CHICAGO COMMONS IS GOING GREEN

We just turned off 620 sixty-watt light bulbs a year! And we’re still just as bright.

Thanks to a grant from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation, Chicago Commons was able to replace ballasts, reflectors and ceiling light fixtures in all four of our early learning family centers.

And we reduced our energy usage by 37.27 kilowatts, equivalent of turning off 620 sixty-watt light bulbs a year.

Youth Quilt is Almost Finished!

As you know from reading the paper, violence continues to infect inner-city Chicago neighborhoods. All too often, youth are the victims and perpetrators of violence. Over the summer, the teen youth program experimented with an interesting new group project to address this issue head on. One youth group at the Back of the Yards location worked on a quilt project. The concept behind the quilt project is to have the students celebrate their neighborhood while challenging them to push for change. Students were asked questions like "What would peace in your community look like?" and "If you could visually represent the best part of your community, what would that picture be?" Students drew a picture to represent their ideas and then turned the drawing into a fabric collage. Now the individual collages are being assembled into a large quilt... combining individual voices into a unified whole! We will post a picture of this wonderful creation on this blog when it is complete in early September.