Settlement house

Settlement house, neighborhood center established to provide social services to inner-city communities and usually staffed by social workers. Samuel A. Barnett, an English clergyman, founded the first settlement house, Toynbee Hall (1884) in London, to restore the neighborhood order disrupted by the Industrial Revolution. The original U.S. settlement house was University Settlement, founded (1886) by Stanton Coit, in New York City. Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago began (1889) as a settlement. Settlement house programs include counseling, rehabilitation for the disabled, child welfare, athletics and recreation, hobby and interest groups, classes in citizenship and English, and manual training. Originally privately funded, settlement house services were forerunners of tax-supported public welfare programs. There are now some 300 settlement houses in the United States overseen by the United Neighborhood Centers of America.

See also: Hull House.