliance Health) is considering a variety of options and no final decisions have been made at this time,” Gilbert and Stellon wrote.
“Heartland Alliance as an entity will cease to exist,” said Michael Brieschke, a Heartland Alliance case manager and unit chair of the union representing many of its workers. “It will be broken up into pieces. It’s a fact now.”
Longtime Heartland Alliance President Evelyn Diaz announced her resignation in August and interim President Don Laackman took over. Heartland officials declined to be interviewed and Gilbert and Stellon would only answer questions in writing.
Heartland’s new leaders said their top priorities include selling Heartland Housing’s properties to groups with the capacity to maintain the buildings and ensuring that health care services for those at risk of homelessness are not interrupted.
