First there were 10. Venezuelan migrants sent from Texas, they appeared one day in front of the nonprofit New Life Centers in Little Village. It was the winter of 2022, and the men, in flip-flops and T-shirts, were in search of help. “We believe in responding to crisis with love and healing,” Matt DeMateo, the CEO of New Life, says. So the faith-based community organization bought air mattresses and housed the men in the basement of its church. When several dozen more showed up, New Life found places for them to stay as well. But then there were thousands more; they were sleeping at Chicago police stations. Which, for DeMateo, meant it was time to respond by building the infrastructure to scale up.
Working with other nonprofits and city and state agencies, New Life set up intake centers to greet “new neighbors” as they stepped off buses, providing necessities and connecting them with services or relatives. Additionally, the nonprofit now runs three migrant shelters in the city. And it distributes from its warehouses hundreds of thousands of items each week to these newcomers: sofas, socks, toothpaste. “We’re faster than Amazon,” DeMateo quips. To date, New Life has moved more than 23,000 asylum seekers into apartments.
Twenty-four years ago, DeMateo was a newcomer to Chicago himself, an 18-year-old freshman at Moody Bible Institute. He began volunteering at New Life’s church, whose neighborhood is predominantly Mexican and Mexican American. He was eventually hired as a full-time youth pastor and has helped the nonprofit grow from a handful of employees to a staff of 270, a thousand volunteers, and an annual budget of $40 million.
New Life’s “heartbeat,” DeMateo says, is mentoring local youths. But it has expanded by responding repeatedly to the neighborhood’s needs. After Chicago saw a spike in shootings in 2016, the nonprofit hired street outreach workers to do violence intervention. And when Little Village was ravaged by the COVID pandemic, New Life partnered with Trader Joe’s to provide food to residents. It now runs the largest pantry in Chicago, feeding 7,000 families each month.
Many New Life staffers have gone through its programming themselves, including several of those first 10 migrants who showed up in 2022. Says DeMateo: “Now we got an army who all believe we can transform Chicago.”