A step-by-step guide to founding a settlement house, derived from the actual experiences of women and a few men in founding settlement houses in England and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Difficulty: Hard
Time Required: Many Years
Here's How:
- Get a good education. Having an inheritance will help.
- Find a house or building in a neighborhood where immigrants and poor citizens live.
- Move in so you'll experience the problems of the neighborhood, too.
- Plan recreational and educational events that nearby residents are interested in. Drop programs that don't work. Avoid explicitly religious programming so you don't divide the neighbors, who often vary in their religious faiths.
- As you work with the neighbors, hear what they consider their biggest challenges, and design programs to help. Experiment. Drop programs that don't work.
- Start a kindergarten program for children whose parents both work, as these children would otherwise be home alone or taking care of younger children. (Remember: the average work day is 10-12 hours long and there are 6 workdays each week.)
- Provide community meals for children and families who don't have the time or money to prepare nutritious food.
- Buy a nearby apartment to provide apartments for single working women so they can live more safely.
- Start programs that honor ethnic customs and handicrafts from "the old country" so the children of immigrants develop respect for their parents and grandparents.
- Raise money from the wealthy citizens of your city, especially from the wives of the major industrialists in town.
- Begin to study the neighborhood scientifically: the demographics, the residents' needs, and the successes of the settlement house's programs.
- Lobby local, state, and national government to take over successful programs and implement them more widely.
- Recruit a continuing supply of educated women (and some men) from good families who want to do something meaningful with their lives.
