Editorial Remarks: Meeting the Needs of Migrant Children and Their Families

In 2013 the 20th annual AATC conference convened in Chicago Illinois with a pre-conference visit to Jane Addams’ Hull-House. Inspired by a settlement house called Toynbee Hall on a trip to London, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull-House in Chicago in 1889. Settlement houses drew educated, native-born middle- and upper-middle-class women and men, known as “residents,” to live (settle) in impoverished urban areas. The two friends envisioned a space where their less fortunate, mostly immigrant, neighbors could attain art and literacy education (About Jane Adams, n.d.). Addams viewed education as the foundation for democracy and claimed that in a genuinely egalitarian society the poor required access to an environment that matched environments that enriched the lives of the upper classes. Thus, Hull-House was an educational setting furnished as a middle-class home with fine art and trendy furniture. Aside from the enriched environment, Hull-House offered art and literature courses, political debate groups, Shakespeare and Sophocles plays, and lectures by notable intellectuals like Henry Demarest Lloyd and W.E.B. Du Bois, a radical African American leader (Jane Adams 1860–1935, n.d.).