Rod Jones, president and CEO of Grace Hill Settlement House, graduated high school at 16. Jones had many incentives to graduate early. Trying to catch the subway at 5 a.m. every morning from the housing projects of New York City to make it to school on time was just one of them.
When his guidance counselor tried to hold him back a year, Jones had some direct words with him.
“This is my ticket out of the housing projects, and you really have no clue on what life is like trying to navigate that every day just to get to school,” he told his counselor.
He added, “With some force, I was able to go to graduate.”
He went to a junior college and didn’t stop until he got his doctorate in education. Fundamentally, his experience with Head Start and other neighborhood center programs made all the difference, Jones said.
In New York City, there are 70 to 80 settlement houses or neighborhood centers like the one Jones attended. In St. Louis City, there are seven. For the past two years, Jones has been expanding these centers’ programs and leading his staff and community members to “raise the floor of citizenship in America.”
On Wednesday, Nov. 10, Jones will receive the Non-Profit Executive of the Year award at the St. Louis American Foundation’s Salute to Excellence in Business luncheon. The award ceremony will be held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at 12 p.m., with a networking event from at 11 a.m. to noon.
Economic impact
Grace Hill’s settlement houses and programs have a vital impact on the socio-economic sustainability of the St. Louis region, Jones said.
“Our services allow families to participate in society almost at a $40,000 level,” Jones said.
Take the employers who hire people at $9 an hour. If a person makes $9 an hour and has one child in child care, and that person brought home $20,000 that year, $12,000 would have gone to child care – if Grace Hill didn’t provide affordable child care.
Another $12,000 would have gone to a health care plan, if Grace Hill didn’t provide affordable health care. And $8,000 would have gone to a decent place to live, if Grace Hill didn’t provide affordable housing.
“We mitigate the things that prevent people from participating successfully in work, which helps employers to reduce the number of missed days from work, which helps us to prevent the number of children that drop out and ultimately become criminals and incarcerated,” Jones said.
“For us, we help to create and support a secondary workforce that allows us to make St. Louis attractive for employers.”
So whether a person lives in one of Grace Hill’s neighborhoods or not, the programs have a rippling benefit.
“He has a passion to work in the community, which is also my passion,”
said Leslie Hernandez, manager of the Early Head Start program. “Mr. Jones has led the passion of working with the families, the poor, and the homeless.”
Equality of opportunity
Grace Hill is 107 years old. It has a long heritage as a settlement, which historically was a method for serving the poor in urban areas by living among them and serving them directly. One of the best-known settlement houses is Hull House in Chicago, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Starr.
One of Jones’ aspirations in coming to St. Louis was to move the area back into the work of settlement houses, he said.
“Essentially, our mission work is to make sure that even the kids who grew up like me in the housing projects had the same opportunity to live in a different economic state and condition as an adult as someone else who was born to a parent with resources,” he said.
“Because in the end, which of us could negotiate with God who are parents were?”
Grace Hill has two faces – the health center and the settlement houses. Together, Grace Hill helps more than 60,000 people in St. Louis city, where the population is barely 350,000 people.
“As long as there’s a free-market system, there’s always going to be somebody who’s at the lower earning capacity,” Jones said. “And it was vital to get us back to a place where we were that key role player in making sure that we allow people to exist in society as citizens.”
Grace Hill supports the hourly-wage worker, he said. People like Sam Blue, who has nine children.
Blue is an adamant volunteer intern in Grace Hill’s Head Start program. When his youngest child, Abraham, entered Head Start, he was elected chair of the parent committee.
“At one point I became discouraged,” Blue said. “Abraham wasn’t making the progress that I wanted him to make, and I was working through some personal issues.”
Blue was thinking about pulling Abraham out of the program when Jones got word of his decision.
“And he said, ‘Hang in there,’” Blue said. “When he told me to hang in there, he didn’t know how deep those words meant to me and my family.”
