The Power of Partnership: Building a Hub for Healing with Clean Power Lake County

By Frank Pettis, Community Organizer in Lake County, IL

Brushwood Center and Clean Power Lake County will soon open a new shared office in Downtown Waukegan, with the goal of expanding both organizations’ impact in Northern Lake County.

My name is Frank Pettis. I’m a proud Waukeganite, I’m also proud to be a Community Organizer with Clean Power Lake County (CPLC), a community-driven nonprofit organization committed to local action to ensure clean air, clean water, and healthy soil in Lake County.

I began organizing in 2013, the same year CPLC began organizing to close the NRG coal fired power plant on Waukegan’s Lakefront. Like CPLC, I was motivated by the harm being caused to the most vulnerable members of my community.

In Chicago at the time, I began organizing to expose the school-to-prison-pipeline – a concept that highlights the systemic inequity in American education. While many schools serving middle class and affluent Americans acclimate their students for success in higher education, other schools serving low-income and racialized student populations look and feel more like the carceral system. 

In New York I worked on the SaveNYCHA campaign to slow the privatization of public housing in a city experiencing its highest rates of homelessness since its founding. 

My work as an organizer has always been guided by a sense of interconnectedness. The strongest of us, and the weakest, are indelibly connected. Our health depends on the health of our community. The health of our community depends on the health of hundreds, thousands of other communities. And now, my work as an organizer has led me home to Waukegan to work towards addressing inequity that has plagued my family and my community for far longer than I’ve been alive. 

My grandparents were sharecroppers who migrated to Waukegan during the last wave of the Great Migration. They were drawn by jobs at manufacturing facilities and processing plants that are now superfund sites: an EPA designation for the nation’s most contaminated land. The same companies that provided them with jobs also harmed their health and disrupted their sacred relationship to nature that sustained them through hard times and government neglect. 

In Lake County, being black or brown and poor has become a serious health hazard. We die younger. Data from the Health Equity and Nature: A Changing Climate in Lake County, Illinoist shows a 15-year gap in life expectancy between the residents of North Chicago and Lake Forest. I see this trend of premature death in my own family. I have lost many friends and family members to violence and preventable disease. We are struggling, yearning for deeper connections to each other and to the earth. 

Partnership between CPLC and Brushwood Center sets the foundation for a culture of building together, rooted in shared values and mutual respect. In partnership with other community members we can begin remembering our sacred connections to the green and blue spaces that persevere through pollution and exploitation. Nature isn’t something way out there past the highways, on the other side of the Navy base. It’s all around us. We can search for and find healing beneath the trees that shade our neighborhoods. 

Our shared space will be a hub for healing, for remembering, for empowering the members of our community to architect the solutions to our problems. It will be a space where we come together to collectively reimagine our communities and our natural spaces. Our ideas will spring from our shared understanding of the interdependence of human and environmental health and question how existing systems benefit from inequity in both. What would our lakefront be like if it was designed for public access and enjoyment instead of industrial exploitation? How might our diets be different if we could safely eat the fish from our streams and Lake Michigan? What might a clean energy future look like in a Lake County committed to health equity? Those most impacted are also most capable of affecting positive change.

This partnership can become the nucleus for a broad and united front pursuing health equity and environmental justice in Lake County. The movement for environmental justice will reflect the diversity and complexity of our communities. It will create space for those of privilege and those on the margins to learn from each other and build together. It will also work to hold our elected officials accountable to the tenets of environmental justice. Together, we will ensure that our neighbors, our communities, our natural spaces are healthier than before we came along.