Stellantis and Canfield Consortium – Detroit

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WHC was engaged by Stellantis to conduct several tree plantings as part of the company’s MotorCitizens community engagement initiative. This effort, which started in 2018, included planting 15 trees on a vacant lot owned by a local community development group, Canfield Consortium, which is located both down the street from the Mack Ave plant and across Canfield St. from the Barack Obama Leadership Academy. Around the time of the plant’s 2021 expansion, the company installed Beniteau Stormwater Park within the neighborhood. The park is part of a multifaced Community Benefits Agreement, designed alongside Canfield Consortium and other community leaders, which seeks to alleviate the social and environmental impacts of plant expansion.

Beniteau Stormwater Park’s installation was paired with WHC’s development of curricula for local schools, and corporate volunteers were trained to serve as lesson leaders. Designed to resonate with students with a wide range of learning styles, both curricula incorporate hands-on activities, social learning, and opportunities for reflection. The topics that align with Michigan State Science Standards, providing a real-world supplement to lessons being taught in school. Activities illustrate concepts such as the interconnectedness of food webs and morphological diversity of animals, allowing students to make real-world connections between the concepts covered and their immediate natural surroundings.

In a community devastated by flooding during extreme rain events in summer 2021, activities illustrating the water cycle, from the local rain garden level up to the watershed level, are especially important. Students have seen the damaging effects of climate change on their homes and communities, and these opportunities for place-based learning that explores the role of trees in storing stormwater will help broaden their understanding of the solutions available to build local resilience.

Metro Detroit- I-94 Corridor

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Alkebu-Lan Village (AKBV) is a longstanding community center in Detroit. With a 30-year history serving youth and their families, what began as a martial arts program teaching discipline and personal responsibility is now a sprawling facility with programs supporting technological literacy, physical fitness, academic success and food security. When employees at the nearby ArcelorMittal Tailored Blanks (AMTB) facility reached out to AKBV to discuss how they could best connect and support the community across their fence line, AKBV leaders identified a community garden as a project in need of support.

With guidance from WHC and funded by WM Think Green and the DTE Foundation, employees of WM, General Motors, DTE and AMTB came together to plant 45 trees and 200 plugs on AKBV property, adjacent to the community garden. All plants were native species selected to provide habitat for local pollinators. The planting event was paired with a selection of informal environmental education activities, designed to build participants’ understanding of the importance of pollinators both ecologically and to food security at a large scale.

The successful pilot planting convening corporate, academic, nonprofit and community stakeholders resulted in additional funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to install green infrastructure across the neighborhood, including the planting of 500 additional trees. These funds will also enable WHC’s development of additional curricula, teaching AKBV’s youth program to monitor on-site pollinators, steward and maintain newly planted trees, and understand how the restored habitat provides ongoing value to local wildlife and the community.

CommuniTree – Calumet Region, Illinois-Indiana

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In an effort to increase canopies and address canopy iniquities, WHC co-founded and manages CommuniTree, an urban and community forestry collective comprised of businesses, municipalities and forestry-oriented NGOs, that has planted over 12,000 trees within community spaces and industrial properties in northwestern Indiana and northeastern Illinois. Building on the longstanding success of these plantings, WHC and CommuniTree engaged students at George Washington High School on Chicago’s southeast side in a collaboratively organized tree planting on school grounds. Students, teachers and local youth organizers planted 45 native trees and shrubs alongside WHC staff and volunteers from local corporations.

The school is located next to an impactful industrial corridor with poor air quality and the associated health impacts on the adjacent community. As such, in addition to broadly applicable lessons about stormwater management and habitat value, students were taught to observe and measure the impact of new tree canopies through the lens of air pollution.

Following the planting event, students, in partnership with Davey Tree Institute, used i-Tree software to track and model projected atmospheric impacts of the planting. Quantifying the carbon sequestration, particulate matter capture and fugitive dust capture of this small-scale planting engages students in real-world problem solving while developing their contextual and scientific understanding of the environmental justice (EJ) conflict playing out in their community.

WHC has also partnered with the Calver Military Academy, a Chicago public school in the Altgeld Gardens and Murray Homes neighborhood. The area is notable as the home of the late Hazel Johnson, an Altgeld Murray resident dubbed “the mother of environmental justice.” Johnson forced factories to improve their anti-pollution practices and also shut down incinerators and landfills.