Telling Our Stories: Creating Green Communities

Through “Telling Our Stories: Creating Green Communities,” funded by the Comer Foundation, our urban anthropologists worked with a professional storytelling team to train member organizations of the Chicago Cultural Alliance and the Energy Action Network to collect, document, and analyze community stories about environmentally-friendly practices, traditions, and values. The stories were used as data for studies commissioned by the City of Chicago Department of Environment to identify strategies for engaging communities in implementing the Chicago Climate Action Plan (CCAP). They reveal the ways in which cultural heritage can serve as a springboard for community participation in climate action. The stories were performed and videotaped by the storytelling team (see http://www.gogreenila.info/storytelling, “Why Stories?”). Science Action is now working with these organizations to develop follow-up community-based climate action projects that address community concerns and also contribute to the strategies of the CCAP and the region’s other climate action plan, the Chicago Wilderness Climate Action Plan for Nature.