A Seed Was Planted
Twenty-five years is a long time to be able to watch something grow. The seed that Gary Cuneen planted, which would grow into Seven Generations Ahead (SGA), had humble beginnings.
In the mid-1990s, Cuneen was beginning to learn more about climate change and the impending global environmental disaster. As a teacher in the Chicago Public School district and an avid traveler, he brought his love of the natural world into the classroom. Early board member and SGA supporter, Charlie Scarlett, recalls how Cuneen would create daily diaries and upload photos while on his trips, long before personal blogs became popular, so that his students could travel along with him.
Scarlett, who owned a travel company at the time, remembers a trip he thinks was particularly impactful for Cuneen. Scarlett arranged for him to take a cruise on the Amazon River. On the trip, Cuneen met a man who taught him about the sustainable, regenerative agriculture he was practicing in the rainforest. After he returned, Cuneen invited Scarlett to give a presentation about the Amazon River to the students in his school. Scarlett remembers the whole school being decorated like the rainforest, and what a fantastic experience it was.
“It was just spectacular,” he says. “It really engaged a lot of kids and I think was very successful in that regard, and got a lot of kids into the whole sustainability idea.”
Years before SGA would engage students on environmental advocacy through It’s Our Future, and years before local, sustainable food would become essential to the environmental movement and SGA’s mission, here was the seed of an idea, the echoes of which continue in SGA’s work today.
At the time, though, Cuneen and Scarlett thought starting an internationally-focused sustainability consulting firm would be the best way to help spread innovative climate solutions across the globe. This, says Scarlett, was the precursor to SGA. The vision for the consulting firm was “..more or less what SGA is doing around Oak Park,” he says, “But we were thinking of doing it on a worldwide basis. So that was where the seeds of all this came from.”
The international focus proved impractical, however, so Cuneen set his sights on local climate action, always driven by doing right by his kids and future generations. SGA was officially founded in 2001, and Cuneen often says he started the nonprofit in part because he wanted to have a good answer if, in the future, his kids asked him what he chose to do, knowing the climate crisis was coming.
Twenty-five years into working to build more sustainable, equitable, and healthy communities, Cuneen certainly has a good answer. But it was a long journey to get here, one with its ups and downs.
“The beginnings were slow going, honestly. And over the years there was one very harsh critic of Seven Generations Ahead, and it was me,” says Cuneen. “Because I wasn’t satisfied with the levels that we were playing on, so [I] did a lot of soul-searching and thinking about how we could impact decision-makers.”
Cuneen began to focus more on municipalities, mayors, and mainstream institutions. The goal was to find ways to scale up and bring sustainability solutions into new arenas.
“I didn’t want Seven Generations Ahead to be a choir. The choir is already bought in,” he says. “If sustainability stays with the choir, it’s not going anywhere. So, the decision was to really focus on the mainstream institutions. Once we started to do that… then I started to feel some traction.”
Local Solutions to a Global Problem
Once Cuneen shifted to a local focus, Seven Generations Ahead truly took root, with an early group of supporters who were drawn to SGA because of their passion for the mission and their belief in Cuneen’s vision. One of those supporters was Warren King, who served on the SGA board for close to two decades. King says he appreciated Cuneen’s focus on practical solutions that were accessible to the community. Even early on, King personally experienced how SGA was changing minds and changing habits, creating pathways for sustainability in people’s lives.
One of SGA’s very first programs was Fresh From the Farm, founded in 2004 to promote local food procurement in schools, nutrition education, and school gardens. This focus on local, sustainable food was one of those practical solutions that not only inspired King to support SGA, but also changed the way he and his family ate. They began getting much of their produce from local farms because SGA’s work helped King realize how important it was to sustainability.
“That’s what really drew me to the organization,” says King. “And that’s why I chose, eventually, to become a board member. Because it had a personal impact on me and my family.”
Mark Ledogar, former longtime SGA board president, echoes King’s sentiments about local impact. But Ledogar also saw the way these sustainability solutions were critical to the global transformation necessary to address climate change.
“What drew me to SGA in the first place and what kept me involved over the years was the opportunity to have very practical impact at a local level,” says Ledogar. “A nice balance of world level conceptual change with localized, practical action.”
Like all nascent organizations, SGA couldn’t have gained traction without the funders who took a risk and supported the organization in its earliest years. The Lumpkin Family Foundation was SGA’s first funder, and it continues to support SGA to this day. Ledogar remembers how crucial this support was to SGA’s early growth and impact.
“We really owe a debt of gratitude to the early believers,” says Ledogar. “I can see them as clear as day when they delivered their first checks of support to the organization and said ‘we believe in what you’re doing.’ And the fact that many of them continue to believe in the organization 25 years later, I’m eternally grateful to those early adopters, those people that had a vision.”
As the focus began to shift to the municipal level, one of SGA’s first and most foundational collaborations took shape. PlanItGreen grew out of the Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation’s Communityworks initiative, and was SGA’s first foray into the model of cross-community collaboration and collective climate action. PlanItGreen’s goal is to enhance the sustainability, vibrancy and quality of life across Oak Park and River Forest. To this end, SGA pioneered Illinois’ first two-community sustainability plan.
“It’s a collective impact model, and it’s really based on the goal of bringing together different institutions and leaders in the community, and having them agree on common goals related to sustainability and emissions reductions, and then working together, collaboratively, to achieve those goals,” says Cuneen.
PlanItGreen was a perfect vehicle to bring together the decision-makers, experts, and local leaders that Cuneen wanted to reach. The collective impact model includes promoting shared knowledge and peer-to-peer learning, which PlanItGreen that continues to this day through monthly meetings and the annual PlanItGreen Leadership Forum. Convening these community leaders for so many years has had transformational impact, says Carrie Summy, President and CEO of the Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation.
“You have big institutions, huge organizational partners that are now behaving differently,” says Summy. Referring to the many sustainability projects that have been completed or are underway in the Oak Park and River Forest communities, she says, “Twenty-five years ago those might have been nice-to-haves, and now they’re really must-haves, driven by leadership that believes in the value of environmental sustainability for this region and environmental justice.”
PlanItGreen’s sustainability plan for Oak Park and River Forest included report cards to track the communities’ progress toward goals. This plan has helped lay the groundwork for local compost and recycling programs, increased native gardens, green infrastructure improvements, energy efficiency programs, clean energy development, and more.
Bess Celio recalls the impact she saw as this work began to take shape in Oak Park and River Forest’s institutions. Celio is part of the Lumpkin family, and when she met Gary, she knew right away that SGA’s mission aligned with the foundation’s work, leading her to recommend that they give SGA that very first check. As an Oak Park resident, herself, Celio remembers first feeling the impact of SGA’s work in the local schools. She was a member of the “Green Team” at Holmes Elementary, a group of parents who were interested in incorporating more sustainable practices in the school. When they began talking about how they could reduce waste in the lunchroom, she turned to SGA for guidance.
“SGA was vital in terms of their support for us to get things done at the school,” she says. “Holmes School was one of the first to have a commercial composter, we had zero waste in the lunchroom, we did recycling, we had an afterschool program. All of that was so exciting for me to see, and I was right there watching the kids get involved learning, and I don’t think that really would’ve happened without the support of Seven Generations Ahead and all the education they provided us.”
This was exactly the kind of work SGA set out to do through its programs and collaborations like PlanItGreen, making sustainable solutions accessible and achievable for institutions. Through the collective impact model, these solutions became replicable and scalable, as well. Now, initiatives within PlanItGreen like the Cross-Agency Sustainability Exchange, or CASE, provide a platform for local governing bodies, including school districts, the park district, the library, and the village, to work together on their goals for waste reduction, clean energy, energy efficiency, and more.
“Seven Generations Ahead has been really effective as a catalyst,” says Celio. She’s witnessed a transformation in Oak Park over SGA’s 25 years, from more solar installations to the residential composting program and other initiatives that SGA has helped support. “It’s just cool to see it go from, sort of grassroots ideas, and now it’s actually part of the village and part of our everyday lives.”
Taking Big Swings for Big Impact
SGA has always been committed to taking “big swings” as Cuneen describes it, and the collective impact model allows SGA to do that. PlanItGreen provided a pathway for something even bigger.
“So PlanItGreen started off just as an Oak Park and River Forest thing based on the plan development and then the implementation of that plan, and then down the road… we began to think about moving this initiative beyond the two communities,” says Cuneen. “The [Community] Foundation was really interested in racial justice and also working with communities beyond Oak Park’s borders.”
Cuneen and other suburban community leaders had conversations at a GreenTown sustainability conference in Rockford, Illinois about how municipalities could take more impactful, large-scale climate action. SGA already had an answer – the collective impact model pioneered through PlanItGreen. So SGA held an event in June, 2022, where 14 west suburban mayors signed a Memorandum of Understanding that they would commit to collaborating on equitable climate action across community borders, and the Cross Community Climate Collaborative (C4) was officially launched.
C4 has now grown into an award-winning collaboration that brings together underserved and resourced communities to drive high-impact climate, equity, and sustainability outcomes. Founded by Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson, Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman, River Forest Village President Cathy Adduci, Darnell Johnson of the Urban Efficiency Group, and SGA, the collaboration is focused on sharing resources and expertise across communities to pursue large-scale projects in solar energy, waste reduction, green infrastructure, youth engagement, and more.
“A lot of times, in underserved communities and disadvantaged communities, environmental sustainability is not a top of the line initiative because we deal with so many other issues,” says Mayor Thompson. These communities are often the last to get access to resources for sustainability initiatives, Thompson says, but when they partner across municipal borders, it’s a game-changer.
“And that’s why this work is so important, because… we’re not leaving out anybody,” she says. “Especially when we’re talking about humanity and what’s best for people. It impacts all of us.”
Carrie Summy says that a broader approach to climate action was a logical next step from PlanItGreen, and aligned with the Community Foundation’s mission to support racial justice, which is core to any truly effective climate solution, she says. C4’s work brings equitable climate action where it’s needed most.
“I think we have to recognize that, obviously, the environment doesn’t have street borders,” Summy says, adding that factors like race, wealth, and public health are all relevant to comprehensive and effective climate and sustainability action. She emphasized that the communities impacted by environmental justice issues know best how to solve them, and collaborations like C4 help bring the necessary resources to make change.
“I see a lot of opportunity to continue the work Seven Generations [Ahead] has done with the C4 initiative, which is working with mayors of neighboring towns to recognize that communities have solutions, and we can help partner and implement the solutions that they want to enact.”
Since its inception, C4 has received more than $600,000 in federal, state, and philanthropic funding. C4 has helped bring zero waste programs to multiple school districts in its partner municipalities, curbside composting programs to local residents, and community solar programs that allow C4 residents to support clean energy development while saving money on their electric bills. C4 also spearheads a variety of youth leadership and workforce development programs aimed at empowering the next generation of climate advocates and clean energy professionals.
Although C4 is one of SGA’s newest collaborations, it has already had an enormous impact in Broadview and beyond, says Mayor Thompson.
“I think it’s hugely important that we continue to collaborate and work these things out together, and not work in silos,” said Mayor Thompson. She sees building relationships as the key to C4’s success, and one of the most important things SGA brings to the table.
“That’s the real work, is how we connect people to one another to get access to the resources to make our lives viable, right? And so I’m excited about the next 25 years working with Gary and SGA and all the opportunities that present themselves, because… we’ve been intentional, bringing 14 municipalities to this work, [that] otherwise wouldn’t have happened without C4.”
Growing into the Future
Despite so much progress, both locally and globally, the climate crisis is intensifying and SGA’s work is more critical than ever before. As the federal climate policy and funding landscape continues to change, comprehensive and ambitious local climate action will be the cornerstone of the environmental movement.
While the 25th anniversary is an important milestone for SGA, Cuneen continues to be focused on looking forward and taking bigger swings, knowing that future generations are relying on us. It all comes back to his kids, and now, his grandkids, too. Cuneen emphasizes that there’s a lot of work still to be done, and now that SGA is on solid ground with a strong reputation, the organization has a real opportunity for those big swings to result in some bit hits.
“The 25th anniversary, for me, yes, a little reflection. Let’s spend time being thankful for everything that’s happened,” Cuneen says. “But more importantly, it’s what’s coming next.”
