By Emma Henry
Nov. 18, 2025
Six students from Chicago nonprofit Teens Take On Climate brainstormed climate change advocacy projects with graduate students of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism this November.
The students are turning Chicago climate data into stories that show climate impacts on their families and communities and help map their future career goals. It’s all part of the STEM Next Community in Nature Prize, a grant competition offering up to $3,500 to fund youth-led action on environmental challenges.
Launched in 2022 by executive director Marji Hess in partnership with the Comer Family Foundation, TTOC supports afterschool programming at eight Chicago secondary schools. The mission is to empower young people by connecting them to opportunities, education and employment that is both personalized and incorporates a climate lens, Hess said. All students participating in the grant proposals are part of the TTOC leadership team for the initiative and attend Gary Comer College Prep, part of the Noble Network of Charter Schools.
The student’s visit to Medill allowed them to work closely with graduate students in the Health, Environment and Science Journalism Specialization to learn about strategies for effective science communication. Among the TTOC participants, interests ranged from the impacts of climate change on mental health to sustainable engineering.
Fatima Muhammad, a founding member of TTOC, pitched her proposal idea based on creating animations to take data into action. Muhammad is interested in using art to produce a storyline and characters as a method of increasing climate awareness. She hopes her main character can act as a link to communicate with audiences emotionally and practically.
“I want to tie in feelings of isolation and energy,” Muhammad said. “She’s going to be representing us, how we as people can take action.”
Following a more traditional communication style, student Camren Tolliver spoke about his interests in urban agriculture and equitable food systems. After conversations at Medill, he expressed interest in using interactive media features and journalistic writing to show climate change impacts on food supply chains and growth patterns.
Tolliver said he plans to use temperature datasets from Climate Central, a policy-neutral nonprofit organization that creates data visualizations, to support his research.
“Eventually, in the grand scheme of things, it’s going to have a long-lasting effect. It could change the way we get our food and the quality of said food,” Tolliver said.
Muhammad said that the workshop helped her talk through her ideas in an impactful way. She realized through discussion that her project idea might be more feasible than she originally anticipated.
“This trip is so far the closest I’ve gotten to sharing my ideas and concepts. Though it was just one concept, I think it’s a start for my future animation and film career,” Muhammad said. “Sharing my ideas and seeing peoples reaction and actually being interested in my creations actually calmed me down .”
The next step for TTOC will be to finalize their individual project ideas in a single proposal – “Our Chicago Climate Stories: Making Data Personal” – and submit it to STEM Next by Nov. 25.
Earlier this year, TTOC was awarded a $2,500 grant from the Teen Science Café Network to lead three Science Café’s, programs where teen and adult leaders collaborate with STEM experts to create presentations which explore science topics and solutions in-depth.
“We often think of ourselves as the glue of getting young people to think about climate,” Hess said.
TTOC will host their first Teen Science Café in January, which Hess said will be free and open to the public.
“We were just so amped up after we came [to Medill],” Hess said. “That’s really at the heart of what we’re doing, is supporting young people so they can find their voice and they have a chance to talk with other people and say, ‘Hey, what can we do together?’”