There’s a major leadership shake-up underway at the Peoria nonprofit that partnered with the City/County Health Department in an unsuccessful attempt to launch a Cure Violence program in the city’s South Side.
Corine Barnes is the new executive director of the House of Hope as of Feb. 1. A new board of directors is coming onboard, too.
Barnes said she was a consultant “behind the scenes” for House of Hope and its predecessor P-Town Car Club since 2021, while the long-time Peoria anti-violence activist Terry Burnside was the front-facing leader of the group.
“It’s just with a lot of the things that have been going on, speaking with our previous board, we just felt like it was right to just have him step down,” Barnes said.
Questions remain about the Cure Violence program. The health department announced it would claw back the remaining federal grant funds from House of Hope in August, citing concerns about the nonprofit’s capacity to implement the grant and get a program up and running. The remaining $197,222 was returned on Oct. 3, two days after deadline.
The next month, the Peoria City/County Health Department filed a police report alleging “theft, obtained by deception” related to the House of Hope grant funding. A Peoria Police spokesperson confirmed Thursday that investigation is still ongoing.
The board of health ultimately abandoned efforts to launch the anti-violence program in Peoria after the failed attempts to partner with the House of Hope on the South Side, and previously, with Peoria Community Against Violence on the East Bluff. The federal funds will instead be transferred into a new juvenile treatment court.
The board of health has also hired accounting firm Sikich to conduct an external fiscal audit of Cure Violence spending.
Barnes called any allegations of wrongdoing at the House of Hope “baseless,” and said she doesn't believe the police investigation will ultimately go anywhere because all of the grant money was returned.
Who are Barnes and the new board of directors?
Barnes is a mental health therapist who runs her own consulting firm, Corine Logic's LLC. Her consulting web site describes her as having over eight years of experience working in the mental health field, and serving as the chief program officer “overseeing 10 nonprofits in the state of Illinois.”
“I work with multiple violence intervention organizations in Chicago as a director, mainly over victim support,” she said. “But our victim support ties into the outreach piece, which was using the Cure Violence model with the mayor’s office of Chicago. So that's been my involvement (with House of Hope) for the last three to four years.”
Barnes said she came to believe early on that Cure Violence wouldn’t work in Peoria because it was too gang-focused, and the city instead needed an approach that looked more at family and domestic issues. But she said she helped Burnside because it was the direction he wanted to take.
Barnes and Burnside previously spoke about the House of Hope’s Peoria Cure Violence implementation process on an episode of the Mother's War on Violence podcast. The health department's administrator, Monica Hendrickson, has offered her own interpretation of events in previous reporting.
Barnes said Burnside will still remain involved with House of Hope, doing re-entry work with youth and men.
“He’ll still be providing services and resources, because he’s very resourceful, but he’ll be doing it direct, instead of just consulting and hiring other people to do it,” she said.
Barnes said she wants to wait until a Feb. 22 House of Hope "revamp” event to reveal the identities of the new board members, but she said they include a returning citizen, a medical provider, and a survivor of domestic violence. She said it’s important that the new board is racially diverse.
“I wanted to make sure it was mixed, because I want to ensure that the new direction of where we’re going has multiple different components of it, and it’s just not directed to just one population,” she said. “The overall goal of House of Hope is to help anyone in a system that are in need and to deal with the real core root, which is the mental health issue.”
