“Eat Well. Live Well. Be Well.” This motto is that of Growing Places Indy, the site Bear Breaks Indy served with today. As a trip leader, and previous Indy participant, it was fun to come back to a place I’ve served at before and see the changes made and gain more out of the experience than I did initially. Growing Places Indy is a non-profit urban garden that specializes in healthy living and uses profits made to fund educational programs for the Indianapolis community. They also provide fitness classes to drive home their mission of living in a healthier way and stimulating the local economy;
Today was hard, manual labor. We worked on moving compost to the garden areas for most of the day. A struggle myself and some of the participants had was coming to the realization of the work we were doing. Our work was indirect, which is equally as important as direct service, but it’s harder to see the impact made when it’s not tangible and right in front of us. Education is such a large part of the experience, and this morning I felt a lack of information given. A few participants were having a rough time with that as well, so my co-trip leader and I asked if we could receive more education on what they do and why they do it. All of the workers at Growing Places decided to have lunch with us and explained anything we had questions about. They really drove home that the work they do is not a quick fix and that’s okay. They want to solve the root of the problem. The analogy given was they want to look at it from a holistic approach. Instead of immediately giving a person medicine for a sickness, they want to look at it from the perspective of why that person got sick. Was it stress? Eating habits? Instead of just feeding them the the answer, they want to shape and help the underlying issue to prevent future sicknesses. They want to provide education to the community of how to be healthy and live well.
Overall, it was a really productive day. We all feel extremely sore, but incredibly accomplished. We left knowing more about sustainability in Indy than we started the day knowing, and I would call that a pretty successful day.