On Thursday, December 11th, Seven Generations Ahead hosted its annual PlanItGreen Leadership Forum. Community leaders, elected officials, teachers, and students from Oak Park and River Forest gathered in the Veteran’s Room at the Oak Park Public Library to celebrate sustainability wins over the past year and plan ahead for impactful projects in 2026. Attendees were ready to dive deep on the key discussion topics for the event: education, energy, waste reduction and green infrastructure.
PlanItGreen is a collaboration designed to enhance the sustainability, vibrancy, and quality of life in Oak Park, River Forest, and surrounding communities. It grew out of the Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation’s Communityworks initiative, and is a collaboration between the OPRF Community Foundation, Seven Generations Ahead, and multiple local institutions and governing bodies. PlanItGreen is guided by the OPRF Community Foundation’s Communityworks Advisory Board and the PlanItGreen Core Team.
The OPRF Community Foundation’s President and CEO, Carrie Summy, helped kick the meeting off with opening remarks. SGA Executive Director Gary Cuneen, and Oak Park Village President, Vicki Scaman also spoke early on in the event. The theme that was highlighted again and again was the collective impact model as an important strategy to address sustainability goals and lower greenhouse gas emissions across multiple communities.
The attendees also had the opportunity to hear from both current and former It’s Our Future (IOF) students who discussed two important events this year. IOF students organized and led Chicago’s first ever Youth Climate Justice Summit, which took place in October at DePaul’s Loop Campus. The event brought together nearly 100 students from dozens of high schools across the Chicago area for a day of learning, collaboration, and action. IOF students also attend LCOY this year, the Local Conference of Youth, which is a youth-led, UN-endorsed climate conference. IOF is a program of SGA that grew out of the OPRF Community Foundation’s “Big Ideas” contest more than five years ago, and has been growing both in scope and impact ever since.
But the bulk of the event was reserved for breakout groups to discuss strategies and plans for cross-institutional collaborations on sustainability goals. The Cross Agency Sustainability Exchange, or CASE, is a collaboration pioneered in Oak Park that tackles environmental goals by way of working groups that focus on specific topic areas and look at solutions that can apply across institutions and government agencies.
“We’re working on plans that are actually achievable and actionable, that can actually be implemented,” said Cuneen.
The breakout groups were tasked with discussing current CASE strategies and adding new ones. The energy breakout group considered encouraging residents to become “electrification ready,” creating educational campaigns to help people electrify their homes, and creating an energy navigator resource that can also help residents navigate the necessary changes to reduce their fossil fuel usage. The education group discussed the best ways to integrate climate education into the curriculum to ensure all high school students get exposure to it. The green infrastructure group focused on the tree canopy and school gardens, and brainstormed how to overcome the challenge of volunteer turnover and inconsistent tending of school gardens. Finally, the waste reduction group explored how to introduce more reusable items into school cafeterias and ensure that schools have the necessary resources, such as functioning industrial dishwashers, to make reusable trays and silverware more feasible.
The breakout groups carried on lively discussions through to the end of the event. The ideas from these groups will inform the 2026 CASE working group plans. The PlanItGreen Leadership Forum demonstrates the collective impact model in action, with a diverse, intergenerational group of community members and leaders working together to shape local sustainability action for the year ahead.
