our story
One Earth Collective began as Green Community Connections in Oak Park in September 2010. Oak Park residents Sally Stovall and her partner, Dick Alton, were worried about global warming and decided to hold a community meeting to learn whether others felt the same way. Out of the woodwork poured a cohort of people with the same concerns—no real surprise in progressive Oak Park.
Together, the residents formed Green Community Connections and started holding meetings to talk about how individual actions can help reverse climate change. Sally took the helm, enlisting volunteers to help with the ever increasing workload involved in creating an information-packed website, publishing a monthly e-newsletter and holding garden and green house tours.
Two years later, in February 2012, Ana Garcia Doyle came to the group with an idea to use film to engage residents about the environment. She had been inspired by the grandmother of all environmental film festivals, the DC Environmental Film Fest. The group decided a film festival could break beyond the choir of self-professed greenies. Over the next seven weeks, the team learned about film licensing and large-scale event planning on the fly, managing to attract an impressive 500 attendees. Over the years, the film festival gradually expanded throughout the city of Chicago and surrounding 5-county metro area, as well as into Northwest Indiana.
In 2013, Sue Crothers Gee founded the Young Filmmakers Contest, and Lisa Files joined the YFC team in 2016 to augment the work she began with GCC in 2014. The nationwide contest awards cash prizes to young filmmakers from all over the United States, encouraging them to exert their creative and leadership skills to educate others about environmental issues and solutions. In 2023, the contest received a record-breaking 403 contest entries from around the world. Each year, more than a dozen winners and their families, friends, teachers and others, come to the awards ceremony, some from across the country and beyond, to collect their awards and see their films premiered at the One Earth Film Festival.
In 2014, Green Community Connections became a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, incorporated as GCC Midwest, Inc. Original board members included Jodi Wine, an attorney, Oak Park activist James Babcock. A few years later, Willard Williamson, a community leader living and working in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood joined as well.
In Oak Park, Green Community Connections developed Green Block Parties to disseminate news about planting milkweed, an essential food for monarch caterpillar survival, as well as sustainable eating, composting, chemical-free lawn care, and reducing reliance on plastic.
In 2017, the organization launched “I Can Fly,” a summer pilot program devoted to mentoring teens in the Austin community, a Chicago neighborhood adjoining Oak Park. The program became “Austin Grown” with the partnership and collaboration of BUILD Chicago, an organization serving Chicago’s at-risk youth since 1969 through gang intervention, violence prevention, and youth development programs. With guidance from One Earth, BUILD, and local mentors from Chicago-area organizations, the students earn $14.00 per hour while planting and maintaining the Iris Farm, a 2,400-square-foot urban vegetable garden—as well as the 25-foot radius Peace Garden, and a 90-foot area of native pollinator plants. A speakers series, vegetarian and vegan cooking instruction, and field trips round out the curriculum.
In 2019, Founder Sally Stovall passed away, leaving a rich legacy of environmental activism, as well as hundreds of local activists inspired by her example.
In 2020, Green Community Connections was restructured as a local, Oak Park-based program of the One Earth Collective. The group chose the name One Earth Collective to reflect the well-known work it does across Northeastern Illinois as well as nationally and internationally through the One Earth Film Festival and One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest.
But the largest change happened with the global COVID pandemic beginning in March 2020, right in the middle of our film festival. With remarkable speed, we pivoted from fully in-person to fully virtual. In 2021, we attracted 6,000 attendees to our fully virtual festival, while perfecting our technical presentation skills. Local in-person activities were put on the back-burner.
In 2022 and 2023, we pursued a hybrid model for the film festival, with a mixture of in-person and virtual events reaching increasingly national and international audiences. Local work ratched up in the Greater West Side of Chicago, with four strong Austin Eats events and two successful summer Austin Grown programs. Our work in Oak Park focused on reviving green block party programs and creating a new community collaborative, Climate Ready Community Outreach to Oak Park (COOP).
The 2024 One Earth Film Festival will look different from previous years, as we will present our annual launch party and 6 film screenings over 4 days, which will be amplified and extended by an anticipated 10-20 host venues. We will take this opportunity to "step back to spring forward" in order to hone in on our core competencies and key program offerings, and build our Board and staff capacity.
In 2024 and beyond, we continue to focus on these three core goals:
Educating audiences through the power of film, art, and community, grass-roots leaders.
Amplifying marginalized and BIPOC voices to bring to light the systemic injustices that disproportionately affect low income communities and communities of color.
Inspiring individuals towards action using our film-for-social-change model, bringing bottom-up solutions to the forefront to fuel the environmental movement.
