On a stretch of concrete streets in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, one brightly painted house has become an unlikely rest stop for a butterfly migrating nearly 3,000 miles to Mexico.

  • 8 native-plant projects started at homes and schools across the neighborhood
  • 3,000 miles — the length of the monarch's annual migration to Mexico
  • 20 years of steady monarch population decline that the project is working against
  • 1 nonprofit, Women for Green Spaces, launched to take the model citywide

From one backyard to a neighborhood movement

Claudia Galeno-Sánchez didn't start out as an environmentalist. "Before becoming a mom, I didn't know much about the environment," she told The Guardian in Spanish. A visit to her hometown in Puebla, Mexico, roughly a decade ago changed that — she noticed the skies held far fewer butterflies than she remembered from childhood, and the question stuck with her: what's happening with the butterflies?

The answer led her to transform her own front and back yards, planting native milkweed and wildflowers that monarchs rely on to feed and lay eggs during their migration. Over the past few years, that single project grew into 8 separate native-plant gardens at homes and schools throughout Pilsen, each one designed as a waystation for monarchs heading toward Mexico.

Learning that good intentions need good science

Galeno-Sánchez initially assumed that saving monarchs meant raising caterpillars indoors before releasing them as adults. She later learned that approach can actually weaken the insects' ability to survive migration in the wild.

"We have to plant their natural habitats out there, because they are not human babies; they are another species. They need to be exposed to sunlight, to changes in temperature, even predators make them stronger to migrate."

That shift — from hands-on rearing to habitat restoration — now anchors her approach. Her gardens exist to let monarchs behave like monarchs: feeding on real nectar sources, laying eggs on real milkweed, and facing the natural conditions that toughen them for the journey south.

Why the timing matters

Monarch butterflies have declined significantly over the past 20 years, driven by habitat loss, pesticide use, and extreme weather linked to climate change, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Recent years have brought a modest rebound in the eastern population, but experts caution the losses still outpace the gains, and federal Endangered Species Act protection for the species has been delayed until 2030.

That gap between federal action and the butterflies' needs is exactly where Galeno-Sánchez's work fits. She co-founded the nonprofit Women for Green Spaces to scale the model beyond her own neighborhood, with a goal of partnering with schools across Chicago to teach kids to grow native habitat and understand why pollinators matter.

The project also carries personal weight. Galeno-Sánchez migrated to the U.S. as a child without her parents, and she sees a parallel in the species she now protects. "The monarch butterfly migrates. We migrate," she said. "The only difference is that the monarch butterfly does not require a passport." For her, restoring habitat for monarchs has become a way of protecting far more than one species — and of turning one family's backyard into a template a whole city can copy.