When you open a door at Cornerstone this winter, you don’t just step into a building, you step into a place where hope lives. And this is where it has lived since 1989 when a group of thoughtful neighbors made space and provided shelter to those in need.

Behind each door is a story: a mother tucking her children into a safe bed for the first time in weeks, a hot meal that quiets an empty stomach, a caring hand that reminds someone they’re not alone. These are the moments of light that your support makes possible.

This season, we invite you to join Cornerstone as we open the doors and light the way for hundreds of individuals and families who have nowhere else to turn.

Cornerstone Community Outreach has always been a place of refuge and renewal. And right now, our needs are immense. More people than ever are coming to our doors, families displaced from their housing, individuals rebuilding their lives after hardship and many who have lost access to meaningful support and public benefits. Our new cafeteria space, and upcoming medical respite space, will be ready to welcome them, but it’s your generosity that brings these spaces and services to life.

Because buildings don’t create hope, people do.

Your gift helps keep the lights on and the heat running. It fills plates with warm, nutritional meals. It allows our dedicated staff to offer compassionate care and practical support to every person who walks through our doors. And it ensures that each guest is met free of judgment, with dignity and love.

This year, we’re asking you to consider how deeply you can give. Your past support has made an incredible difference, and today, your renewed generosity can go even further. Every dollar you give helps open another door and light another path forward.

This is the season when light means the most, when your compassion can truly transform cold nights into moments of warmth, safety and hope.

Please, give as generously as you can. Together, we can open the doors and light the way for our neighbors in need.

The Johnson family wakes at 6:30 a.m. in their shared room at Cornerstone Community Outreach. Michelle and Anthony help their children start their day: a high schooler, middle schooler and an elementary school student. After a quick breakfast in the cafeteria, the children bring their new backpack and supplies to school with bus passes provided by CCO. When the children come home, they are greeted with a snack, a safe space to reset and do homework. Finally, they are served a nutritious meal and are free to spend the evening with their family, preparing for the next day.

For 35+ years, Cornerstone Community Outreach has provided safe housing and 3 meals daily to thousands of families and individuals. We support clients with a network of medical, job, and educational resources with the ultimate goal being their achieving permanent housing and a thriving life. This isn’t all, though – Cornerstone believes in the impact of the “little things” – a new backpack, a fun water bottle, a cool pair of shoes – the things that might seem like afterthoughts in the largeness of life but that actually make a huge difference in the day-to-day. For kids, for all of us.

Children experiencing homelessness can often feel high levels of social pressure to hide this fact. One of the ways in which we support our children comprehensively is through our back-to-school-program. By providing each child with new and high quality shoes, socks, underwear, backpacks, and supplies, we find that children enter the new school year with more confidence and excitement than before. Many of us know from experience that the clothes you wear can majorly impact confidence in social settings, and school is an especially important social setting. We take a multifaceted approach: not merely providing for the most basic physical needs of an individual, but also with an awareness of the significance of a person’s emotional state, in the moment and as it affects their future.

This August, CCO’s back-to-school planning team served children at the shelter by providing them with supplies and clothing to start their school year off well, in addition to celebrating their return to school with a party to kick off the year. We provided each of the ~100 school-age children at the shelter with a backpack, water bottle, school supplies, shoes, socks, and underwear. We celebrated them with games, food, and entertainment on the day of our party. This boosts morale for the kids and for the parents. Half the people on the dance floor are the moms.

Recently, a client told us that no matter how tired she is, she brings her 5 kids to every event that Cornerstone hosts, because she knows that it makes a difference for them. It relieves significant stress for parents to know that their children are being looked out for by the community at large, and that the students will start their school year with clean, new clothes and supplies.

We want you to be a part of this! We’ve seen some amazingly creative fundraisers (in 2024, our friends at Tiny Giants Daycare threw the cutest art show ever where parents “bought” their kids art and the proceeds went to Cornerstone), some incredibly generous donors, and some wonderful and hard-working volunteers over the years. Contact a.learmond@ccolife.org or eraedke@ccolife.org or visit our website at ccolife.org to find ways to get involved in Cornerstone’s Back-to-School 2025.

Program Manager – Naomi Womens Shelter
(full description at InDeed: https://qr1.be/ZEBX)

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Summary of Feedback Received

Q2 2025:

CCO Vision and NCD PDF

To Submit Bed ReportLog in to : https://webapps1.chicago.gov/shelterbedreporting/

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At Cornerstone Community Outreach, our mission is to do more than provide shelter—we strive to restore dignity, agency, and a sense of belonging to every person who walks through our doors. That’s why we’re exploring a new framework to deepen our impact: the Civic Identity Hub.

Civic identity is more than paperwork or a mailing address. It’s the ability to be seen, counted, and heard in society. It’s how someone knows they belong—not just to a system, but to a community. For people experiencing homelessness, this identity is often lost or stripped away, leading to a cycle of invisibility and disconnection from public life.

The Civic Identity Hub is a vision born out of our frontline experience at Cornerstone and our commitment to innovation in care. It is a space—physical, relational, and digital—where individuals can begin to recover what has been taken from them:

-Healthcare integration (linkages to Medicaid, primary care, and behavioral health)
-Legal identification (state IDs, birth certificates, benefits enrollment)
-Access to civic life (voter registration, census participation, mail services)
-Restored agency (support to reclaim voice, purpose, and social participation)

While our Medically Integrated Shelter model addresses physical and mental health, the Civic Identity Hub expands that care to include social and civic health—the foundational structures of belonging and participation.

This is not a new building; it’s a new way of seeing people. A way of helping each person become known again—to themselves, their community, and the systems that shape their lives.

As we develop this vision, we invite civic leaders, policymakers, and neighbors to imagine with us:
What would it look like if housing, healthcare, and civic identity were restored in the same space?
What kind of city might we become?

Let’s build it—together.