Rayne Martin
Making a Difference
January 14, 2007 | by brett | Permalink
When we walked into the Chicago Housing Authority headquarters we wondered if we were in the right place. The unassuming security guard, who questioned the validity of my Arizona driver’s license, didn’t seem to fit what I had imagined of the organization that is single handedly changing the face of public housing in Chicago. But after meeting Rayne Martin a few minutes later, I began to realize that public service is only made possible by people with a passion for making a difference.
Rayne grew up in a tiny Louisiana town with a ridiculously small population of 200 people. It was here that Rayne discovered her passion for public service. After parting with a close-knit class of 12 graduates, she decided to attend Centenary, a small liberal arts college in Shreveport, Louisiana. At Centenary, Rayne began to organize and lead public service projects through Habitats for Humanity, Student Government and the Lighthouse, an after-school program for teenagers.
After graduating in 1996, Rayne moved to Philadelphia, where she became a VISTA volunteer. As such, she was given the duties of setting up community mediation centers in inner-city communities and peer mediation programs in high schools. In Philadelphia, Rayne confirmed her ability and drive to pursue a career in public service. “I was realizing that you don’t necessarily have to know what want to do with your life at 18, 20, 30, or 40,” Rayne told me of her time with VISTA, “but you should know what makes you happy, and you should spend your time working towards achieving that happiness.”
Rayne’s pursuit of her happiness soon led her to San Francisco, California where she did political fundraising and further community mediation work. When she decided to relocate to Chicago, With her public service ambitions now refined by her experience in the field, Rayne decided to relocate to Chicago. “When I was working in San Francisco as chief of staff for a county commissioner, I was exposed to different types of public service. Through my experience, I knew that I wanted to be in housing, and I had heard about the ‘Plan for Transformation’ going on in Chicago.” Rayne explained of how she came upon her current position, helping implement perhaps the biggest social welfare change in the nation since welfare reform.
The Plan for Transformation is the Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) ten-year initiative to demolish and renovate the 25,000 units of public housing notoriously plagued by mismanagement, racism, and most of all, poverty. Chicago is famous for its disastrous public housing developments, such as Cabrini Green, featured in the movies Candyman and Hoop Dreams as settings of poverty and violence.
What’s unique about the Plan for Transformation is that the CHA is building communities rather than stacking impoverished residents on top of each other in high rises. The CHA has taken the innovative, pioneering stance of acknowledging that public housing residents deserve to be integrated into the city. They are taking sweeping measures to raise the bar of living conditions for low-income families. It is the hopes of CHA to integrate citizens of different income levels in “mixed housing”, (where a third of the residents in the new building qualify for public housing, another third do not qualify but are below the market rate, and the remaining third is at the market rate). CHA is creating an environment that provides lower income residents with the tools to be successful and make a positive change in their new communities. Rayne’s interest in CHA’s plan lead her to designing the most elaborate, extensive relocation program in the nation.
“When I arrived in Chicago, I sent emails to anyone I could think of that would be able to put me in connection with the project. As a result, I got three or four names and numbers to call. But instead of approaching the phone calls as job solicitations, what I came up with was more like ‘Hi, I’m new to Chicago, and I would really like to talk to you and do an informational interview about the Plan for Transformation’. Most of the people were open to it.” Rayne continued, “I never left an interview without obtaining the name of another person I could talk to. Eventually I was led to the HR director for CHA, whom I called twice a week for three weeks straight. She probably thought that I was either crazy, or I really had something of value and eventually she gave me the chance to interview with a resident group, and they called and said they really liked me.”
“I met with my future boss,” Rayne told me of securing her position at CHA, “and we started to talk about the concept of relocation, and my position on it was that relocation should occur all the time with families because you should always be in a position to better your income and obtain better housing. In that conversation I realized they were looking for a director. So I was offered the job as a director, and when I started, it was a department of one, then it was a department of five, and now it has grown to forty.”
As Director of Relocation for the CHA, Rayne is in charge of managing a department of forty employees responsible for the relocation of 25,000 families while implementing social services. Prior to Rayne’s presence at CHA, the relocation process consisted of sticking a notice to a resident’s door to inform them that they had sixty days to relocate. Rayne implemented a year long relocation process in which CHA takes care of moving expenses and transportation assistance, making the move as easy as possible for residents.
When asked about what the most rewarding part of her job was, Rayne replied, “I would say every day that we move families into new housing, it’s exciting. We have families that have lived in a high-rise building for the last forty years. There’s no better joy than when a family like that has established employment, found child care and made a decision to make a positive change in their life, and moved to a brand new unit.”
Rayne’s passion to make a difference has impacted the lives of thousands of Chicago families through her work with CHA. She has helped initiate a powerful, influential change in public housing. CHA’s Plan for Transformation has received worldwide attention, with mayors from all over the country as well as government officials from South Africa traveling to Chicago to take note of the process. Now, seven years into the project, fifty high-rises have been closed and CHA is on schedule to finish the project in the allotted ten-year time frame.
Considering her accomplishments and experience with public service, I asked Rayne what advice she would offer to someone with the ambition of entering the field. She said to, “volunteer somewhere, because everyone wants a volunteer. It can be disillusioning at first, because we all have this notion of wanting to help and make the world better. But when you get in it, politics can take over, money has to be raised and some of those tactics can be disillusioning. So I think volunteering and understanding that there are some hardcore business things that happen just like in the business world is important to acknowledge.”
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