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Make History With Us Saturday!
@ 60th & St. Lawrence, 12-2pm!
The West Woodlawn Tree Inventory
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Trees!
BIG's green infrastructure programs cultivate commercial corridors, family properties, open spaces, green careers and enterprises, and the natural capital that quietly blesses us every day all around us.
Together they reflect BIG's GOD platform
~ GARDEN ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT ~
inspired by our African American traditions of land stewardship
and reinvented for economic development
here in the Age of Climate Crisis.
As BIG begins the nuts and bolts phase of achieving official Arboretum status and institutionalizing the West Woodlawn Botanic Garden, we look forward to a walkable-village blazing with blooms and cooled by canopy where all are drawn to common enjoyment of the beautiful life! This transformation relies on our network of horticultural partners who bring expertise and other resources to our ground game. One essential partner is The Morton Arboretum.
The Morton Arboretum is the only organization in the nation authorized to certify an arboretum, and West Woodlawn aims to be America's first certified African American community arboretum.
The West Woodlawn Botanic Garden & Village Farm Initiative is a square-mile program in Chicago's first black middle-class neighborhood, densely populated by the newcomers of America's Great Migration.
The inventory will serve as a baseline in our work to enhance species diversity and aesthetic charm as we build America's first African American certified community arboretum and introduce neighbors to horticultural jobs. We will map the trees and their conditions, map the gaps, and plan a gorgeous infill. See the flyer for all the great work trees do for us!
To train neighbors as treekeepers and other land stewards wherever they live in and beyond West Woodlawn, BIG provides scholarships to a