Camp Experience Builds Confidence to Conquer Challenges
Before coming to Mercy Home, many of our young people never had the opportunity to attend summer camp. In fact,...
September 26, 2024
May 4, 2023
Mercy Home cares deeply about honoring God’s creation through the stewardship of our planet and the innumerable plant and animal species that inhabit it. That’s why we are incredibly proud of our youth and coworkers for the environmental initiatives they’ve undertaken since last fall to make our Home more environmentally friendly.
The latest development in their green strategy is the recent opening of a peaceful new butterfly sanctuary and garden at our Walsh Campus for Girls on Chicago’s South Side. The sanctuary’s low-maintenance native plant species can adapt to survive in our climate, which means that fertilizers or pesticides aren’t required to maintain a beautiful space for our children and coworkers to enjoy. Once fully operational, the sanctuary will be a safe haven for endangered birds and butterflies—much like our Home is a safe haven for our boys and girls.
“[We wanted to] use it as a pilot project to say look what we can do with a little patch of land,” Rebecca Bowlin, the coordinator of Mercy Home’s Craft Cottage (an arts space on our Walsh Campus) and one of the coworkers who spearheaded the project.
Of course, in addition to being environmentally friendly, there are also therapeutic, recreational, and educational benefits to our young people. This space will allow our kids to explore and participate in our after-school programs where they will learn the science behind tracking butterflies, practice photography, and engage in other sensory exploration.
The sanctuary also holds an important cultural component for many of our young people, particularly those of Mexican heritage. In Mexico, the monarch butterfly symbolizes the souls of deceased relatives who come back on the Day of the Dead to visit their loved ones. When our young people see monarch butterflies in this beautified and serene space, they will be reassured that the impact they make will exist in some permanent way, even as so much changes around us.
“[Incorporating this cultural awareness] ties the garden back to the youth, making them feel heard and seen in our community as Latino,” said Gloria Aguilera, Mercy Home’s coordinator of tutoring and after school programs and another coworker who took the lead on this project.
At the opening event, Aguilera and Lupe Carey, a youth care worker at Mercy Home, read a reflection in both English and Spanish that touched on the cultural significance of the monarch butterfly. “A butterfly symbolizes the acceptance of every phase you go through in life,” the reflection concluded. “We must maintain faith when everything around us has changed.”
Because monarch butterflies have been in decline in recent years, both Bowlin and Aguilera hope that our butterfly sanctuary will be a safe place for monarchs to stop on their annual migration from Canada to Mexico. Our coworkers will plant milkweed to create a nurturing place for them to safely grow.
The butterfly sanctuary is something that Bowlin and Aguilera hope will be the start of a larger Mercy Home response to the pollution that affects Chicago residents, including the families of our young people.
In addition to the environmental benefits, the sanctuary will be another venue for healing at the Home. In the planning stages, our coworkers listened to our kids who expressed a desire for an outdoor space they could use as part of their work with their therapists or simply as a place to spend time with their peers.
It’s also a place that can aid in the healing process for families. At the butterfly sanctuary’s opening, we welcomed our young people’s families to help decorate the space. Each family painted square rocks. On five sides of each rock, they wrote down things that guided them as a family. Then, on the bottom, they wrote something that has been a stumbling block. Having the issue facing downward symbolized the family’s commitment to move past it. Then everyone took their stones to the garden, where they added them to the stone walkway. This signified that every family was already a permanent part of this special space.
The families also made seed bombs, which are wads of seeds in clay or recycled paper. These can be tossed into unused lots, alleyways, or other abandoned spaces. Once the seeds sprout, they begin to create micro meadows of native plants that will bring beauty wherever they land. Some of families also took seed bombs home for their own gardens so they could add these plants to their own spaces.
Though the butterfly sanctuary is one of the more tangible signs of Mercy Home’s commitment to environmental change, it is just one of many green initiatives our coworkers have been developing. They have also implemented compost bins and gotten rid of disposable and Styrofoam plates in the cafeterias. Aguilera has also scheduled educational programs for our kids to learn more about environmental issues and learn ways that they can make a difference in the city.
Bowlin noted that the care and preservation of our planet is something that interests many of our young people.
“They’re really passionate about trying to help,” she said. “These kids are smart, they’re not oblivious [to the problems they’re facing].”
“It takes many drops of rain to make a storm, one drop isn’t going to be enough,” Bowlin said. “But if you have enough, you can really do things. That’s the narrative we’re trying to push [with the young people]. I know it seems small [and] overwhelming, but it’s not an excuse to give up or say that it doesn’t affect me. There are things we can do [to make a difference].”
By modeling to our children and their families the way that small changes can make a big difference over time, we can all be part of saving our planet.
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