Gabrielle Lyon - "No Small Plans"
Gabrielle Lyon discusses No Small Plans. Launched in conjunction with Chicago Architecture Foundation's 50th anniversary and “Meet Your City” initiative, which aims to foster civic engagement, No Small Plans is a graphic novel that follows the neighborhood adventures of teens in Chicago's past, present and future as they wrestle with designing the city they want, need and deserve.
Presented in partnership with UChicago Program on the Global Environment
At 57th Street Books
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About the book: No Small Plans is a graphic novel that follows the neighborhood adventures of teens in Chicago's past, present and future as they wrestle with designing the city they want, need and deserve.
The 144-page novel was published in July 2017. It's inspired by the 1911 "Wacker's Manual" textbook that taught Chicago's young people about Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago. Over the next three years, CAF will work to give free copies of the novel to 30,000 teens and catalyze conversations in Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Public Libraries about what makes a good neighborhood.
About the author: Born in New Mexico and raised in New York and New Jersey, Gabrielle (Gabe) Lyon has spent most of her life fighting for better educational opportunities for Chicago’s youth. In 1994 Gabe served as a fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance magazine in Alabama. In 1996 she moved back to Chicago towork with the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1999 she founded Project Exploration, a nonprofit organization dedicated to changing the face of science for underserved minority youth and girls. As the vice president ofeducation and experience at CAF, Gabe is responsible for leading the organization’s thinking on how to bestenable youth, educators, mentors and families to explore the built environment and design thinking. Gabe received a Chicago Community Trust Leadership Award in 2009 and, in 2011, Chicago magazine named her a “Chicagoan of the Year.” Gabe studied medieval history and the history of anthropology at the University of Chicago and got her doctorate in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Gabe is the mom of two awesome kids, Ava and Arlo, discovered a dinosaur named Deltadromeus, and may have missed her calling as an urban planner. "No Small Plans" is her first (but not last) graphic novel project.
