It was a beautiful spring day as I approached the Academy for Global Citizenship, a K-8 school two miles north of Chicago Midway Airport. I first noticed the overgrown areas. The blocks around the school were full of noxious weeds. Fifteen years ago, the city demolished hundreds of public houses here, uprooting families and creating the decay that is visible today.
Berenice Salas spent her teenage years walking past public housing developments, known locally as courthouses.
“It was public housing, but there was a computer lab there, basketball courts,” said Salas, who is now the principal of the Academy for Global Citizenship. “It was thriving in many ways with many resources.”
He and his fellow teachers want to revive the local spark, or “chispa,” as Salas puts it in Spanish. They started with the location: installing a farm, rain gardens, native plants and trees, outdoor classrooms, solar, and geothermal energy at the school.
The school is part of a broader program in three US cities to bring Latino communities closer to nature. GreenLatinos, a national environmental organization, sponsored a $2.6 million effort in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque with the help of the Bezos Earth Fund.
School leaders expect to produce 10,000 pounds of produce in the first full year of production, which will be used to feed students and sell to the public at a low price. When I visited, I saw a group of elementary school children carrying trays of strawberries to the kitchen staff.
The effort is also developing Chicago’s Canal Origins Park, a nearly three-acre park about six miles northeast of the campus, as well as building an urban farm and expanding recreational access to the Calumet River — all in areas where Latinos can enjoy the changes.
That’s important because nearly 70% of Latinos live in environmentally deprived areas. Research has found thousands of benefits associated with access to nature: improved mental health, increased physical activity, lower blood pressure, and a stronger sense of community. And as the climate becomes more volatile due to climate change caused by fossil fuel pollution, trees and other plants can also help neighborhoods keep temperatures down and floods at bay. Across the globe, trees reduce urban heat, according to a recent Nature Communications study.
“These projects are not just for decoration,” said Lucy Contreras, Illinois regional director for GreenLatinos. “And it’s about addressing historic underinvestment, pollution burdens, and unequal access to green space in Latino and minority communities.”
Like much of Chicago’s South Side, the Academy’s six-acre Global Citizenship campus is surrounded by pollutants: the highway, railroad tracks, and the airport. The local asthma rate is very high.
Nationally, wealthier, whiter areas are less likely to have access to natural resources. Chicago is the same: Latino neighborhoods have 33% less park space than average. A 2023 study found a correlation between less green coverage and lower life expectancy in Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles.
“Urban planting is not just about planting trees,” Contreras said. “It’s also a public health issue.”
Heat is a very serious problem in a city like Chicago, explains Juan Declet-Barreto, senior climate risk social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In 1995, the city experienced a five-day heat wave that left more than 700 people dead. Since then, the city has expanded its emergency notification system, established cooling centers, and identified its most vulnerable residents.
“That heat wave happened several decades ago, but it still offers lessons about prioritizing the most vulnerable members of society,” Declet-Barreto said.
He gave a scenario that shows how vulnerable immigrant families are. A white-collar worker may experience heat in his air-conditioned car and office. Their employer provides them with health insurance, so they visit the doctor regularly and are up-to-date on any conditions. A newcomer, however, may work in the back of a van or on a bicycle. At work, usually in a building or landscape, they are exposed to the sun. Their employer may not provide them with health insurance or worker protections. They come home at the end of the day where they can’t run the air conditioner, if they have one at all.
“These are two very different profiles of people with very different heat exposure during the course of their daily lives who are under the same sun, the same heat load, and the same global warming,” said Declet-Barreto.
Green Spaces Keep Neighbors Cool
Improved tree cover and vegetation can help offset some of these impacts, keeping neighborhoods cooler by up to 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
Enter Canal Origins Park, where on the day I visited, a beaver had nearly chewed through three oak trees. Above, birdsong boomed above me: northern cardinals, red-winged blackbirds, brown creepers, and yellow warblers.
Like the Academy for Global Citizenship, the park is surrounded by industry, including a 30-acre data center, a poultry processing plant, and a defunct coal plant. Community leaders representing the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods shut down the coal plant 14 years ago. Now, they are focusing on the park, with the aim of renovating it.
“I grew up in Pilsen, and I wasn’t allowed to go out to play because before it happened, it was really dangerous,” said Rebecca Ramirez, a member of the environmental justice group Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization, or PERRO. “My mother just locked me and my brother in.”
“Me too,” added PERRO President Zitlalli Paez. “There was a lot of gang violence, and my mother literally wouldn’t let me go outside.”
This organization wants to break that cycle in the next generation. The center’s eighth graders cleaned up trash in the park in February. And PERRO prioritizes public feedback. Over five events, including one featuring Mexican folklorico dancers, the organization has engaged with around 190 local people to help them understand the value the park can bring to their lives. By August, the group will have something to show for its work: a $190,000-square-foot picnic area with two tables, one with wheelchair space.
As we prepared to leave Canal Origins, I saw a group of paddlers hitting the water. I think of Salas, the school principal. When she was in high school, she was part of her first women’s rowing club at school.
“We had this fragile, hand-built boat, but it worked,” he recalls. “We had bike shorts – black and a white T-shirt – that was it.”
His team practiced at Canal Origins Park, where they started in a small shipyard. During practice, the oars would pull used condoms or tonsils. However, as they ascended the Chicago River, the stench disappeared. The water started to clear.
That’s what Chicago’s Southside Latine residents want, too: water clean enough to swim in and parks green enough to cool off.
The Benefits of Getting the Environment in Schools
Back at the Academy for Global Citizenship, Salas explained that his father was an organic bean farmer in Mexico. He lost that way of life when he moved to the US
“I see that with other parents who feel very connected to our farm,” she said. “People miss that connection.”
Salas recalls a time when a student’s mother wanted to pick a dried squash from a trunk. He wanted to turn dried squash into a natural sponge.
“That’s part of our roots,” Salas said. “Most of these pueblitos and cities in Mexico are very smart because they have to be. They support their community with whatever they grow. They don’t have access to a Walmart.”
Third grader Kara Solis-Cortes participates in the high school’s Green Team. The 9-year-old tells me excitedly about the group’s recent seedling sale and the honey harvest from the campus beehives.
“I don’t really need to spend a lot of time at school, so yeppee!” jokingly.
You are right – many students spend a lot of time outside.
It’s an approach with real rewards: Students often ask for walks to help them calm down, Salas explains. The school is designed in such a way that no matter where the students are (except the toilet), they can see through the window.
This Kind of Education Comes at a Price
The leaders of this institution want other schools to imitate theirs, but it is easier said than done. The facility cost $53 million to build, made possible by private donations, federal grants, and federal tax credits. Its method costs $22,100 per student per year, in line with other Chicago charter schools.
But in many ways, the importance of this method of learning cannot be overestimated.
Eighth grader Camila Ontiveros, who wears round glasses and braces, told me she can focus better when the class is outside. Emily Gaytan, another eighth grader with bright brown eyes, quietly nods her head in agreement.
It’s photo day when I meet eighth grader Joaquin Cervantes, so he’s wearing a new black suit. He lights up when he talks about teaching his father to plant peppers in his backyard.
“He didn’t really know how,” said Cervantes about his father, “but I came out of this school, I learned a lot about the garden and the soil, it benefits my life because now I can plant flowers and vegetables.”
