A week after indicted 20th Ward alderman Willie Cochran joked about being a “gangster” at an Aldermanic Black Caucus fund-raiser, constituents are pushing back against his plan to evict a pop-up mental health services project from a vacant lot in Woodlawn.
Nortasha Stingley, whose 19-year-old daughter Marissa Boyd-Stingley was shot and killed in 2013, said she’d been enjoying the empty lot as a place to pray and walk in the mornings since moving to Woodlawn in February. The arrival of the Healing Village made the lot even more important for her. “I feel that this lot should be for parents who have suffered loss to gun violence,” she said. “We need a space where we can come, we can meditate, we can be creative and we can have peace . . . throughout the city, with so much violence going on, we need some type of comfort.”
is something that’s good in the community, the community has thrived off of it, embraced it.”
