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    Published: January 17, 2011

    Telling Our Stories: Creating Green Communities

    Mario Longoni, Lead Environmental Social Scientist, Keller Science Action Center

    Through “Telling Our Stories: Creating Green Communities,” funded by the Comer Foundation, our urban anthropologists worked with a professional storytelling team to train member organizations of the Chicago Cultural Alliance and the Energy Action Network to collect, document, and analyze community stories about environmentally-friendly practices, traditions, and values. The stories were used as data for studies commissioned by the City of Chicago Department of Environment to identify strategies for engaging communities in implementing the Chicago Climate Action Plan (CCAP). They reveal the ways in which cultural heritage can serve as a springboard for community participation in climate action. The stories were performed and videotaped by the storytelling team (see http://www.gogreenila.info/storytelling, “Why Stories?”). Science Action is now working with these organizations to develop follow-up community-based climate action projects that address community concerns and also contribute to the strategies of the CCAP and the region’s other climate action plan, the Chicago Wilderness Climate Action Plan for Nature.

    Mario Longoni
    Lead Environmental Social Scientist

    Mario has conducted research across the region into topics ranging from housing access, to fish consumption, and urban resilience in the face of climate change. Programs he has helped shape and conduct include Cultural Connections, with a focus on cross-cultural comparisons, and Green Ambassadors that brings teens into Chicago's near south green spaces to develop their leadership and place making skills. Much of his current efforts focus on research to support the creation of a Calumet National Heritage Area that would increase the visibility of and local pride in one of the nations premier industrial and natural landscapes.