care goes city-wide. if you didn’t notice, it’s by design.
Hello, Neighbors!
We wanted to share some long awaited good news! On May 13, 2026 Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced an expansion to the city's CARE Program, a specialized team that responds to mental health crises without police. The CARE Program — which stands for Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement — IS NOW available in all 77 community areas in Chicago. The program sends a mental health professional and an emergency medical technician – not police officers or firefighters — to respond to calls of mental health emergencies.
33th Ward Alder Rossana Rodriguez, who joined Mayor Brandon Johnson, The Collaborative for Community Wellness, a coalition of community-based organizations, community residents, advocates, and mental health professionals working on the Treatment Not Trauma campaign and the expansion of the CARE program, spoke at the presser, and shared this update on her Instagram:
"I am so happy to be here today. Its been six years since we started a fight to be able to provide mental health crisis response in the city of Chicago without criminalizing people who are struggling, people who might suffer from mental illness, people who might be disregulated due to the material conditions that they face in our city everyday.
We wanted this to come from government, because government has a duty to care for people. So we do this work with workers who are unionized, with workers who are protected, and that makes a huge difference in the way in which we deliver this work.
I am immensely proud of this work and I am also incredibly grateful that we have a mayor that said 'yes' to this work, that said 'yes' to building systems that can transform our city, and that kept his promise to all of us. And with that, I will bring to the podium the mayor that said 'yes', and kept his promise, Mayor Brandon Johnson."
There is still a lot of work to be done so that we could have the right person responding to the right call at the right time, as our lovely friend Ishan Daya says. We need to fully fund the expansion of this program and the reopening of the public mental health centers to expand this ecosystem of care, which depends on CDPH leadership and city council members, which is why we keep organizing.
The funding for this work is not guaranteed thanks to the relentless campaign against Community Safety Surcharge (CSS), aka ‘Head Tax’ which was backed by Michael Sacks, or as our Governor Pritzker put it later the same afternoon at the DNC site visit presser "he's a good civic leader in the city of Chicago who's tried his whole career to support things that really matter to working people, and he's a Democrat". Without taking a breath, in the same 60 sec segment local news called out Sacks as a ‘generous donor” and a friend of the Governor and former Mayor Rahm Emanuel and “a frequent target of Mayor Johnson’s because Sacks spent money to oppose the Mayor’s Head Tax proposal”. The irony of bringing up the ‘Head Tax’ on the day of the CARE program announcement, while calling it ‘Mayor Johnson’s Head Tax’ was not lost on us. It was never Mayor Johnson’s ‘Head Tax’ or Mayor Johnson’s Budget. But it’s more fun to make it sound like a game where it’s the mayor who lost something, not all of us.
This underscored the fundamental hypocrisy that we are dealing with: the same elected officials who call themselves pragmatic, common sense and efficiency driven, rally against human and community-centered, lifesaving programs that not only help people, but keep them from ending up in criminal justice system, which is even more costly both financially and morally, are treating this work as a game. As if scoring points is all that matters and there are no considerations to the human and financial costs in their games.
When Chicago City Council voted 30-18 on December 20, 2025 to approve the final portion of city’s budget for 2026, they went out of their way to exclude reinstatement of ‘Head Tax’, which was around since 1973 until Rahm admin nixed it in 2014. This tax caused no job losses according to Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson. So if the city is not allowed by law to tax the wealth and top corporations, and the state is refusing to do it, the burden shifts on ordinary people. That part.
Our 44th Ward Ald. Lawson, who was weaving and dodging our efforts to get a clear answer on where he stood on this issue, refused to share the feedback (calls and emails) from the ward residents, and only issues his biased survey AFTER our’s People’s Townhall on Nov. 18, 2025, ultimately ended up blaming ward residents for his vote, as he wrote in a Ward Newsletter sent on Dec 29, 2025.
“My decision to support a different proposal from the Mayor’s proposed budget also directly reflects what I heard from hundreds of constituents across the 44th Ward over the last few weeks. Through our survey, nearly two-thirds of residents expressed their opposition to the Mayor’s budget and less than twenty percent expressed support for the Mayor's budget. Residents also communicated support for finding ways to improve government efficiencies, and most shared strong opposition to the Head Tax”.
One would ask why not just stand on business and defend your position? But alas, to this day Ald. Lawson refuses to share the actual number of calls and emails that his office received in support of the Protect Chicago budget, and our FOIAs on this subject were denied twice. The reason for this petty mess is that we know from our fellow organizers at JCUA that almost 300 residents expressed their support for the Protect Chicago budget, but we could never get our alderman to share the actual numbers or give any reason beyond anecdotal corporate talking points. As we learned later, Sacks donated close to $373,000 to the campaigns controlled by alders who opposed ‘Head Tax’, including $28,400 to Friends of Bennett Lawson Candidate Committee.
So why would a ‘good civic leader in the city of Chicago’ and a friend of Governor and former mayor Rahm Emanuel tank a marginal corporate tax meant to fund much needed mental health service in the city? Maybe, just maybe, the answer is adjacent to the same reason why Ald. Lawson didn’t include CARE expansion announcement in his weekly newsletter two days later (see screenshot above), beyond a thumbnail buried deep under the pile of other scary crime stuff . Do people in Lakeview not need free, accessible non-police crises response? Or public mental health services? Why does every single one of his newsletter lead with robberies, thefts, burglaries and other CPD stuff?
To wrap this story with a bow, we leave you with what happened in the evening of the same day, May 13. Ald. Lawson actually showed up to the monthly 19 Police District Council meeting, for the first time this year. The topic of the meeting was indeed CARE expansion. Just as our district councilor Jenny started her presentation, exactly 16 minutes into the meeting, Ald. Lawson… left. Since 19 PDC meetings are the only truly democratic open forums in our ward, this was a missed opportunity to ask him important questions. Particularly about the policing plan for this year’s Pride.
But we have a plan! Since our alderman doesn’t hold any public meetings, this morning we sent a letter to our Ald. Lawson, organizers of Pride Chicago, 19 Police District Council, and a few members of local press. We are not asking for the world, or to make any scary policing decisions, just a kiki about making Lakeview Pride safe and welcoming to EVERYONE, not just friends of Governor and former mayor Rahm Emanuel and the like.
We leave you with a couple of possibilities. Let things continue as they are, which frankly is just a lazy slide into full oligarchy. Or, do democratic stuff while we still can, and maybe we can make enough changes to improve lives for people in Lakeview. So here are three easy and impactful ways to engage:
We want accessible mental healthcare and city-wide non-police crisis response fully funded and expanded to 24×7. How do we get it? Step 1: Sign TNT petition and share it with three friends. bit.ly/tntpetitionsIf you want to learn more and get involved, we have the action page for you!
We want a community dialogue (a kiki) so that we could work together to make this year’s Pride fun AND safe for EVERYONE. JOIN OUR COMMUNITY PETITION to request a public community forum about making this year’s Pride celebration safe and inclusive for EVERYONE.bit.ly/lakeview4everyone
Finally, with the legislative session ending at the end of May, we need to be heard on Tax Justice. Our friends at One Northside are holding two actions in the next 9 days. If you can, join us, AND text three friends.
Always text three friends. Send them this page, you will definitely have something to kiki about next time you see them.
44th Ward Action
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