The Lake Calumet region, spanning Southeast Chicago, Illinois and Northwest Indiana, is a place filled with diverse communities old and new, vast expanses of natural areas rich in rare and unique flora and fauna, municipal waste sites, and a 130-year old legacy of steel production and heavy manufacturing. This dramatic region is poised between a rich industrial past and future plans for economic and environmental revitalization.

In order to save endangered species and ecosystems, as well as recreate a local economic base, efforts are underway by community groups, as well as city, state, and federal agencies to develop plans for the future of the region. While the goal of area advancement is widely supported, there are often differing views of what 'advancement' means and how to accomplish this goal.

Connecting People and their Environment
Recognizing and connecting community strengths, which we call social assets, to each other and to outside stakeholders is key to putting plans into action. The USDA Forest Service funded The Field Museum's Center for Cultural Understanding and Change to help policy makers and funding agencies understand how to connect with the efforts of local residents and engage them in the future of their communities and environment.

Journey through Calumet!
Come explore a snapshot of the people behind the region's social assets through photos, video, maps and stories gathered by Field Museum researchers. This site provides a glimpse of some of the extraordinary accomplishments that residents of this region create through the work of their everyday lives. For every asset featured on this site, there are hundreds more similar assets, each adding its own creative and positive contributions to the local communities. We encountered the following examples during the 2001 and 2002 research periods. They were chosen for this website for several reasons. First, we were able to visually document the asset. Second, the encounter or event occurred in one of our field sites during the research period. Finally, we felt the example also told an important part of the story of Calumet.

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