Hello to friends and supporters!

We wanted to share a post updating you all on where we have been and what we are moving toward.

The beginning of 2015 marked a quiet year for us. After running four intensive years of our Summer of Solutions summer program and working with over 100 youth from around the city, we decided to take a step back to revision. A major factor in this decision was the loss of our community house owned by United Church of Rogers Park and the closing of that partnership. The house served as a major asset to our work not only acting as a platform for our Children’s Garden program held in the front yard but also a home to many of our members. We are heartbroken to say the least and look back fondly on many beautiful and transformative memories in that home. We are excited however about the roads opening up before us.

The 2016 brings a new 501c3 status with The Resource Center AND and new partnership with A Just Harvest! We are thrilled about these new connections for many reasons but primarily because we know they share many of our same visions and values about work in Chicago which include; an accessible urban agriculture movement and the creation of sustainable jobs for young people in Chicago.  

The Resource Center is home to many projects including a recycling program, a compost program, and a robust urban farm called City Farm.

A Just Harvest is an organization we have worked with informally for years and are delighted to move toward working with them in a more concrete way. Also housed in Rogers Park, A Just Harvest is a hunger and poverty focused non-profit. In addition to a daily soup kitchen, AJH also runs a number of youth centered programs out of their office and surrounding garden spaces around Gale Academy Elementary. They also oversee the Gale Academy Greenhouse. We are hoping to work with them in increasing amount in years to come but are looking forward to starting our Children’s Gardening Program back up with them.

Our collective team retreat in January brought 8+ of us together to vision these new partnerships and to hatch out plans for our existing projects. We are excited to keep growing food in Rogers Park through our Westwood Manor greenhouse partnership and our Yard Sharing network project. Opportunities to grow food with us abound. We are also moving forward in the creation of the cooperative business Grassroots Ecology that our team had been building for the past few years.

Our visioning forward in 2016 will focus on us developing more financially cyclical programing so as to increase our capacity to do this work and spend less time on fundraising. Our values remain centered on goals of a sustainable food movement in Rogers Park and the engagement and education of youth in Chicago to create real jobs.

Stay connected with us on our Facebook page and through our newsletters!

Hello All! We hope you had a nice Spring and Summer 2015 and are making the most out of the last balmy Fall days! It has been a busy season at LETS GO Chicago, from our yard-share network, greenhouse, and children’s garden program, we have been working hard and having fun doing it!

Fall is a time of transformation, as the warm days come to a close and that fresh fall air rolls into Chicago. We have taken this time to rethink our organization, ensuring that our actions ad programs reflect our model:

The mission of LETS GO Chicago is to empower, connect, and support youth leaders as they create innovative, self-sustaining, and inter-dependent initiatives that systemically integrate climate and energy solutions, economic security, and social justice. Our model includes three primary areas of work: Leadership Development/Training, Community Service, and Economic Development. 

Through our programs, youth gain skills to become leaders in their community while designing and carrying out projects that promote environmental sustainability and seek to create jobs for young people in Rogers Park. Over the years, this work has centered around urban agriculture projects, children’s garden education, and the incubation of a youth-led storm-water management company.

This summer, LETS GO Chicago focused mainly on the children’s garden program, yard-share network, and our greenhouse. The garden program worked with The United Church of Rogers Park to get children outside and exploring and discovering all of the amazing ways food is grown. The yard-share network took a few unused spaces in our neighbors lawns and turned them into productive farm and garden land, providing food to local charities and friends. The greenhouse, located behind the Westwood Nursing Home in West Ridge, allowed our seedlings to grow and prosper and also gave our senior friends access to a vibrant green space.

We are looking forward to our leadership retreat in January and our productive 2016 programs. Keep your eyes and ears open for a fall/winter fundraiser and more fun events coming in the next few months! If you want to get involved contact us at team@letsgochicago.org

Peace and Love,

LETS GO Chicago

The first day of spring is in a few weeks!  LETS GO will be busy planting seeds in the greenhouse and planning for spring Children’s Gardening classes very soon!

Here are some pictures from last summer to keep your minds off all of this snow…

Are you interested in helping organize a Seed Library in Rogers Park? Then come to LETS GO Chicago’s meeting on Wednesday November 19th. We have received a grant from Shareable to build a library in the neighborhood and are looking for neighbors interested in helping design and run the project. Come learn more!

Location: 1545 W. Morse Ave at the United Church of Rogers Park

What is a seed library?

A seed library, or community seed bank, is a collection of seeds which are made available to the public to promote biodiversity, heirloom garden varieties, and to teach about seed saving and starting. Seed library members “check out” seeds from the library to grow in their gardens. Some seeds that are saved from these plants are then deposited back into the library so they can be made available to more gardeners.

Please email team@letsgochicago.org for questions or for more information.

Our very first apple from our local apple tree!

#turnup #turnip 

Continue reading →

Hey everyone!

As the summer gets closer, stay up to date with the Yard Sharing Network team at their Facebook page — newly launched! There will be many cool pictures and stories, as well as good urban agriculture tips and more!

The Yard Sharing Network is also accepting applications for landowners and growers — you can use this form to apply to grow, or contact team@letsgochicago.org for more information!

A scene from one of our Thursday morning harvests during the Summer of Solutions program.

Program Leader KENDRA and her garlic!

Marlon (blog author, left) and Peter working to protect plants from the frost in early November

This fall has been coming along well so far for Let’s Go Chicago. During my 1st week back at LETS GO, I helped teach classes in the children’s garden, worked on the cooperative business development project, and got ready to attend Power Shift 2013 in Pittsburgh, PA.

In children’s garden, we assisted the children to pickle radishes and cucumbers.It was exciting to see how enthusiastic the children were to pickle vegetables. I was really surprised to see how many of the children wanted to pickle radishes.

In the following week, we attended Power Shift 2013, an environmental justice conference in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania from Saturday to Monday. At Power Shift solutionaries collaborated to address climate change,fracking,capitalism, and the oppression of people of color and Indigenous people. On the last day of Power Shift, there was a large action held to show resistance to the banks that invest in fracking for natural resources and to hold local politicians accountable for allowing capitalist to pollute the environment. I heard many stories from environmentalist and Indigenous people that live in communities that face the crisis of water and air pollution.

Molly Costello, Kara Hoy, and Nell Seggerson (from left to right) of LETS GO participate in the Power Shift march for a Green Economy

Once we returned to Chicago, two other members of the collective(Peter&Molly) and I did the garden maintenance on Steve’s yard, our backyard CSA garden. Due to the low temperatures approaching, we harvested some tomatoes, kale, chili peppers, and constructed a small greenhouse structure to save the remaining crops from frost. It was sort of a relief to know that we can preserve the plants without the risk of pulling them out premature.

Kale salad made from fall garden harvest

Over the past month, Peter, Ethan, and I collaborated on our objectives and the timeline for our cooperative business development project. This project is important to me because we can provide a service for a community that faces flooding issues in the community that we work,live,and socialize in. We are working on our timeline because we have to arrange our priorities to accomplish our goal of becoming an established coop by the up and coming growing season. If you haven’t seen it already, check out our new video and fundraising campaign for the cooperative project by clicking the image below:

Stay tuned for more updates as we move into the winter season and continue our planning for what we hope to be an exciting 2014!

-Marlon English