New Year, Greener You!

Happy New Year to our Downers Grove family. We are looking forward to doing great things and making big strides for sustainability this year! At our December meeting/social gathering, we asked attendees to write down what topics and initiatives they would most like to see Greener Grove focus on in 2024. We had so many thoughtful and exciting responses, and we wanted to share them with you as a way of documenting the things that really matter to us as a group.

We also have a record of each individual response. If you’re interested in doing a deep dive, you can take a look at our handy dandy spreadsheet here, organized into color-coded categories for your viewing pleasure.

Educating DG residents on various sustainability-related topics was a common theme to the responses. The leadership team has decided to make education a core component of our meetings this year. To kick things off, we are excited to start with a presentation by Jean Kent from S.C.A.R.C.E, who will be talking to us about how to make more sustainable choices. As a reminder, we will now be meeting in the Downers Grove Public Library, and our first meeting of the year is Tuesday, January 23rd at 7 PM. Please invite your friends and neighbors to attend!

Our next two meetings after that are already set, with February 27th being a presentation about Making the Switch to Solar Energy, so if you’re curious about going solar, you don’t want to miss this! And, March 26th, we will have our own Greener Grove member and landscape architect, Tom Eisenhart, giving a presentation about using native plants in your landscape. Lots to look forward to!

We also look forward to meeting Jason Michnick, the new Environmental Sustainability Coordinator for the Village of Downers Grove, who started on January 2nd! Our Greener Grove leadership team will be reaching out to schedule a meeting with him to introduce Greener Grove and talk more about what we do and how we can help facilitate sustainable initiatives at the village level.

Hope to see you all soon!

Greener Grove Communications Team