Su Casa

Our atypical digs embody our atypical Community. Since 1990 we’ve been living in a building almost 100 years our senior, and while in it we’ve been combining our various pasts and cultures in a daring experiment in diversity.

The house

While we at Su Casa eagerly boast that our Community is pushing 20 years old, our house humbles us by its impressive century-long endurance. Franciscan friars used to call our building home, but with the closing of the St. Augustine church which once stood in our back yard, they offered their space to the ambitious five founders of Su Casa. Since then, in the CW spirit of solidarity, workers and guests have lived, eaten, given birth, wept, cleaned, and laughed within these bricks.

Though we began our mission as a shelter for refugees of Central-American civil war, we now take in Spanish-speaking homeless families of Chicago, many of whom are women and children escaping domestic violence. We accommodate an average of five families at a time, each one able to stay for up to a year from their move-in. The workers in the house commit to various kinds of volunteerism for various amounts of time, bringing new energy and ideas to the house. Though our Mission Statement explains this in more detail, we mean for our to work to restore and liberate the humanity of the whole Community.