[One potential model for Occupy and Occupy Muskegon to pursue. --Ed.] January 29, 2012 As Chicago's Hull House Closes Its Doors, Time to Revive the Settlement Model? Hull House, a cross class settlement house, founded by Jane Addams, closes its doors in Chicago after 123 years, due to government funding cuts. Louise White in The Nation: The great insight of the settlement movement was the power of social ties to realign the energies of prosperous people away from their class self-interests and towards efforts to support the reforms working people sought, which in Addams’s times included a livable wage and the eight-hour workday.Underlying that insight was the recognition that materially comfortable people often held dangerous misconceptions about working class people as undisciplined and without ambition and that working people held prejudices of their own about the selfishness and greed of the wealthier classes.
