South Side Couple Will Keep Trying to Make a Difference Series: NEIGHBORHOOD HEROES

A week with Otis Monroe and Virginia Hardrict is like a crashcourse in the problems of urban America.

The husband-and-wife community activists might be cajoling abank to open a branch in a South Side neighborhood on one day. Thenext, they'll be out persuading gangbangers to trade in theirbaseball caps for mortarboards.

By the end of the week, they could be on a street corner passingout condoms along with warnings about risky sex, or telling a younggirl that an education, more than a baby, will bolster herself-esteem.

In an area that includes the West Lawn, Gresham, Englewood,Roseland and South Shore neighborhoods, they do everything fromhelping find funds for other small community groups to operating asafe house in Englewood for repentent gang members.

It's a job that comes with long hours, little thanks and lots ofnaysayers.

"And not much money," Hardrict said, laughing. "I didn't getinto this because of the money. I have a genuine interest in thisarea. My grandmother used to say, `Nothing beats failure like atry.' And we are going to try until we know for ourselves thatnothing is going to happen."

The couple also run the Englewood Streets Alternative Project,funded through the Chicago Community Trust, which seeks to get gangmembers off the streets and into jobs or anti-gang work. During thesummer, the project ran a safe house in Englewood where workers andgang members could talk.

Monroe and Hardrict also direct the Monroe Foundation from anoffice in their Gresham neighborhood home. The foundation givesassistance and modest grants to community organizations.

They run a program called Project Loan, which seeks to bring abank or a credit union to the Auburn-Gresham area. Most of theirwork is done quietly.

"We're just seeing what kind of options we can create," Monroesaid. "Everything doesn't always have to be done by marching up anddown someplace or yelling and screaming."

They counsel teenagers. "For a lot of them, their self-esteemis dragging on the ground," Hardrict said of the girls she helps."Some of them need to know that there is more to being a black womanthan having a baby . . . that you have to love yourself before anyonecan love you."

Monroe and Hardrict married in 1990 after doing community worktogether in West Englewood.

The Monroe foundation was born a year later, Hardrict said.

"One day we were sitting up talking about dreams and he said,`You know what my one big dream is? A foundation,' " she said. "Onour first anniversary, I set up a meeting with several bankpresidents and said, `Here's your anniversary present. You wanted afoundation? Here's some people to back it.' "

"Virgina is the rock when I'm feeling down," Monroe said."People come around and try to discredit us and tell us we don't havea purpose, but she is the rock and very much is the strength thatkeeps this whole thing tied together."