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She’s always been a bright one: the girl her teachers loved, the student the administration couldn’t wait to showcase to the outside world every chance they had. Mercedes Pickett was the poster child, a shining star from West Garfield Park who’s lighting the way for the next generation of scholars.
Mercedes grew up near Chicago Avenue and Pulaski Road, where West Garfield Park and Humboldt Park converge, to parents emphasizing education, mental health and wellness to their eight children - she’s the third oldest of an even split between four girls and four boys.
“My parents stressed family, building community and pouring into that infrastructure,” Mercedes said. “I believe that gave me an opportunity and a support system. My family was my first sense of community.”
From her early academic experiences as Brian Piccolo Specialty School, now the Piccolo School of Excellence, throughout her years at Orr Academy High School, Mercedes began to recognize that her intellectual abilities were creating pathways.
“I noticed there were opportunities for me,” She recalled. “I’ve been given opportunities because others saw potential. The more opportunities I was presented, the further I would go, the further I would grow.”
Feeling blessed and grateful for the experiences, she began to pass her knowledge onto others, helping classmates with schoolwork and sharing her time to help them work their way through a course.
Mercedes held the top GPA at Orr and recorded nearly 400 community service hours while in high school, a rate ten times the basic service hours requirement.
“I ended up getting a full-ride scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gates Millenium Scholarship,” Mercedes said. “I believe it was due to my community service. It showed that this was a student who can pass along blessings.”
With the opportunity to attend the university of her choice, Mercedes chose Depaul University in Chicago.
“I wanted to go to DePaul. I love their Vincentian services,” Mercedes recalled. “St. Vincent de Paul committed to the poor.”
But it was the example shown by DePaul students while Mercedes was in high school that connected her most to the institution.
“Going to a low income school and seeing students that were not TAs (teacher’s assistants), volunteering in my school made me want to volunteer,” she said. “If you have something, even if it may not be much, put it in the pot and watch it grow.”
“I wanted to pour into people how they were pouring into me.”
Take a look around you. What do you see? Mercedes sees information waiting to be collected and organized, stories to be told.
“That’s ultimately my work, to build that database,” she said.
Mercedes holds a Master of Science in computer and information systems security from DePaul, a skillset she’s used as a primary driver of her work with Earth’s Remedies, a collective she founded in 2016.
Earth’s Remedies is a connector, a hub of developmental resources that brings together families and small businesses to free education, career readiness, financial literacy, business consultation, health and wellness, and violence prevention resources.
What started as a tutoring program for Westside youth evolved into the encompassing resources collective as the tutors began to understand that there wasn’t a capability shortfall, but rather a support deficit that impacted the young people’s academic achievements.
“We started asking questions like, ‘What else do you need?’ and let them talk. Their hearts just started pouring out,” Mercedes remembered. “You get to see that they may have an unsafe home environment, they may not be able to walk to and from school in a safe manner, they may not have a great relationship with their educator - and those relationships, or a lack thereof, can stifle a child’s development.”
As it turned out, the scholars didn’t need remediation, they needed a relationship.
“They needed a mentor. They needed someone to sit down with them and listen, to let them feel seen and heard,” Mercedes said. “We recognized that we have a lot of field experts in our community that we can connect them to.”
Like anyone blessed with an analytical mind, she looked for the gaps, the role that best fit her collective’s talents.
“Where can we fit in? Where do we do our best work? It’s being that datacenter for our community.”
In action, Mercedes’ efforts look like the Save the Westside project, a community funding initiative that supported 26 small businesses during the pandemic as a way to provide momentary financial relief for Black- and Brown-owned businesses. It was another way to pour into her community what it had poured into her.
That grassroots effort created a new business network to introduce to the scholars from Earth’s Remedies.
“We gave them a moment of relief and every time they helped us, we barter. Let’s amplify your platform, let’s amplify your resources,” Mercedes said.”In that process, the community was getting connected to the resource.”
“To be able to connect community and data - we started to build a database for small businesses, for resource centers and we have a network of families to connect them to,” she said about the ever-expanding Westside database.
Mercedes currently is expanding the scope of her work to create data solutions that help nonprofits in their decision making, a strategic toolkit for leaders looking to streamline operations to amplify their impact, enhance their fundraising capabilities, and dedicate resources to their most effective programming.
It’s another step toward bridging the gap between needs and the available resources and putting residents of the Westside on equal footing. Even though the data is vital, Mercedes sees another marriage as vital to turning the numbers into action.
“It’s very important when you walk into these rooms that you’re telling the story, not just reporting the data.”
Mercedes Pickett is one of 18 up-and-coming Westside leaders selected to be a part of the inaugural cohort of Community Leadership Fellows. Community Leadership Fellows (CLF) is a leadership development experience that involves educational workshops, tactical training, collaborative learning, coaching, mentoring and networking. We believe that the investment in homegrown talent will lead to sustainable, vibrant communities.
Mercedes Pickett, CLF ’23 Fellow and Founder & CEO of Earth’s Remedies. Hear more about her mission to use data analysis to change her neighborhood.