By Tori Marlan
Dennis tells this story not to advocate throwing money at clients but to encourage his audiences to see their charges as more than the sum of their problems. In Yvette’s case the cartoon was just the beginning. Kaleidoscope set her up in her own apartment and assigned a social worker and a team of youth workers to help her make the transition. They visited daily. Noticing she was a compulsive cleaner, they helped her enroll in a janitorial training program and later find a job as a housekeeper at a motel. “By looking at her strengths and building services around her strengths,” Dennis says, “we showed her that she had worthwhile skills and that she was worthwhile herself.”
Dennis begins each workday he’s in Chicago cruising the long hallways of the sprawling Kaleidoscope office, on Milwaukee Avenue just north of Division. It’s a practice he calls “dipstick administration”: he dips in and out of each department–foster care, pediatric AIDS, adolescent parenting, youth development services, and in-home services. A robust 63, he’s tall and trim, with silvering hair, a tidy beard, and hazel eyes. He’s an impeccable dresser, and has been ever since a juvenile-court judge pulled him aside one day in the mid-70s and told him that his getup–jeans, cowboy boots, and fringed shoulder bag–was a sign of disrespect. Along with suits, he also wears a silver and turquoise watch and pine oil, the scent of which trails in his wake, tributes to the Cherokee and Blackfoot parts of his heritage.
Dennis didn’t major in social work in college. He was in an education program. In his 20s and 30s he held a series of jobs–salesman, extra in a TV soap opera, delivery-route planner for a barbecue-sauce company–before going into social services. He started out by volunteering at Operation Impact, a federally funded program designed to prevent students from dropping out, and later was hired as an administrator. He read about the therapeutic models of treatment on his own but rejected them, instead coming up with his own method, one that was simultaneously new and old. Borden says he isn’t well acquainted with Kaleidoscope’s specific programs, but Dennis’s approach to social services sounds as though “it takes us back to our roots.”
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It didn’t escape his notice that circumstances, rather than lack of desire or intelligence, prevented many of his peers from going to college. Some dropped out of high school, others wound up in prison, one was shot by police and paralyzed during a holdup. Without his family, athleticism, and a bit of luck, Dennis figures, his life would have unfolded very differently. He now enjoys a comfortable upper-middle-class existence with his wife, Kathy, and his ten-year-old grandson, whose mother is in Africa researching her dissertation. They live in a huge three-story lakeside condominium in Rogers Park with its own patch of beach and a rooftop deck. “I believe that the difference between me and the people we provide service to is a matter of circumstance,” he says. That belief has shaped the way he delivers social services.
Dennis went into social services in the 70s, when providers across the country were questioning the wisdom of institutional care and beginning to recognize the need for alternatives. Illinois children with severe problems typically were rejected by private agencies on the grounds that they’d be too difficult to serve, so DCFS sent them out of state. In 1973 the director of DCFS heard reports that some Texas institutions were offering substandard care and abusing clients and ordered the children sent back to Illinois. One hundred and seventeen of the state’s most difficult children–many had severe psychiatric problems–were headed back to Illinois, and nobody knew what to do with them.
At the time Breed was the only founder still at Kaleidoscope, and the agency was floundering. It was under investigation by DCFS, the state audit commission, and a General Assembly committee on charges that it had mistreated children, provided lax supervision, and overcharged for its services. It was at this time that the Tribune editorial called it a fiasco. Despite the bad press, Dennis eagerly accepted the job, believing the controversy stemmed from fear. “We were working with kids a lot of people felt couldn’t be worked with in the state of Illinois, much less in the community.”
