Rochelle Jackson

Biography

Rochelle was born and raised in North Lawndale. She grew up on 15th & Kedvale in the K-Town neighborhood, and lived there until 1991. She moved to 15th & Millard where she stayed until 2013 and moved back to K-Town where she currently resides. She attended Mason Elementary and Farragut High Schools where she has fond and treasured memories. Her best memories growing up in K-Town is school, hanging out with friends, going to basketball games at Mason and Playing and hanging out with friends at Franklin Park and working at Bar BQ Kingdom on 16th (an Uncle Remus restaurant).

Rochelle has been employed at Juvenile Protective Association for the past 31 years. She has held several positions at JPA from front desk receptionist to research coordinator. In her current position as the Administrative Specialist, she handles the accounts payables and manages all of JPA’s donations and receivables for deposits and the organization’s donors’ log. In addition to those responsibilities she also maintains and enters all data for JPA’s Schools Programs as well data collected from other child welfare projects JPA collaborates with. She also serves JPA’s Intake Coordinator, assisting callers with referral resources for counseling, housing, employment and other community resources.

In her early years at JPA as a Research Assistant, Rochelle coordinated the recruitment and follow-up of participants in The Capella Project, known as LONGSCAN is a 20 year longitudinal study of high risk families with a history of child maltreatment, extreme poverty, prenatal exposure to alcohol and other drugs and exposure to neighborhood violence. Due to Rochelle’s efforts, study participants doubled. In the first four years of the study, she conducted videotaped in-home observations of mother and infant/child social competencies and videotaped in-office parent/child observations and stranger attachment paradigms. During this study, Rochelle trained over 30 research interns, conducted hundreds of interviews and was able to stay in contact with 247 families through birthday and holiday cards over a 20 year period.

When the study ended, Rochelle served as the Administrative Coordinator of the Parenting Assessment Team where she assisted clients with severe mental health issues transition into participation with Parenting Assessment Team (PAT) and/or Permanency Planning (PP) for Parenting Capacity Assessments. She maintained documents needed for these assessments, conducted initial release of information interviews and scheduled Parenting Capacity Assessments with parents and caseworkers. She created and maintained appropriate storage of confidential materials received from referring agencies, proofread and edited documents for final assessment reports and prepared and transferred confidential documentation for client psychiatric evaluations.

In 2014, Rochelle recruited 114 of the youth participants of the LONGSCAN study who are now adults to participate in an online survey for the National Institute for Drug Administration study.

Rochelle also serves as the Transportation/Infrastructure Committee Chair of the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council (NLCCC) where she serves tirelessly with a group of committee members to improve infrastructure and public transportation in North Lawndale. Her team was very instrumental in bringing an extension of the 157 Streeterville/Taylor bus route back to the west end of the North Lawndale Community. Her current task is reimagining Franklin Park and bringing more amenities to the park to increase walkability, activities and evening events as well as enhance the current programs already established to the park.

Rochelle is an avid crocheter. She has an annual “Hats for Homeless” project where she makes hats for the homeless chooses a shelter that provides temporary housing and other resources for the homeless community. She loves just making things and donating them for worthy causes. She is currently teaching crochet classes at the Douglass Branch Library on Thursday evenings. The classes are free of charge.