Butler University
EN-10: Community Partnerships

The CUE (Center for Urban Ecology) is a center in the Biology department at Butler University that serves as a conduit for urban ecology and sustainability projects.  All the partners I listed in the Excel file are active partners with the CUE on a variety of projects. So we are the lead or collaborator on all of the projects listed.  The sustainable agriculture project is linked to the CUE Farm (campus farm) that is a part of a larger network of urban farms in Indianapolis called IndyGrown (includes the farms: Growing Places Indy, Big City Farms, Southside Farms, and Pleasant Street Produce). This collective strives to educate the Indianapolis community about the importance of local, sustainable foods for ecological health, food access, and food system resiliency through tours, educational workshops, and selling/donating foods to the Indianapolis community. https://www.butler.edu/cuefarm

The Farm Incubator project was initiated through a collaboration between the Marion County Purdue Extension Service and the CUE at Butler University. The original goal of the project was to convert vacant city lots into a physical space with infrastructure for farm entrepreneurs to test the waters for new urban agriculture business ideas. The primary stipulation in the project is that farmers follow standard sustainable, organic farming practices to foster ecological improvements on the site (better pollination, healthier soils). Butler hosts an Americorp VISTA fellow from the School for Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. Her job is to build community capacity in impoverished neighborhoods. Once the project began, the site was chosen, the United Northwest Neighborhood (near 25th & MLK) a well-known food desert. By engaging the community, in collaboration with the Kheprw Insitute and Groundworks Indy (both youth mentorship programs), the project has really moved from a entrepreneurial opportunity to an integrated project where neighborhood farmers are trying to address food access issues while educating youth on the importance of local, sustainably grown food to benefit the environment, social equity and wellbeing, and promote resiliency of the community to future food barriers by controlling the food system locally.

The Urban Wildlife and Habitat Conservation project called Indy Wildlife Watch was initiated by two Butler Biology faculty and the CUE after being approached by the Lincoln Park Zoo which has been conducting a similar project in Chicago. We are now a first partner of a growing network of cities monitoring urban wildlife. We selected sites along two urban-to-rural transects where motion-triggered cameras were strapped to trees.  These cameras capture images of any wildlife that is utilizing that site.  We are trying to understand how urban wildlife moves around the city, what types of habitat they use (parks, lawns, cemeteries, golf courses, etc), and how this varies with species. Ultimately, the captured images will be placed on a citizen science website (similar to www.chicagowildlifewatch.org) where anyone can go online and analyze the images for us. Our partnership with Indy Parks allows us to place cameras in Indianapolis city parks. We also strategically placed cameras at K12 schools where possible to stimulate student participation in data collection and analysis of images. We have worked with Newfields and the Indy Zoo to place 2 cameras at each of their sites and we have 8 schools that have cameras at their schools. We are in discussion with the Indy Zoo to have an on-site kiosk about placing a kiosk in their buildings so visitors can view the images and help us analyze them as a citizen science webpage for the project.