The Rundown | Chicago News WBEZ Chicago

The city’s annual point-in-time count in January showed more than 18,800 people were unhoused—a threefold increase from last year. The Saint Adalbert Church in Pilsen is a step closer to being a historical landmark. Calumet Fisheries is reopening.

Pastry chef Anna Posey will find out June 10 if she’ll win the 2024 James Beard Award for “Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker.” Among the five nominees in her category, she’s the only one in the Midwest.

“I mean it’s scary to be truthful. You’re so grateful but you also feel kind of like, ‘Are you sure?’” Posey said. “It’s humbling. You still feel like that cook who doesn’t know anything who’s walking into their internship.”

Ahead of the awards, Rundown podcast host Erin Allen visited Elske – the West Loop restaurant Anna co-owns with her husband David Posey – to taste a couple desserts and learn who Anna is, how she found success in a difficult industry and why she’s no longer trying to please everyone.
]]>

Several groups want to demonstrate near the United Center when the Democratic National Convention comes to Chicago in August. The city wants them much further away. The Chicago Board of Ethics is one step closer to being able to enforce an executive order barring lobbyist contributions to the mayor. The new Director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services addresses challenges after stepping into the role just six months ago.

A Chicago alderperson wants to impose an 8 p.m. curfew for unaccompanied teenagers downtown. Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling says officers working during the Democratic National Convention in August will have their badge numbers uncovered and body cameras on. A new exhibition highlighting queer history and banned books opens tomorrow in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.

All too often, the most vulnerable populations fall through the cracks in our social safety nets: people dealing with addiction, homelessness and severe psychosis. Zak Mucha, the president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, says this happens when the people serving those populations don’t understand what they need.
“‘Are they like me or not?’ That's how a lot of these decisions are made,” he said. Mucha spent the early years of his social work career working on the ground on Chicago’s North Side to provide clients with direct services.
Now, he has documented those experiences in his book “Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work.”
In this episode, host Erin Allen talks to Mucha about his book and what he learned from his years working in community mental health services.

Immigration advocates in Illinois say President Biden’s new executive order restricting asylum claims violates asylum law. Illinois’ Maternal Health Task Force reflects on four years of work trying to reduce health inequities in Illinois. Some workers at the Shedd Aquarium are claiming management is pushing back on efforts to unionize.