Black Santa has his ear to the street
What does Santa do the rest of the year?
This interview was originally published on Medium on December 18, 2020.
Everyone knows what Santa is doing in December, but what does Santa Claus do the other 11 months of the year? There’s not a lot to be said about what happens when the boots, the belt, the hat and the suit head to the hamper, and the spectacles to their case.
But for Chicagoans like Andre Russell, also known as Dreezy Claus (“Chicago’s Black Santa”), being in children’s lives is an all-year round process. With a background in Criminal Justice from Chicago State University, Russell started his career by working in an after-school program. Shortly after, he made the decision to navigate his way to at-risk youth.
“As a black man working and learning about the system in my field, I discovered I had the patience for it,” Russell explained. “As a mentor, I could help identify with the needs of these young, black men. And if you’re good at it and you feel connected to it, you see the results. I want to be a positive impact on people.”
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Russell has been working in some capacity with juvenile offenders for the past 15 years, spending more than half of his career at Mercy Home for Boys and Girls in Chicago. For the past three years, he’s focused on being a behavior interventionist, working on Chicago’s South Side as the dean of Students at LEARN Hunter Perkins Charter School for grades K-8.
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“The more education I got on the process and everything else, I just became more passionate about working with that demographic in that environment,” Russell said. “And if you’re working within your passion, then it’s not really work.”
But when he steps foot outside of the doors of his full-time job, his day is not done.