Keep Indianapolis Beautiful has kicked off a $4 million fundraising campaign to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
The nonprofit wants to upgrade and maintain more than 65 green spaces throughout the city and build three new ones.
The money would also help build a $2 million urban ecology and workforce development center along West Morris Street in West Indianapolis. The center would train dozens of high school and college students for careers involving tree care, horticulture, landscaping and water infrastructure.
Keep Indianapolis Beautiful President and CEO Jeremy Kranowitz said the organization has achieved about 90% of its fundraising goal through corporate donors, but needs about $400,000 more. The fundraiser launched last week.
West Indianapolis Neighborhood Congress President Jon Howe is excited about the development center potentially coming to his area. He’s looking forward to seeing how he can work and partner with the nonprofit.
“KIB’s always done great work in the community, and so having this building here, I think it’s beautiful,” he said.
Kranowitz said the location was chosen because it met specific requirements. That includes a large amount of space to build a structure for education and community training workshops as well as garage bays for the organization’s equipment.
The center would be one of only a few businesses to have opened in the neighborhood since major vehicle manufacturing plants closed there beginning in the mid-1990s. Kranowitz believes the new center won’t just help Keep Indianapolis Beautiful — it would also benefit the community.
“I think that bringing this type of community development and youth training to that part of town can only be an asset, and once you’re starting to bring more positive businesses into a region, I think that then starts to become more interesting for other entrepreneurs,” he said.
A westside workforce development center
The organization currently trains students at a warehouse on East Raymond Street and South Sherman Street on the south side, but Kranowitz said the location isn’t optimal. For one, it has no windows or air conditioning.
“It’s a really bare bones warehouse,” he said. “It’s really not a great space for us to do this type of training.”
If enough funds are raised, the new center would be built next to the Heath Outdoor LLC landscaping company’s facility near West Morris Street and South Tremont.
The center would be used to train high school students enrolled in Keep Indianapolis Beautiful’s Youth Tree Team and college students and recent graduates in the Urban Naturalists program.
The programs plant thousands of trees around the city each year and work on a variety of green projects that help manage stormwater while students earn between $13 and $17 an hour. The programs also provide job readiness training and financial literacy classes.
For Howe, the training programs are similar to some that existed in the neighborhood decades ago. During the neighborhood’s heyday, he said programs paid neighborhood kids to plant flowers and perform other yard work.
“When you’re a kid, that’s huge,” he said. “When you get a couple dollars as a kid, you go to the grocery store, the gas station and get some candy or some snacks. You go to (Barry’s Pizza and Wings) and get some pizza. So, the money gets spent in the community, and the kids get pride and learn some skills.”
3 new greenspaces
In addition to the new center, the campaign hopes to raise enough money to build three new greenspaces around the city.
Riverside
Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, along with Nine13sports, would turn a vacant lot at the northwest corner of West 29th Street and Elmira Street into a garden-and-bicycle safety training park that would teach children about what street signs mean and how to obey them. The park would be named after Indianapolis cyclist Jim Douglas, who was killed in a 2010 car crash.
“You know all of these stories in the news about bicycle-car collisions and how tragic those are — if we can avoid just one future accident, this park will have paid for itself many times over,” Kranowitz said.
Far Eastside
With the P30, Inc. Community Center, Keep Indianapolis Beautiful would build a 3 ½ acre park with trails, plants and outdoor art at the northeast corner of North Post Road and East 30th Street.
“If you were just whizzing by, it just looks like acres of grass and bare dirt. There’s nothing really that inviting. We’re going to turn it into this amazing gathering space for the community,” Kranowitz said.
North side
At a northside location that will be announced later, Keep Indianapolis Beautiful would turn a ¾ acre asphalt parking lot into an urban microforest.
“This site has been a parking lot for decades, and so the soil beneath it we know is going to be incredibly compacted. It’s going to be dead,” Kranowitz said. “We’re going to be getting some insight from Purdue University to help think about how best to restore and revive the soil beneath the parking lot.”
Once the soil is revived, Keep Indianapolis Beautiful would plant grass, shrubs and low canopy trees that would act as a living classroom and reduce the risk of flooding nearby by absorbing about 750,000 gallons of stormwater a year.
The microforest is based on a University of Louisville project, which found doubling tree and shrub density lowered the risk of heart attacks by 10% to 15%.
“You know the song where they take paradise and put up a parking lot? We’re sort of doing that in reverse,” he said.
How to help
Kranowitz said the organization has raised about $3.6 million so far. It needs to raise $400,000 by the end of the year to meet its goal and fund all its planned projects.
To donate and learn more about the campaign, head to Keep Indianapolis Beautiful’s dedicated Rooted in Indy website.
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Mirror Indy reporter Enrique Saenz covers west Indianapolis. Contact him at 317-983-4203 or enrique.saenz@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on Bluesky at @enriquesaenz.bsky.social.
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