Mari Sunami retired from her position as Executive Director at South Side Settlement. She delivered the following remarks at a celebration in her honor on February 8th:

To quote Jane Addams, the mother of American settlement houses:
"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life."

The essence of settlement work is building community, something that no one person can do, but that all of us can facilitate. Being a part of this community has broadened and deepened my understanding and my life. It has been a challenge, an honor and an education to serve here at South Side Settlement.

When I began my tenure as Director nearly 16 years ago, I was already a devotee of this settlement house and its Philosophy, yet I found myself struggling to understand what it actually meant to build a community of culture and concern rooted in social and economic justice. What was a Community, with a capital C? How did one express culture and concern, and how was I supposed to shorten the distance between the reality around me and that vision of social and economic justice that sounded so noble and impossible?

I started trying to build Community just by making people feel welcome, feel that South Side Settlement really was their house and that their ideas and projects, gatherings and events belonged here. Culture and concern often looked like anything from drumming and dancing, community theater, visits from the mobile arms of COSI, the Zoo and the library, poetry and art events, to health fairs, donating blood on-site, and free lunch. There have been meetings about every conceivable subject--organizing and training home child-care providers, revitalizing the economic corridor on Parsons Avenue, calling Childrens Hospital to account for their impact on the neighborhood, supportive housing for the chronically homeless, police and teens, derelict housing and absentee landlords, Farmers Markets and the causes of obesity on the South Side. The list is endless.

Has it added up to anything? I guess that question is asked at the end of any endeavor, and the answer is really for others to determine. For me, it has been rewarding to see children from our program enrolled in college, and to watch the older adults getting energized, going to workshops and trips, and doing volunteer work.

Every time I go into the Preschool room, or spend a day at Camp, it is a thrill to see our youngest neighbors sustaining or building self-confidence, as they learn to think and contribute as members of a real community. I am heartened by the members of staff who give themselves whole-heartedly to doing what they can to help people have more humane lives,as Bernie Wohl put it.

But I also see the boarded-up houses throughout our neighborhood, the increase of crime that always comes with hard times, I see the impact of uneven education in kids that cannot read in the 4th grade, and also see parents working multiple jobs, or no jobs, often with similar results. Social and economic justice seems very far away.

I suppose my tenure has been another leg of the journey of a living community that moves in and out of this building and forms, in its relationships, the vibrant organization that is South Side Settlement House, neither wholly successful, nor wholly unsuccessful, but always wholly committed to the Work.
So it is fitting that we are celebrating today, consistent with our commitment to the struggle that includes both failures and successes.

Today, we find ourselves in a season of great hope and great change. Jane Addams wrote that settlements must change with their times in order to remain relevant and effective in their work for social progress.

Right now, real people are in real need of health care, employment, safe housing, and neighborhoods free of arson and crime. Children need relevant educations and open doors of opportunity, creative expression, and intellectual stimulation. Old people need helpful and caring neighbors, and adults need hope, and the chance to put their skills to work for themselves, their children and their parents. All of us are needed, taking up our part of the work to make these things a reality sooner, rather than later.

South Side Settlement is taking a step forward to meet this challenge: We are very fortunate to have selected Marsha Wickliffe, a new leader who brings her experience, skills, and relationships to put into service for this community and for our values.







Click here for the Mari Sunami Retirement photo gallery