INDIANAPOLIS ‑ After 50 years of planting trees, restoring habitat, building neighborhood parks and hauling litter out of streets and streams, Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, Inc. (KIB) is asking Indianapolis to help make that work permanent.
The organization launched today Rooted in Indy: Nourishing a Greener Future, a $4 million capital campaign timed to its 50th anniversary. The campaign – the largest in the organization’s history – will build three new signature green spaces in collaboration with the neighborhoods that will use them, create the Perennial Fund to maintain the 65 green spaces KIB has built since 2005, and construct an Urban Ecology and Workforce Development Center, a permanent home for the youth training programs KIB has operated for years from a bare-bones rented warehouse space.
Two-thirds of Indianapolis residents do not have a park or green space close to home. What they often have instead is land doing nothing, or worse than nothing: asphalt that holds heat through the night and sends rainwater into the sewer, lawns too open and too hot to cross, lots that have sat vacant long enough that people plan their walks around them.
One project is on the Far Eastside, with the P30, Inc. Community Center (Post Road and 30th Street). The community center sits behind an open lawn roughly the size of two and a half football fields, with no shade between the bus stop and the front door. The campaign turns it into an outdoor commons.
