Local coalition seeks to get community onboard for upcoming South Chicago quantum project

CHICAGO (WLS) -- A new group is pushing to get the community onboard for the upcoming quantum development park in South Chicago.

They hope to silence the criticism of the project.

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This coalition has about 20 organizations, full of residents and small business, working to put on a community gathering to educate those who may be resistant to the quantum development.

"This is about access," St. Francis de Sales High School Principal Dr. Roni-Nicole Facen said.

The newly formed Southeast Neighbors for Quantum Coalition said the building of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park Development will give South Chicago access to jobs, opportunity and investment.

"It's going to be something technological that has to come here to reboot this community or provide development for the future," Chico's Oven owner Jorge Perez said.

The multibillion dollar 300,000-square-foot facility that broke ground in September will employ up to 150 people in five years. In the past, there have been those who expressed concerns it wouldn't benefit the community.

"Don't go to those areas and get the people and bring them in and work and build everything else. No, it's people right in the backyard, right all around here that you can tap. You can't say they don't have the credentials cause they do," resident Freddie Batchelor said.

But those with the coalition say there simply needs to be more education on the project.

"This is something that my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, can look forward to. As I always say, a community can't be what a community can't see," lifelong South Chicago resident Sharon Brown Latiker said.

They say the development will open doors for the next generation, like Raven Patton, a high school senior with dreams of working in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM.

"It's an opportunity for us to get in at the ground level and access careers we may have previously never even known about," Patton said.

It's why the group firmly believes in getting the community together, even offering local business owner and coalition member Perez's recently named "Quantum Donuts" for snacks.

"Let's use our leadership abilities to create a collaboration or partnership and really ask the questions, not in terms of saying no, because it's easy to do that, but to see how we can work together," Perez said.

Southeast Neighbors for Quantum plan to hold monthly community gatherings to talk about the development. It's expected to be open in a little over a year.