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Fran Caffee

Aurora, Illinois
Valley of the Fox Group
Chair

When Fran Caffee moved to Aurora, on the banks of the Fox River about an hour west of Chicago, there was no Valley of the Fox Sierra Club Group. So she founded one.
“There weren’t many Club activists in Kane County at the time,” she recalls, “and there certainly wasn’t a handbook for starting a new group. It was just ‘by-gosh, by-golly.’ But I found there are a lot of like-minded people in this area; it just takes work to get them together.”

Caffee’s activism had been limited to “soft stuff” like letter-writing when she was raising a family, but when she and her husband moved briefly to Savannah, Georgia, in the late ‘80s, she found herself ready to take the next step. “So I looked up the local Sierra Club,” she says matter-of-factly.

A nearby state park along a salt marsh was threatened with development, “but we stopped it,” she says. “And that was just the first of several successes. So when I moved back to Aurora in 1990, the first thing I did was start the Valley of the Fox Group.”

The river itself has been the group’s main focus, and Caffee has been an indefatigable catalyst for community involvement. “There’s a world full of people eager to help,” she says. “As a result of our efforts there’s now a Fox River Study Group made up of citizens’ groups and representatives from sewage treatment plants and all the municipalities along the middle section of the river.”
Caffee is close to completing a longtime objective: hiking the entire Appalachian Trail. “I’ve hiked all but 200 miles,” she enthuses. “This fall I’m going to climb Mt. Katahdin to celebrate my 65th birthday!”

Published: November 5, 2007