It was a gorgeous spring day as I approached the Academy for Global Citizenship, a K-8 charter school two miles north of Chicago Midway Airport. I first noticed the overgrown lots. The blocks surrounding the school were lush with rambunctious weeds. Fifteen years ago, the city demolished hundreds of public housing homes here, uprooting families and seeding the deterioration visible today.
Berenice Salas spent her teen years walking past the public housing development, known locally as the courts.
“It was public housing, but there was a computer lab there, basketball courts,” said Salas, now the coprincipal of the Academy for Global Citizenship. “It was thriving in many ways with lots of resources.”
She and her fellow educators want to rekindle the neighborhood’s spark, or “chispa,” as Salas put it in Spanish. They’re starting with land: installing a farm, rain gardens, native plants and trees, outdoor classrooms, solar panels, and geothermal energy at the school.
The academy is part of a wider initiative across three U.S. cities to bring Latine communities closer to nature. GreenLatinos, a national environmental organization, funded the $2.6 million effort in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque with support from the Bezos Earth Fund.
