 On May 14th, 2019, a new plaque was installed on the facade of ICA GreenRise, a physical display of the building’s status as a Chicago Landmark. It reads:
 Chicago Sustainability Leaders Network, a citywide grassroots coalition organized by ICA, gathered for the second meeting of 2019 on the evening of May 16th. The venue was The Plant, a “collaborative community of small food businesses” housed in a 93,500 square foot facility that was once a meat packing plant.
 Over the past 50 years, from the Fifth City community development project in 1963 to the fifth year anniversary of Chicago Sustainability Leaders Network in 2018, ICA has developed a wealth of programs, projects, methods, training materials, and more. Over the course of one week each spring and fall, colleagues from across that history gather at the GreenRise to work on a thriving Global Archives project that aims to organize and translate an estimated four million documents into a comprehensive story.
 When Terry Bergdall returned to ICA-USA to serve as CEO in 2009, the organization was in the midst of a missional shift to meet the emerging climate crisis. The City of Chicago was also attempting to respond to climate change, but the government’s approach was to convene expert consultants who crafted environmental programs, and then tried to “sell” them to Chicagoans. ICA believed that this top-down approach to policy-making perpetuated the mentality of treating residents as consumers and in 2011 launched the accelerate77 project to instead show that residents as producers.
 The first Chicago Sustainability Leaders Network (CSLN) meeting of the year carried a sense of new energy with a host of familiar names and faces among the 24 who gathered at Windsor Park Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Our host, Alvyn Walker, has been deeply involved and active in CSLN for years, just as Windsor Park Church is deeply involved in the life of the South Shore community it calls home. To start the meeting, Alvyn gave a tour of the church, explaining both the challenges and opportunities of maintaining such a community anchor. |
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