By Jack Austin,
Nov. 18, 2025
At Teens Take On Climate (TTOC), a Chicago-based environmental mentorship organization, youth climate activism doesn’t begin with lectures about melting glaciers — it starts with conversations about identity, creativity, and opportunity, and how young people’s passions connect to the future of the planet.
“We make climate personal” is the motto of TTOC.
TTOC works with about 20 students from Chicago Public and charter schools on the South and Southwest Sides. The organization recently received a $2,500 grant from Teen Science Café to host three student-led “science cafés,” public events to be held at Gary Comer College Prep exploring climate topics — between January and May.
Now members are developing pitches for a $3,500 national grant (The Community in Nature Prize Challenge) from STEM Next, Teen Science Café’s parent organization. To prepare, six members of TTOC’s leadership team, all students
at Gary Comer College Prep, participated in a workshop with graduate science journalism students from Northwestern University’s Medill School. The TTOC students are using Chicago data from the Climate Central database to tell stories about how climate impacts their families, communities and future career goals.
The training helped them sharpen science communication skills to strengthen their project pitches for funding that would allow them to expand their public programming even further.
The youth leadership team for the TTOC challenge proposal brings a wide range of passions and perspectives to their work.
Comic artist and football player Gregory Shields hopes to bring his community together through public art. He envisions creating climate-themed murals that replace blighted walls with messages of pride and renewal. Shields’s motivation is personal: his family in Jamaica has experienced climate change firsthand. He said colder temperatures have affected local food production, and Hurricane Melissa destroyed a family home.
For his project, Shields is focusing on inequities in electric vehicle infrastructure. He said he hopes to advocate for more EV charging stations in low-income neighborhoods and to challenge misconceptions about electric cars.
“Gas affects our environment, affects the atmosphere,” Shields said. “Part of this could be helping communities install more EV charging — figuring out where they’re needed and encouraging people to fund or build new stations in certain areas.”
Janay Bussell-La’Raviere said she is interested in nursing, asthma, agriculture, and photography. Fatima Muhammad combines digital art and filmmaking to communicate climate awareness and is developing an original animated story inspired by climate issues. Camren Tolliver focuses on food sovereignty and building more equitable food systems.
Artist Joshua Williams uses his detailed drawings of reptiles and birds to raise awareness about how climate change threatens wildlife. Through TTOC, he has traveled to Acadia and Yellowstone National Parks and said he hopes to study evolutionary biology in college.
Williams said his lifelong fascination with animals has deepened his understanding of ecological connections — from Chicago’s urban green spaces to the Amazon rainforest, “the Earth’s lungs,” as he calls it. He advocates for expanding access to nature in his own community, citing the 257-acre Dan Ryan Woods as an example of how urban forests can reduce pollution and support biodiversity.
“Those green spaces with those trees can help decrease the amount of pollution in the air,” Williams said. “Every system, every plant, every animal, every person is connected — and we can’t survive without each other. We need to come together to protect each other.”
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Photo at Top: Gregory Shields, left, and Cameron Tolliver, right, with Teens Take on Climate, at a workshop with Northwestern University graduate students. Shields hopes to create community murals centered around environmental messages. (Rachel Duckett/ MEDILL)