Equipped with plastic litter grabbers, garden tools and colorful gloves, hundreds gathered Saturday in Wicker Park as part of a city-wide initiative to beautify public spaces for Earth Week.
The two-part event began with a community clean-up in the morning, followed by Green Fest, a celebration featuring a sustainability-focused marketplace in the afternoon.
For Zach Harris, a 26-year-old North Center resident who stopped by vendor tables while biking home from work, the occasion served as an opportunity to engage with like-minded advocates of community solar energy.
“I’ve seen the way climate change is already impacting myself and people around me,” he said. “I believe that when we’re taking care of the earth, we’re really taking care of ourselves.”
Though Harris had not planned to attend Saturday’s event beforehand, he said he was grateful to have met people who helped connect him with resources to eliminate fossil fuel use, which he views as a “disaster for our society and democracy.”
A few tables away, Sophie Rallo, the founder of Garbage Gals, a Wicker Park-based non-profit, relished the opportunity to tell community members about her group’s work.
Back in 2023, when she was bored with work and hoping to make new friends, Rallo placed flyers around the park encouraging others to come pick up litter with her. Since then, the initiative has expanded to a community of service and socialization that draws around 20 volunteers for four clean-up events each month.
On Saturday, Garbage Gals joined forces with the Wicker Park Advisory Council and the Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce, resulting in the collection of about 115 bags of trash from around the neighborhood.
“If everybody cared about their community and the street they lived on, it would be such a better world,” Rallo said.
Along with Garbage Gals, local organizations focused on composting, native plants, biking, and other environmentally friendly activities hosted tables and engaged with attendees at the park’s southwest entrance.
Children, many of whom were riding bikes and scooters through the freshly cleaned park with their parents, stopped to dig in a container of dirt near a table advertising Scuola Italiana Enrico Fermi, a full-immersion bilingual education program for students ages 3 to 6.
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Anna Maria Fantuzzi, a co-founder of the school located four blocks from the park, felt it was important to sponsor Saturday’s clean-up event because it aligned with their mission of promoting healthy habits and helping children engage with the natural world.
Distributing free cannolis and Sanpellegrino Italian beverages, Marta Castella, the school’s interim director, spoke about the institution’s emphasis on composting and consuming only local, unprocessed foods.
Though many of the other vendors had a more obvious connection to sustainability initiatives, Fantuzzi and Castella said they hoped to spread the message that being environmentally conscious should start from a young age.
During brief remarks before the marketplace portion of the event, Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st, commended Scuola Italiana for prioritizing “global citizenship,” adding that becoming a father made him appreciate clean and safe parks even more.
“I didn’t understand the value of nature spaces until I saw the freedom with which my daughters played in those spaces,” he said.
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, general superintendent and CEO of the Chicago Park District, thanked volunteers and vendors for their efforts, noting Wicker Park was just one of 180 cleanup projects scheduled around the city this week.
Ramirez-Rosa said that while he believes Chicago already has the best park district in the country, there is still plenty of work to be done.
“We know that summertime Chi is when our parks and our city come to life,” he said. “But we also know that we need a little TLC and a little help keeping our parks clean and that’s exactly what Earth Day is all about.”