Friends Receives Grant for a Multi-year Restoration and Water Quality Project

In December, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation announced that Friends of the Chicago River will receive a new $352,500 grant from the Chi-Cal Rivers Fund for a multi-year project near Sauk Lake, which is located on the Thorn Creek tributary of the Little Calumet River in southern Cook County. 

The Chi-Cal Rivers Fund is a public-private partnership working to improve the health, vitality and accessibility of the waterways in the Chicago and Calumet regions by supporting green stormwater infrastructure, habitat restoration and activating habitat and greenspace through community engagement and public access improvements.

The project will improve stream hydrology and habitat at Schubert’s Woods and King’s Grove preserves through bank stabilization, seeding, planting and installing a sediment basin. In partnership with the Forest Preserves of Cook County (FPCC), the project will restore over a half mile of creek, remove 318,200 pounds of sediment, and significantly improve water quality.

Earlier this spring, Friends and the FPCC concluded major work on a Chi-Cal Rivers Fund supported project restoring 135 acres at Sweet Woods Forest Preserve, which is also adjacent to Thorn Creek. Among the other critical habitat restoration projects Friends has implemented through Chi-Cal Rivers Fund grants are:

• The reconnection of Mill Creek to the Cal-Sag Channel to allow fish and mussel passage,
• Inventing a design for channel catfish nesting cavities and installing 400 of them in the Little Calumet and North Branch of the Chicago River,
• Restoring hundreds of acres at Country Lane Woods and the Crooked Creek subwatershed which is important habitat for the rare Hines emerald dragonfly,
• Installing the floating island habitat infrastructure at The Jetty on the Chicago Riverwalk based on our pioneering Chicago River Fish Hotel, and
• Initiating the first large scale instream habitat installation in the river with the installation of thousands of emergent native plants in the North Shore Channel; a project that is now being expanded river-wide through a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Coastal Resilience Fund grant.

Friends thanks the Chi-Cal Rivers Fund and its private partners for their support of this work improving the ecology of our region’s public open spaces in this environmental justice community.