Brushwood Initiatives

Building Resilience with the Health, Equity, and Nature Accelerator

By Dani Abboud and Jess Rodriguez

What will our region look like in the next 5, 10, 20, and 100 years? How will our communities adapt to future crises, rising food and housing costs, extreme weather events, shifting populations, and supporting climate refugees? 

Already this year, we have experienced record heat, storms, and major flooding events. The time for solutions is now. Brushwood Center’s Health, Equity, and Nature Accelerator supports building resilience through collaboration with communities and the healthcare sector.

Mobilizing Community Leaders

Last summer, more than 100 Lake County community leaders gathered in Waukegan for Brushwood Center’s fourth annual Community Leadership Roundtable. This gathering built on the momentum of our recently-released report, Health, Equity, and Nature: A Changing Climate in Lake County, IL, with focused conversations about local impacts of climate change on health. Inspired by Lake County’s resilience and strong community networks, leaders responded to four different climate scenarios based on real and predicted impacts, and collaborated on a community response. The responses showed the depth of assets in our region, as attendees discussed innovative approaches to urban gardening, ideas for community response systems, and ways to build community connection to improve resource access and data sharing.

Based on feedback from the community leaders at the 2024 Roundtable, in 2025 Brushwood Center took our community into the field with two Environmental Justice and Healing Tours. Participants learned about the current state of environmental justice in Waukegan, visiting some of the most relevant sites of environmental damage and rehabilitation in the area.

Driven by Data

Community assets are one of the major highlights of Health, Equity, and Nature: A Changing Climate in Lake County, IL. This report, first released at the 2023 Leadership Roundtable, compiled public data sets, interviews with community members, original artwork, and GIS maps to tell the story of nature and health inequities in Lake County. While there were many interesting and frustrating findings within the report, the key message was clear: while our region has a wealth of green space and community assets, Northeast Lake County is overburdened by environmental racism and health injustices, including exposure to toxic industrial pollution, lower income, lower life expectancy, and increased respiratory and pulmonary disease risk.

This report has had a profound impact on our work since its publication. We have shared the data with more than 3,000 people, distributing thousands of copies of the report in English and Spanish, providing over fifteen presentations to various organizations and stakeholders, and multiple artistic interpretations of the data, including our signature art exhibition and concert performance, Convergence. The community response has been humbling and overwhelming. We have heard from community members who felt seen and validated by the report, partners who have used the data in grant requests to leverage support for their work, and even faculty from Rosalind Franklin University incorporating the report into curriculum for first and third year medical students. But the work of the Health, Equity and Nature Accelerator does not end with the report– it is only the beginning.