Wild Things 2025

Beth Drucker and Kim Stone, founders and co-facilitators of Go Green Illinois, will show you why your community would benefit from a citizen’s sustainability group and how to start one today. Learn how suburbs all over Chicagoland have started groups with just a few people and limited funding. Beth and Kim will review the history of Go Green Illinois and share some of the many successes and challenges of member groups, and how regional collaboration helps us have a greater impact.  

KT Peterson of Go Green Des Plaines will provide examples of some of the ways her group has made progress in just two years since they were founded.

You’ll leave with a clear idea of what steps to take to become the next Go Green group.

Stewardship storytime! How did you get started as a volunteer? What sustains your involvement? Was there an experience that changed your life? Something you learned that you didn't expect? Maybe an "Oh, how wrong I was!" memory?

This is sociology, a start, with stories. The goal is to glean ways to build and support our volunteer community.

This session explores students using various biodiversity tools to capture and contribute to a yearly inventory of the school campus flora and fauna. 111 AP Environmental Science students pitched ideas on the best ways to inform the public about biodiversity data and decided to co-create a publicly accessible Tree Campus digital zine.

We are a group of Tri-Point School students from Ford County who have been working to re-establish the prairie cicadas in Don Gardner’s reconstructed prairie in Kempton, Illinois. The prairie cicada was once a thriving species in Illinois prairies until extensive habitat loss led to a fragmentation of the populations. The species persists in Illinois at a few small remnant prairies and is at risk of regional extirpation. We are working to reintroduce this rare species of cicada from threatened habitat to a reconstructed prairie which will have long-term management.The on-going project is intended to re-establish a sustainable population of prairie cicadas with the intent to expand the population to other restored prairie sites.