By Suzy Schlosberg, Chicago Youth Alliance for Climate Action
On Saturday, February 1st, the Ready for 100 Chicago Collective hosted the first of its 2020 community engagement meetings at the Hatchery, a food and beverage incubator on Chicago’s West Side. Around 60 people came out, with representatives ranging from middle-school students to long-standing collective members. The day started with lunch catered from ArePA George and an opportunity to walk around the interactive Issues Gallery, which included five policy pillars: Transportation, Renewables, Health, Jobs and Economy, Saving Energy. There was also a sixth, blank pillar where folks could add additional policy areas they thought were missing. Each policy pillar had two sides, one side encouraging people to add sticky notes expressing what they are excited about, the other encouraging stickies on what concerns they had.
After lunch, Kyra Woods from the Sierra Club and Obai Reed from Equiticity gave an introduction about Ready for 100 and the need for these conversations about Chicago’s renewable energy transition. Then began the official workshop led by Space Lab, a Chicago-based, design-focused facilitating group. The workshop’s goal was to make everyone in the room think more creatively about Chicago’s energy future. We split into small groups, and each group drew two pieces of paper. One piece of paper told us which of the four elements we were given (air, water, earth, fire), and the other piece gave us a policy pillar (Health, Transportation, Buildings and Efficiency, etc). We were then tasked to create a future city block in using our element and our pillar, and to do it creatively. My group was given fire as our element and Buildings and Efficiency as our pillar, so we took fire as providing solar energy (if you stretched out the definition of fire and took the sun as a giant ball of fire) and designed a community-owned solar block where all residents took part in and controlled their energy system.
After sharing our designs and a quick break, we came back together as a group to end the day with a conversation, starting with what we found to be a creative suggestion and what issues we still thought were missing. We were all excited by the bursts of innovation we’d seen in each other’s block designs, and throughout the room we shared what we had found to be particularly clever. One group proposed cleansing rainwater by directing it into a unit populated by mussels, which would naturally purify the water for reuse. Another combined “air” and “Transportation” to invent CTAir, in which energy is harnessed through collecting the massive gusts of wind generated when a train pulls in.
We were delighted by the imaginative turn the day had taken, and one of the big questions we asked throughout our debriefing was how we can make our imaginary blocks come true. When asked what a meaningful community engagement process should look like for our city’s renewable energy transition, many flagged the importance of holding city officials accountable to the promises they make, highlighted the necessity of transparency, and offered suggestions for ways to reach out to communities, including community Facebook groups and block parties.
The day ended on a note of continuing momentum as our conversations wound down and folks were encouraged to advertise their organizations’ upcoming events, as well as sign up to bring energy conversations to their communities. It had been a day which not only brought out the powers of our imagination but also grounded our visions in concrete policy pillars.
Ready for 100 also launched its survey asking residents of Chicago to identify priorities for the energy transition: please share your thoughts here! I’m looking forward to the continuation of this conversation on Earth Hour Day 2020, March 28th.