Managing trash
The amount of solid waste generated in Bloomington has been on the rise for years, thanks in part to population growth and economic expansion.
6 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
The amount of solid waste generated in Bloomington has been on the rise for years, thanks in part to population growth and economic expansion.
The amount of solid waste generated in Bloomington has been on the rise for years, thanks in part to population growth and economic expansion.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Despite snowfall and temperatures that hovered below zero, a few men waited outside Trinity Episcopal Church, smoking the last of their cigarettes.Finishing quickly, they hurried inside to the warmth, where they joined a long line of other men and women experiencing homelessness waiting to be admitted for the night. Homeless shelters in the area have recently had to make some adjustments in an effort to keep people safe from the exceedingly cold temperatures, said Rev. Forrest Gilmore, executive director at Shalom Community Center. The National Weather Service released an advisory last night predicting temperatures reaching as low as minus 15 to minus 25 degrees for the night.“Winter’s always rough, and this is a particularly horrible winter,” Gilmore said. “The weather’s deadly, but so far we’ve managed to protect people who are homeless from serious harm ... we haven’t yet had any instances of frostbite, and we haven’t lost anybody either.”Deacon Connie Peppler, the site director at Trinity Episcopal Church, said the church has been extending their hours to accommodate for the bad weather. “We’ve been bringing the guests in earlier, even though the rooms aren’t ready,” Peppler said. “We’ve been letting them linger in the spaces we have available.”Gilmore said his work at the Shalom Center focuses on providing individuals experiencing homelessness and poverty with the resources they need to change their circumstances.“We’re a pretty comprehensive approach to addressing people’s challenges,” Gilmore said.Shalom Center is typically open from only 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, but there are exceptions, as was the case about two weeks ago.“When we had that big freeze, all of the public places closed,” Gilmore said. “We expanded our hours because there was literally no where else for (the homeless) to go ... We filled the gap, which is what we tend to do when things get dangerous like that.”During those couple of days, many of Shalom Center’s volunteers were unable to make it to the shelter because the weather was so bad, Gilmore said. Fortunately, the guests themselves stepped up to make meals and help run the shelter.“They really went that extra mile,” Gilmore said.Recognizing a need to keep this segment of the population safe from the cold, local leaders from a variety of faith organizations came together in 2009 to create the Interfaith Winter Shelter, a place that has since offered a seasonal, nighttime place of refuge for the city’s homeless men and women.“Our main job is just to get them off the streets to a safe, warm place to sleep,” Peppler said. “We’re trying to give them that protection for just the night.”Four churches, including Trinity, are host to the shelter for one or two nights per week on a rotating basis, according to its website.The shelter operates under a low-barrier model, meaning guests may be admitted regardless of whether they are under the influence of alcohol or an illegal substance, so long as they are respectful, according to its website.“All of the guests are homeless for whatever reason,” Peppler said. “Some of it is that they cannot afford to pay rent. Some work full time. Some get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and walk to the other side of town to get to work. It’s a broad spectrum.”“No one wants to be homeless, but some of them cannot help it,” said Reva Duke, a volunteer at Trinity. “It’s a cycle.”Guests at Trinity are let inside at 9 p.m., at which time they register, check their belongings at the desk and are usually given something hot to eat, Peppler said.“The cold weather has made it so that I have been letting them in earlier than usual,” Peppler said. Oftentimes, Peppler said, many of the guests at Trinity seem eager to help out as well.“It seems like there’s almost a community,” said senior Victoria Laskey, a volunteer at Trinity. “It’s usually the same people every week,” Peppler said. “We get to know them by their first names, generally.”The vast majority of the people who work at Trinity are volunteers from all across the community, Peppler said, including students, retired people and members of different organizations.Shalom Center relies heavily on its volunteers as well, Gilmore said.“We base our need on what’s happening in the community,” Gilmore said. “We’ll be there for people and work hard to make sure people are safe.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Jeffrey Belth has been chasing butterflies for as long as he can remember.Belth, a Bloomington resident, has spent the past 12 years photographing, writing, compiling and designing his award-winning “Butterflies of Indiana: A Field Guide.”“95 percent of the photos in it are mine,” Belth said. “I also designed the book, wrote the text. Basically I did the whole book on my computer here at home, working on it virtually every evening.”Belth’s book recently won the award for Best Nature Guidebook at the 2013 National Outdoor Book Awards, “The outdoor world’s largest and most prestigious book award program,” according to its website.“I was very happy and very gratified that my book was recognized, especially given the competition,” Belth said. “It’s just gratifying after the years I’ve put into it.”The book is a field guide about butterflies in Indiana, Belth said. It contains photographs of the different species and details about their history and characteristics, as well as some information about butterfly gardening.“It should help you identify butterflies in the state that you may happen upon when you’re on a hike, out in your yard, whatever,” Belth said.Belth’s background in art led him to a love of photography, which he used to advance his first hobby.“I had been photographing butterflies since the mid-1980s,” Belth said. “Around 1999-2000, I was taking more photos and traveling to new places in the state to get new species.”Belth often dedicated anywhere from a single afternoon to an entire weekend to taking photographs, depending on where his search took him, he said.He photographed some of the butterflies around the Bloomington area, others in Gary and in the northeast corner of the state where there are natural wetlands, he said.“There were some that I had to go back multiple times to find,” Belth said. “There was one, the Eastern Pine Elfin down in southern Indiana, that I had to make five or six different trips over the course of five years before I got the photo.”Other rare species that are out for only a couple of weeks out of the year were easier to find in other states, Belth said.To photograph these butterflies, Belth took trips to Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida and Texas, Belth said.Though he went on the majority of his trips alone, Belth was sometimes accompanied by his wife, Sandy, who also has a love of the outdoors. She works as an assistant naturalist with Monroe County Parks and Recreation, Belth said.Now that his 12-year project is finished, Belth isn’t sure where he’ll go next. “Right now I’m just taking some time off, so to speak,” he said. “It’s different. But it’s a relief to have it done. Very satisfying.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The IU School of Optometry will be the recipient of an annual $14,000 endowment from the recently dissolved Saving Sight Indiana, a vision welfare organization formerly known as Prevent Blindness Indiana.The money is meant to help the School of Optometry’s Community Outreach Clinic better provide vision care to underserved patients, School of Optometry Dean Dr. Joseph Bonanno said. It will also allow Saving Sight Indiana to use its limited resources effectively, according to a press release. In the past, IUSOCO has served numerous patients through its free care with support from grants and school subsidies, Bonanno said.Grants come from the Marion County Department of Health, the insurance group Anthem, the Hoover Family Foundation and a variety of other organizations, Bonanno said, but the money goes quickly.“That money always went up and down depending on whether the grants were available, and when the recession hit, all that money dried up, and it hasn’t come back,” Bonanno said. “We’re still writing grants, but what this endowment from Saving Sight Indiana gives us is a base.”Before the endowment, IUSOCO didn’t have any base funding for its activities, which means that the money available could have reached zero dollars, Bonnano said. With new annual funding, the School of Optometry can serve a minimum of about 200 patients a year through is outreach programs, Bonanno said.“Having an endowment basically means that you can always count on that money, every year, coming through,” Bonanno said.The Central Indiana Community Foundation holds the Saving Sight Indiana endowment funds, Bonanno said. Because CICF is located in Indianapolis, and most of IUSOCO’s activity takes place at the Indianapolis Eye Care Center, a lot of the money will be spent there.Still, IUSOCO does “quite a bit of outreach here in Bloomington through the Volunteers in Medicine Program, called VIM,” Bonanno said. The Volunteers in Medicine Program provides free medical services to low income, uninsured Indiana residents of Monroe County and Owen County, according to the School of Optometry’s website.These recipients of IUSOCO’s services in Bloomington often have jobs without benefits or work part-time, Bonanno said.The recipients do have income, Bonanno said, but if it is below the federal poverty level, they qualify for the services.Those services include free eye exams and reduced costs for glasses or medically indicated contact lenses, Bonanno said.“What the money helps us do is create more exam times for these individuals so they don’t have to pay, and it also provides money for materials for their eye glasses and contact lenses,” Bonanno said. “We also have ophthalmological partners who will do an occasional surgery ... as part of the program.”The School of Optometry has had a long partnership with Saving Sight Indiana, Bonanno said. Back when Prevent Blindness Indiana was in existence, the group’s mission was to find eye doctors who would provide free services to individuals in need throughout the state of Indiana.When the organization stopped that activity and became Saving Sight Indiana, it had IUSOCO in Indianapolis administer the programs, Bonanno said. One is called Gift of Vision for adults, and the other is Sight for Students.“Not only do we give the care directly in our school clinics, but let’s say somebody lives in Terre Haute, obviously they’re not going to drive all the way to Indianapolis or Bloomington, so we try to find eye doctors nearby who can then donate their services for that individual,” Bonanno said.Bonanno said he thinks the School of Optometry’s outreach activities benefit not only underserved individuals, but the students administering services as well.“We provide a lot of free services, and it’s a two-edged thing,” Bonanno said. “I mean, we’re helping the community, but we’re also — it’s training for the students. The patients often have multiple health problems, which means they have vision problems on top of health problems. So they’re difficult cases, which means, educationally, they’re excellent patients for our students. So it’s win-win.”When looking toward the future, Bonanno said he thinks IUSOCO and other vision care outreach programs will continue to need grants, subsidies and other sources of funding because they will remain essential within communities.“Some of the need theoretically will be reduced with the Affordable Care Act,” Bonanno said. “But it’s not going to be ideal, and there’ll still be a lot of people who don’t have insurance and don’t qualify for Medicaid for whatever reason, depending on the state rules. So there will always be a need to serve this population.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Many youth in rural Ghana lack access to school-sponsored programs that encourage involvement in healthy and productive activities. In an effort to combat this problem, Sarah Young, an associate professor in the School of Public Health’s Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Studies, recently began a project to bring after-school sports programs to students in Ghana. The project, known as Youth Enrichment Sports-Ghana, is meant to promote participation in sports as a healthy distraction, and in turn helping underserved children in certain rural areas of the country avoid problems associated with substance abuse and sexually transmitted diseases, according to a press release.“I think the research is pretty clear that kids who are involved in sports are less likely to engage in risky behavior,” Young said. “They’re more likely to lead a healthy lifestyle.”The project was set in motion when Young and her colleagues were notified of a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of State to fund a SportsUnited International Sports Programming Initiative in one of about 30 countries.“It’s not very often that you see grants that involve some kind of a sport,” Young said. Young and Craig Ross, a professor in the School of Public Health, decided to apply for the grant. Although YES-Ghana is only in its beginning stages, Young said the researchers involved have already begun to make progress.The team includes researchers from within the School of Public Health and other departments to bring specialized fields of study to the program, Young said.Young said they chose Ghana in part because it is a democratic country.One of the country’s primary languages is English, which lessens the problems and difficulties associated with a language barrier, Young said.The team will be working with partners at the University of Cape Coast, the U.S. Embassy in Ghana and local government officials in Apewosika Township, a rural area along the Gulf of Guinea.Schools in Ghana have recreational sports programs, but they are focused in metropolitan areas, Young said. To change that, researchers hope to bring to Ghana the “sport-for-all” concept that exists in recreational sports in the U.S., Ross said.“When you think of sport-for-all, what does that really mean?” Ross said. “What it really means is sport for everyone, regardless of your physical ability. So you may be a below-average athlete. You don’t have to be the elite.”The IU team also hopes students in Ghana will be able form a common bond through shared sports, Young and Ross said. “I think what is exciting to me is it’s a wonderful opportunity to highlight the global impact of sports and especially recreational sports can have around the world,” Ross said. “We’re using basketball, we’re using soccer, we’re using volleyball and we’re doing all kinds of wonderful things for the residents in that community in Ghana that need help and assistance.”During Thanksgiving Break in November, Young and three of her colleagues will travel to Ghana to talk with its in-country partners and local officials, scope out the area and interview potential coaches for the positions. “We are in close contact with the U.S. Embassy in Ghana,” Young said. “We can rely heavily on them as well as our in-country partners to advertise for this project and advertise for qualified applicants to apply.”After interviews, the team will select 16 coaches who will travel to the U.S. in May for a two-week training session in Bloomington. All of the researchers in the project will be playing a large role in training, organizing and managing that two-week program, Young said.During their training period, coaches will be participating in development and leadership education sessions and learning how to coach and officiate the three sports, Young said. She said the IU team will help to share American culture with the coaches by taking them on tours of sports facilities and bringing them to observe youth sports leagues.“It’s designed as a train-the-trainer,” Ross said. “And it just keeps going.” The team has plans to return to Ghana in May 2015 to reassess the effectiveness of its coaches and programs.“We want to do that with the youth as well — teach them sportsmanship, teach them character building,” Ross said. “Teach them all the things that sports provide that our youth are all used to.”