After the Constance Morris House was closed for renovations since last August, its first set since it moved into its current location in 1988, Pillars Community Health has reopened the domestic violence shelter in LaGrange.
The organization celebrated the shelter’s new look with a ribbon cutting the morning of June 27, one day before the house opened its doors again to survivors, followed by an open house for attendees to see the new space. Pillars Director of Marketing Stefin Steberl said in an email that the organization moved the shelter’s residents into local hotels while the renovations were underway.
The new facilities at the shelter include a new community kitchen, new laundry facilities, new offices and rooms for staff and new indoor and outdoor play areas for children living at the shelter.
The renovations, designed by LaGrange-based (r)evolution architecture, llc, also moved the shelter away from its previous dormitory style of living, where residents had to share bedrooms and use communal bathrooms. Now, the Constance Morris House is comprised of private, single rooms with their own bathrooms and doors that lock. Some of the rooms are conjoined with doors, allowing two rooms to be used as a larger suite for families seeking shelter together or as single rooms with the door locked, depending on who lives in the shelter at the time.
The switch to private rooms for residents “ensures that we can continue to provide a safe and supportive environment, helping them to rebuild their lives with dignity and hope,” said Pillars CEO and President Angela Curran in a written statement.
The Constance Morris House is located at 327 Bluff Ave. in LaGrange. Pillars previously kept the shelter’s address a secret, referring to it only as an “undisclosed location” to protect people seeking refuge from their abusers. But as of the shelter’s reopening, the organization has undergone a “significant shift in philosophy” to make the house’s location accessible to survivors fleeing domestic violence, Steberl said in an email to the Landmark.
“By making our location public, we ensure that survivors know exactly where they can get the help they need, making it safer and reducing the stigma often associated with seeking shelter,” he wrote. “This change also addresses the challenges and struggles of keeping shelter locations confidential, which can sometimes hinder timely access to support.”
At the ribbon cutting ceremony, Curran, Pillars Vice President of Domestic and Sexual Violence Services Kim Stephens and outgoing Pillars Board of Directors Chair Bana Atassi spoke about the history of the Constance Morris House and the impact it’s had since it first opened under another name in Brookfield in 1979.
“If you can, try to imagine a world where everyone is free from fear and violence. A world where survivors of domestic abuse are not just surviving but thriving. The vision is within our reach,” Stephens said in her speech. “Many survivors must flee [their homes] suddenly, without time to prepare or find a safe place to stay. Isolated by their abusers, they often have nowhere to turn. The Constance Morris House is there for them.”
In her speech, Curran told a story from early 2018 — just after the merger that formed Pillars Community Health — when she visited the Constance Morris House with Stephens and Lynn Siegel, a former senior vice president of domestic and sexual violence services for the organization.
“The rooms were dormitory-style, and, frankly, the shelter was looking sad and showing its age. Kim reminds me that I turned to them both and said, ‘If there’s one thing I hope to do in my new tenure as CEO, I want it to be a new shelter,’” she said. “There is so much for us to be proud of at Pillars Community Health, but for me personally today, being able to fulfill that promise to renovate Constance Morris House is one of the proudest and most fulfilling moments of my tenure with this organization.”
Curran went on to thank a list of people whose “open hearts, open checkbooks, smart minds and strong hands” contributed to the domestic violence shelter’s renovations, including many Pillars staff members and the architects and contractors who worked on the renovations.
Among those named was former Illinois House of Representatives Minority Leader Jim Durkin, who Curran said secured $750,000 in state capital funds “to seed this project.”
“We were able to leverage those dollars to use Illinois Department of Human Services domestic violence prevention and intervention grants for one-time costs to furnish and equip the new shelter,” she said.
According to the Illinois Catalog of State Financial Assistance, the state’s Department of Human Services awarded nearly $1.5 million to Pillars in domestic violence prevention and intervention grants for fiscal year 2024.
Curran also gave her thanks to Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García, whose office secured $1 million in Congressional Community Project Funding for the Constance Morris House’s renovations.
“Constance Morris House is now a beautiful, trauma-informed space, but it’s just a nice, new building unless you have support to provide services every day and support our fantastic team here,” she said. “While we all envision a community without the horrors of domestic violence, having this place of sanctuary and healing lets everyone know that to end domestic violence, domestic violence cannot be hidden in the shadows. And it lets domestic violence survivors know that they are not alone.”
To learn more about the Constance Morris House and the services it can provide to people seeking shelter, visit Pillars Community Health’s website, pillarscommunityhealth.org.
If you need help escaping domestic violence, Pillars provides three free, 24-hour hotlines. To reach the organization’s main line and crisis hotline, call 708-745-5277. To reach the confidential domestic violence hotline, call 708-485-5254. To reach the confidential sexual assault hotline, call 708-482-9600.
