Community Initiatives

The chapters for class this week happened to be about building and changing policy towards being environmentally friendly and about urban sustainability. Rather than reverberating the general highlights, I thought I would give two anecdotes about my time working on building urban agriculture at Loyola University Chicago and my time working at Lake County Stormwater Management Commission doing policy work.

         At Loyola I was privileged as an environmental action and leadership minor to have a hands on capstone in a Sustainable Agriculture class… one that has forever changed the way I view agriculture. My first day of class I was taken up to the rooftop garden and told to build to plant beds, so I picked up a hammer, some nails, and went to it. We built plant boxes to bring into the greenhouse to start growing the plants that we would eventually move from the greenhouse to a plot of land we were going to restore in an urban agriculture demo site for the city. Loyola is a very affluent school, due to its private education tuition costs, so we were able to easily get an endowment from the school for supplies to build season extenders for the area. My group went on to make French Solar Pods, which were an incredible feat in themselves. We put our good engineering skills to use and mastered carpentry to design our own version.

We also supplemented the pods with a low cost version that I created from hay bales, a tarp, and a pole to keep the snow out. During my time of venting our little kale plants I was subjected to many police interrogations. In this area vandalism is a typical day-to-day action and I would consistently have to give my IDs and have campus security come to verify that this indeed was my project and I was allowed to be working on these sites.

         This was unfortunately my last semester at Loyola. But it did not stop the initiative. To our surprise the university continued to welcome it with open arms, continues to fund the site, offers it as a class and an outside club, and has become a very popular urban redevelopment agriculture demo site for the city of Chicago. I had put many hot hours outside digging our plots and many others in the cold frost of the Chicago fall building this site. Occasionally when I go home, I like to stop by and take a peek at the garden. They even have a fully functioning composter that they use and have garnished enough vegetables to add to the dining experience and the farmers market. I was fortunate enough and strong willed enough to pursue a grant from Loyola University to help our class get the funding for this site. We built some of the most intense proposals I have ever done. Loyola was so impressed that they funded our initiative. Here I learned that change is possible as long as you have the backing of the community.

         I am sure that Loyola now receives some tax subsidies and extra government funding or what have you for this initiative, but they have also built a secondary campus that was given to the school as an endowment into a whole sustainable campus. The food that the dining hall/restaurant to the hotel there serves is local, organic, seasonal, and mostly grown on site.

         The campus is located in Lake County, which I had the fortune of interning at this past summer doing Stormwater Management at their commission. I was in charge of redoing a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination Phase II website rebuild. This is a requirement in the Clean Water Act to force municipalities to ensure stormwater protection in their area to promote the wellbeing of their watershed. In Illinois, watershed management is integral because of its close connection to the Lake Michigan.

         After pouring over the Clean Water Act for about two weeks trying to understand Phase II I finally came to the conclusion that not only was I confused, but also if I was an “expert” (if I don’t say so myself) how the heck were regular municipal workers supposed to understand this. That was the day I finally understood the Stormwater Management Commission’s purpose. It was to make all these very complicated, yet entirely necessary laws and permits achievable.

         I spent the next two months finding links on the EPA, videos, products, other sources, demo sites, demo communities, and other forms of watershed protection measures for them to be able to complete the necessary Best Management Practices required by the Clean Water Act and the NPDES Phase II permit for them to finally succeed.

         Although I finished the rebuild outline, it is still under construction by our web designers and has to be approved by the Board of Directors before the site can go live. If you clicked on my above link you would be able to see what a mess it is. I will post a link to the new one in a later blog post when it has finally gone live. I cannot wait to see my hard work finally available to help municipalities.

         One more thing I realized was the great necessity that the commission was. Stormwater management is so complicated and NPDES Phase II is a requirement yet an unfunded mandate that without my work, I know many communities in the future will fail. Working in a county commission has taught me the sense of community necessary. Without our strong network of employees who constantly fight for our commission to continue to be funded and become presented as a necessity in the community as well as our strong backing by the board of commissioners, water sustainability in this region would be unheard of.

         Here is a little video for you that helps explain what NPDES Phase II is about and is the majority of local initiatives that I worked on in the community to promote sustainable watershed development.

-Stephanie