BBF is located at the corner of 15th Street and Pulaski Road in the heart of the west side neighborhood of North Lawndale (Chicago Community Area 29). 

North Lawndale’s Past

Organized in 1857, North Lawndale was for many years one of Chicago’s largest and most vibrant industrial centers, housing the operations of International Harvester, Sears, Sunbeam, Western Electric and Zenith as well as nearly 120,000 residents.  The neighborhood was in its early days (from 1900 to 1950) populated primarily by eastern European Jews, a group’s whose presence lingers in the community today in the many synagogues that line North Lawndale’s central boulevards. 

North Lawndale’s population began to shift in the 1950s, as Jewish immigrants moved northward in the City and thousands of African Americans moved into the community seeking work in its many factories and industrial plants. Following Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, fierce rioting erupted in North Lawndale, destroying many stores along the neighborhood’s primary commercial strip and accelerating an economic decline that had begun some years earlier.  By 1970, North Lawndale had lost 75% of its local businesses.   All major industries eventually relocated, people who could afford to moved out, and commercial buildings and housing stock deteriorated. 

North Lawndale’s Present

Today, North Lawndale’s population total hovers at 42,000.  Ninety-four percent (94%) of the population is African American; 5% is Latino; and 1% is Caucasian.  While there have been some recent gains in socioeconomic stability, the community still faces considerable challenges:

• 27% of adults are unemployed (6% citywide).
• 42% of families with children live below federal poverty level (23% citywide).
• 30% of all births are to teenaged mothers (15% citywide).
• 33% of all high school students drop out (24% citywide).
• 29% of adults lack a high school diploma/GED.
• 11% of adults have only a 9th grade education.

North Lawndale is not, however, a community without hope.  The new BBF Community Center, built for North Lawndale’s young people by the Kellman Family Foundation, is part of nascent but growing wave of redevelopment in North Lawndale that includes residential infill areas, retail outlets and shopping plazas, new private, public and charter schools, and new community-service developments, including a YMCA, fire station, police headquarters, public transportation station, and health clinic. 

North Lawndale’s Future

North Lawndale is a community rich in human potential. BBF strives to develop in North Lawndale’s younger generations the perspective  necessary to see that they are more than what they might be defined as externally, more, for example, than the sum of a set of demographic statistics. Through participation in BBF programming, young people come to recognize that while their circumstances may be challenging, their lives are not predetermined stories, but developmental narratives that they can shape proactively through education, goal setting, good decision-making and positive interpersonal relationships.