We stayed in the Peace House for the week- a 3 story renovated house from the 1880's that is gorgeous. We got to make all of our own meals and we had a pancake feast for breakfast on the final morning. There were some fabulous chefs in the group :) 
The group on Thursday after working in Filege Hiywot Community Garden. This Community Garden works with 1st and 2nd generation immigrant children from Ethiopia. It is used as an educational program to teach the children about environmental issues, how to garden and other biology topics. The lady that runs it, Aster, is a researcher for Eli Lilly, so a lot of Lilly employees volunteer their time to work with the kids and while it is still small, it is a growing program and very cool!
Our work at the garden was to "till" the soil by turning over the grass to kill it. The Lilly Day of Service is next week- over 8,000 volunteers will be working across the city and a group of them will be coming to plant flowers and mulch the area that we tilled. This will be such a great addition to the garden and Aster is extremely excited about it!
The garden-the area that is tilled on the left side of the picture, and the planted area were the garden last year. Due to the success of last year, this year it is expanding to almost the entire rest of the area inside the fence!
Lindsay and me outside Goose the Market- a former gas station that has been renovated and is now a cafe with awesome fresh food
A brownfield site that we stopped at on the bicycle tour. A brownfield is a site that was once a factory, gas station, dry cleaner, or something of the sort that once they moved out the building/land was contaminated and has to have serious cleaning before another business can utilize the area. There are a ton of brownfields around Indianapolis (and every city) and Chris works in the Economic Development Dept for Indianapolis to clean up brownfield sites and make them useful again. Goose the Market is a brownfield redevelopment project.
The Project SchoolThis is on the other side of the building from the picture above. This was a former factory that the left half of it has been completely cleaned out and is now functioning as a charter school. The school is very hands-on and is currently 5th and 6th grade students. Next year they will be adding 7th grade and the year after will be 8th grade. The 2nd floor is still in the planning stages and some of the student projects include what they would like to see happen with the space. Other projects include designing/planning a playground that will hopefully be built in the next year across the street, plans for an outdoor classroom, and an edible playground (basically a garden that they students would learn about while maintaining it). The Project School is very community based and is environmentally friendly.
We had the chance to tour a local recycling center. All of the "trash" that you see will be moved through the plant and sent on to the next phase of the recycling process within 4 days. They move millions of tons of paper, plastic, aluminum, cardboard, etc. through every year and are part of a nation-wide operation under Rock Tenn. A lot of what they recycle goes back into packaging food products that are sold in WalMarts. It was fascinating to learn so much about the process of recycling and so many facts that I never knew. Only 52% of the paper used in the US gets recycled...which is better than I would have guessed but that means that a lot of paper is just getting thrown away. This is my plug to encourage you to recycle if you don't already!
Squished up milk cartons, detergent bottles, etc. ready to be shipped to the next plant and be melted down.
I think these cubes of squished up plastic containers look like the cubes on Wall-E.
Two of our students carrying trees. We worked with Keep Indianapolis Beautiful (the organization we worked with for the tree planting a few weeks ago) to relocate and water 500 trees that will be planted this week for the Lilly Day of Service in a local park. We worked with local AmeriCorps members as well as ICC staff members for 3 hours to sort and unload the trees.
This is the Peace House! It is a beautiful house that has been renovated and is absolutely gorgeous both inside and out.
We had the chance to tour a local recycling center. All of the "trash" that you see will be moved through the plant and sent on to the next phase of the recycling process within 4 days. They move millions of tons of paper, plastic, aluminum, cardboard, etc. through every year and are part of a nation-wide operation under Rock Tenn. A lot of what they recycle goes back into packaging food products that are sold in WalMarts. It was fascinating to learn so much about the process of recycling and so many facts that I never knew. Only 52% of the paper used in the US gets recycled...which is better than I would have guessed but that means that a lot of paper is just getting thrown away. This is my plug to encourage you to recycle if you don't already!
Squished up milk cartons, detergent bottles, etc. ready to be shipped to the next plant and be melted down.
I think these cubes of squished up plastic containers look like the cubes on Wall-E.
Two of our students carrying trees. We worked with Keep Indianapolis Beautiful (the organization we worked with for the tree planting a few weeks ago) to relocate and water 500 trees that will be planted this week for the Lilly Day of Service in a local park. We worked with local AmeriCorps members as well as ICC staff members for 3 hours to sort and unload the trees.
This is the Peace House! It is a beautiful house that has been renovated and is absolutely gorgeous both inside and out.So, thats the majority of what happened on the retreat. The group was awesome-everyone got along so well and was really into the retreat. I think most of them knew more than me going into the week but I feel like we all learned so much. We had the chance to do the recycling tour, a tour of the KIB headquarters that is a gold-certified LEED building (meaning it's super green), talk with a couple of gentleman who work with local and federal legislation regarding environmental issues, work with KIB, the Project School, and the Community Garden, and the chance to learn about what students are doing on campuses around the state. We had 11 students representing 8 different colleges from Indiana and it was so inspiring to hear about all of the work they are doing!
Retreat #1=a success.
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