Students 'keep Indianapolis beautiful' through BITS II
March 2, 2009
Jessica Kiefer, Features Editor
“I’m getting my workout for the day,” junior class president Kristin Hess said as she and four other students shoveled large piles of mulch into yellow wheelbarrows.
Hess is one of ten Butler University juniors who participated in BITS II, the second semester follow-up program to Bulldogs into the Streets (BITS), which allows students to volunteer at various service agencies in Indianapolis and is designed to encourage student involvement and service in the community.
BITS, which takes place at the end of Welcome Week, opens up the fall semester. About 250 to 300 students, mainly freshmen, participate under the direction of 40 upper classmen.
“BITS II was created to be a bigger volunteer event in the second semester,” said Volunteer Center Events Coordinator Keigan Mull. “Each class is assigned to work at a different service organization.”
Mull, a junior philosophy major, is in his second year on staff with the Volunteer Center. He plans and organizes BITS and BITS II, as well as the Volunteers Opportunities Fair in the fall and spring semesters.
“It’s a mixture of productive working and volunteering,” he said. “It’s allowed me to get involved in a different way on campus.”
The junior class participants volunteered for Keeping Indianapolis Beautiful, a program that has service projects including planting trees along residential roadsides, cleaning up littered neighborhoods and turning vacant lots into small parks.
One of these residential roadsides is at 400 Davidson St. in Lockerbie Square near the busy I-65/I-70 interstate. A row of trees is going to be planted here by KIB, but mulch needed to be spread first. And that’s where the junior class was needed.
Andrew Hart, director of urban forestry initiatives for KIB, said the “urban forest” project mission is to add trees to the city to help improve air and water purity, reduce energy costs, increase property values and improve the overall health of the people in Indianapolis.
Hart, who has been with KIB for four years, is also the director of the NeighborWoods program which plans to plant 100,000 trees in the city within the next ten years. At the service events, which usually take place on Saturday mornings at 9, a wide range of anyone from youth to senior citizens participate.
“It’s good to see volunteers and neighbors come out and socialize on Saturday mornings,” he said. “You really are able to see the start of community building.”
Accompanying Hart and the Butler University juniors are members of the Youth Tree Team, a youth group within KIB that works to preserve and maintain trees in Indianapolis. James Sager, 18, is a senior at Emmerich Manual High School and has been involved with KIB for three years.
“I like it because of the relationships you are able to build, and because I like working outdoors,” Sager said. He will become a youth leader this year and is looking forward to having more responsibilities within KIB.
Other students are getting valuable experience for their future careers. Ana Aviles, 17, is a junior at Emmerich Manual High School and has been involved with KIB for two years. She said she likes the program because she is interested in horticulture and wants to become a landscaper. “I love it and I want to learn as much as I can,” she said.
Nicolette Hurt, a sophomore at Park Tudor, has been involved with KIB for just over a year and enjoys seeing the work she and others have done. “We plant trees and they get bigger, and you can see that. It’s nice to feel like you did that,” she said.
Butler University student interest in the BITS program has been increasing as well. Mull said this is in part because they started promoting earlier in the year, and had an information and registration table in the campus Starbucks a few weeks ago. Still, Mull said he would like to see the involvement increase by at least 20 students a year.
“It’s really about the staff asking, ‘how big do we want to make this?’” he said.
But it all comes back to students being informed. Aside from sending out listserv emails when students sign up at Block Party, Mull is hoping to move BITS to Facebook and create a large group to send out messages about upcoming events, and also become more prevalent in the Student Government Association.
“A lot of student organizations come through BITS when they need a project, and there is stability within the Volunteer Center to allow for good projects and good service events.”
Mull said he hopes to get involved in a variety of service projects in the future, including the Polar Plunge, where people swim in the Eagle Creek Reservoir in winter temperatures to help raise money for Special Olympics Indiana.
For the juniors at the Keeping Indianapolis Beautiful site, there wasn’t icy water; but it was still cold. Butler University junior Alisha Cahue said she feels that volunteering is worth it, despite the wind and low temperatures.
“It’s really neat to see your site leader so grateful to see you there and that you’re helping out,” she said.
As I dug my own shovel into the last pile of mulch we had left to spread, I realized how long it would have taken a much smaller group of volunteers to have done this job on their own.
Hart, looking out at the mulch spread across the roadside that was once in huge piles, said he was thankful for the volunteers who helped get the job done, and said, “It’s amazing the difference that people can make when they work together.”
