“The university still has refused to sit down with us and come up with a better plan to improve our working conditions,” says one speaker. “That is not acceptable.” The crowd cheers, volunteers bang on drums, and the applause continues.

These were the sounds and voices from the Town Hall held by the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition on September 23. The graduate students at Indiana University in Bloomington have been attempting to form a union for three years now.

Calling themselves the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition, the group is fighting for better working conditions for graduate students at IU. Their goal is for graduate workers on IU’s Bloomington campus to have adequate pay, benefits, and freedom from discrimination.

Nora Weber, a fourth-year graduate student in the sociology department explains that the coalition started about three years ago when a group of students decided they wanted to represent graduate students as workers.

“We have the grad and professional student government, and that represents us as students, which is part of our dual role on campus,” said Weber, “but we are also workers and so we wanted a body that represents us in that role.”

Nora expresses why she wanted to join the Coalition and what her informal role is in the unionization efforts.

“Just talking with other grad workers on campus, hearing what they have to say,” she says, “and trying to incorporate that into thinking about our mission and how we can serve grad workers across campus.”

***

At the Town Hall, one of the founding members of the Coalition, Valentina Luketa, asks graduate students in the crowd to raise their hands if they have faced economic insecurities due to the lack of financial compensation by the University for graduate workers.

“We are, when it’s all said and done, not treated with dignity and respect. To demonstrate this, join me. How many of you have struggled to pay the rent? How many of you have worried you’re not going to have enough money to buy food? How many of you have taken side jobs, stayed up late at night trying to figure out how to cover all your financial duties?”

Luketa then asks the crowd how many have sold their plasma for money. When the Coalition told Dean Daleke this, he wanted proof of this, Luketa claims.

“He said we still need some proof that we are actually at the end of the day selling our bodies, our plasma. Some of us are participating in sex work, which is an honorable thing to do, but it’s something that the graduate students are forced to do in order to survive,” Luketa continues.

“How many of you have felt alone, powerless, spent hours devising an email to your course director afraid that if one misplaced word is there, you’re going to somehow lose funding for the next year,” Luketa says, “How many of you have felt that if you’re not quiet and you put your head down and you have to listen to us to those sorts of things that you are going to lose that funding you’ve been promised?”

“I too have felt very, very powerless. And then we founded the graduate Coalition. Not only did I learn that I was not alone, I have also learned that I, and all of us together, could be quite powerful.”

***

IU has a formal policy when a group wishes to work towards unionization, and currently that is what the coalition is working towards.

“Unionization supports everybody. And I think what’s really powerful is that some of the big issues that workers face on campus is payment that is not sufficient to meet our base needs,” Weber says. “And we will say, well, you know, maybe the university doesn’t owe you that. I would argue that based on the percent of classes that we’re teaching, the amount of money that grad workers bring into the university, that’s not over your head. That’s a hurtful, in addition to untrue, assessment of the situation.”

Nora notes that better conditions for graduate workers also benefit the undergraduate student body at IU.

“When we are able as graduate workers, to just focus on our studies and to just focus on our teaching and our lab commitments and our TA-ing, that’s a better experience for the undergrads as well,” she continues.

Nora, as well as others a part of the Coalition, do not see this attempt to unionize as working against the IU administration, but instead working with them. By allowing them to unionize, the Coalition sees this step as the university acknowledging that graduate students have needs that should be met.

“We really would like them to acknowledge the work we do, but also understand that when they are in negotiation with a union, it’s much more efficient than having to deal with all of these individual departments and all of these individual workers one-off, that it just makes a much more efficient process,” says Weber.

***

As a part of their unionization effort, the Coalition has five key goals that Katilyn Beidler, a fourth-year graduate student in the biology department explains at the Town Hall.

“We have five main things that we’re pushing for as a union: ending the fees of living rage with annual and living wage with annual raises protection and improvement of our benefits, implementation of an effective grievance procedure and fairness for our international graduate workers,” says Bender.

***

For the past two years, graduate workers at IU have organized, petitioned, marched, and engaged in a historic fee strike. Currently, they need to sign up a majority of graduate workers on union membership cards.

Once they have the majority, they will deliver these cards to the IU Administration, who will hold a Yes-or-No vote for unionization.

For the Coalition, winning the union election will show IU that the majority of graduate workers agree with their demands for regular raises, to end the mandatory fees, and for fairness for graduate students at IU.

“I am optimistic about the future of this. I’ve talked with a lot of grad workers over, especially over the last year, and while I see a lot of frustration and a lot of difficult situations that people are facing,” says Weber, “I also see a lot of solidarity and I see a lot of people who are committed to the work that they do and committed to the things that they study and are also really committed to building a community that is better not just for themselves, but for future generations of grad work at IU.”

“We have president Whitten as the new president of IU and she has stated diversity on campus is one of her priorities. She stated hat listening is one of her priorities. And so we are here. We would love to love to continue and have these conversations with her,” she says.

***

“What do we want?” Valentina Luketa shouts to the crowd at the town hall.

“A Union,” responds the crowd.

“What do we want?” Luketa repeats.

“A Union!” The crowd cheers, volunteers bang on drums, and the applause continues.

When you think of drylands, what first comes to mind? A field of zebras galloping across the savannas of Africa. Or, perhaps, a rattlesnake slithering past cacti in the deserts of Arizona. Maybe you think of a herd of cattle, munching their way through the Great Plains of the United States.

Dryland ecosystems make up around 40% of the land in the United States, including the vast desert of the Southwest and the Great Plains. Similarly, drylands comprise 40% of the entire Earth’s land surface. With this in mind, a better understanding of such a vast area of the globe proves necessary.

Indiana University professor Natasha MacBean shares a similar sentiment. She was recently awarded a grant from the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences Carbon Cycle Science program to do just that, to understand more about drylands and specifically their role in the carbon cycle and how climate change could affect the ecosystem. Last week, Professor MacBean spoke with WFHB news about her work.

“My research into dry lands is primarily to understand the kind of ecosystem scale processes, that is the interaction between vegetation and water and carbon cycling and how that is responding to climate change and to land management change as well. Mostly that’s driven or motivated by a wider research theme of mine which is to understand global carbon cycling. We are obviously emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the land and the ocean are taking up, their absorbing about 50 percent of those emissions so we know that kind of global scale number but what we don’t know is really which ecosystems, which regions, and which processes are driving that, sort of what we call a sink of carbon. We also don’t know if we’re going to sort of maintain that 50 percent reduction on our emissions into the future or not. So we need to understand that better and it has been highlighted in the past decade or so that semi-arid ecosystems, even in dryland ecosystems more broadly, are playing a big role in that sort of year to year variability in global carbon cycling and so we want to understand that a bit better. There are lots of people working in the field in dryland ecosystems and understanding processes and that work has been going on for a while but where my research comes in is really scaling that up to broader scales, sort of regional to continental scales and then up to the globe as well and then for the second component of that is making sure that our process of understanding of the carbon, water, and vegetation dynamics is implemented into the kinds of global Earth system models that we are using for climate change projections for the I. P. C. C. for example.”

With this broad overview of Professor MacBean’s work in mind, the expert shared more about drylands themselves and some of their characteristics.

“Dry lands are inherently water limited. Most of the ecosystem processes are driven by moisture availability. So that means that there’s less rainfall on average and there is a potential for evaporation and evapotranspiration. There are lots of different strategies in these ecosystems, a lot of different vegetation types. There are strategies for dealing with that kind of seasonal water stress and year to year changes in water availability. Drylands cover about 40% of our land surface, some of that is the desert. So that takes up about 7%. So I think, 1/3 of the land surfaces are the semi arid, sub humid, dry land ecosystems that have quite a bit of vegetation and include savannas or grasslands, etc. And they have a lot of ecosystem services. They support about just over a third of the world’s population. So they have tons of ecosystem services for that population such as often these regions are used for grazing for livestock production. There’s obviously water availability issues and in those ecosystems for the populations that need water. We actually, in the US, I can’t remember now the number but we grow a lot of our crops in the US in the southwest and West, where it’s actually water limited, which I don’t think always makes that much sense. Especially for some of the crops that need a lot of water and therefore irrigated a lot. So these are the kinds of ecosystem services that come from these ecosystems. They’re also really diverse and they’ve got a lot of different flora and fauna that are often beneficial for foods, culture and medicines, etc. There are lots of different purposes and supporting a lot of the world’s population.”

Dryland ecosystems are extremely complex and important for many key species that depend on them as well as humans who depend on them for their livelihood and survival. A key part of MacBean’s research is to understand how climate change, and other human effects, could impact the drylands.

“Climate change, I’d say, is one of the big pressures, other pressures include population increase, and land management, you know, like I just mentioned are we really managing the land well, and these ecosystems, so often we are over grazing them, and over cultivating them and maybe not growing the right crops, etc. That’s one thing. And climate change interacts with that. The biggest thing that climate change is going to do in these ecosystems is change the water availability. And so that includes a couple of things. One is changing rainfall variability, so sometimes that means more intense storms. For example, the Southwest US is driven by the North American monsoon, which provides water availability, and that’s not necessarily going to go away, but the characteristics of it might change. If they’re more intense storms, then that’s not necessarily a good thing, we might lose a lot of that water as runoff. It’s just too intense for ecosystems to manage. But with climate change a lot of drought, most of the west and southwest of the US, for example, have been in a mega drought for most of the century. We think that can be exacerbated with climate change. So these ecosystems really rely on water availability, they’re adapted to the kind of seasonal changes in water availability. And as that changes, potentially more extreme droughts in the future climate change, the plants, and all the ecosystem processes are going to have to adapt to that. And the second thing I’d say with climate change that I think we’re seeing a lot now is potentially increased risk of wildfire. There is an interplay there with land management, and building, and sort of urban expansion and how we’ve managed fires in the past. But we think that, you know, one of the reasons why wildfires might be increasing is increasing temperatures and, again, dry land ecosystems, well adapted to deal with fire over, you know, 1000s, 10s of 1000s, 100s of 1000s of years. But, as these changes are sort of accelerating, the vegetation will have to adapt to that as well.”

Dryland ecosystems and how they relate to global carbon cycle and global climate is a topic that requires more understanding. As mentioned before, Professor MacBean was recently awarded a $900,000 dollar grant from NASA to provide funding for more research into drylands. MacBean described how this grant came about and what her team’s research will do to improve the mapping of drylands and better understand the potential environmental effects on the environment.

“So NASA has a bunch of different calls on different topics. And they have a carbon cycle science program, it’s specifically about understanding the carbon cycle of terrestrial ecosystems. It can be any type of ecosystem. And so, I’d been already doing research in dryland carbon cycling, and through my work and when I was at the University of Arizona and my collaborators there. So I got together with a few different collaborators who were working in the southwest, and working on dry lands, to put in a grant that was aimed at really improving our understanding of carbon cycling in dry land. And, and what we’re trying to do is a mixture of different things. So we’re trying to improve our mapping of different plant types, vegetation types, and soil cover in these regions, because they’re often very spatially heterogeneous. If you think of savannas, you know, you’ve got shrubs dotted everywhere, and it’s very difficult to map those types of ecosystems. And then once we hopefully can do that a little bit better, we’re going to take a lot of other measurements in the field, remote sensing measurements, and link the plant cover type to the function and their responses to changing rainfall, etc. And then the third part is to implement that into a model. So it’s really a kind of bringing together people working on different things, modeling, remote sensing, field measurement, working across scales, you know, scaling up from understanding ecosystem processes at the field scale to modeling at the regional to global scale, with remote sensing and satellite data. You know, that’s how it came about, just a meeting of collaborators who wanted to continue working on that.”

With an uncertain future, MacBean’s research offers a chance for scientists to understand and perhaps predict the future of drylands through the use of modeling. MacBean provided insight as to how this project will help in this endeavor.

“What we really want to do, and that’s, you know, one of the goals of this project is to make sure that we have the sort of right process, understanding in the kinds of models that we use to make (future) predictions like that. And then hopefully, by the end of this project, we wouldn’t have developed everything that we need in the model to look at those kinds of questions, but I think we’ll be able to run future simulations under climate change scenarios, and see whether we are seeing, for example, like an expansion of dry on vegetation, but that’s a real overall goal, but I’d say we want to really test and develop the models a little bit better, but before we say that more definitively”

With hard work and dedication, Professor Natasha MacBean’s work is being recognized for its immense importance and is now funded by NASA. With research just beginning, there are limitless amounts of information to still be learned about our world’s drylands.

By Nathaniel Weinzapfel

The City of Bloomington will host the Black History 101 Mobile Museum from 9 a.m. to noon on September 11th at City Hall at 401 North Morton Street.

The museum will feature a collection of 7,000 artifacts of Black memorabilia dating from the trans-Atlantic slave trade era to hip-hop culture. This collection was founded and curated by Dr. Khalid el-Hakim, a keynote speaker at the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. 

WFHB News spoke with James Sanders, chair of the City of Bloomington Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commission. Sanders describes the artifacts as “jarring” and “polarizing,” but he still believes it is important for our community to acknowledge this difficult history. 

“That’s important to display,” says Sanders. “That’s important for people to see where things came from, how they progressed, contrasting to how things are now.” 

Listen to the full interview to hear Sanders outline his view of the importance of having a museum in this community dedicated to Black history, Covid-19 safety measures the museum will put into place, event partners and sponsors and more.

Q: Jonah Crismore, Executive Director of the Buskirk Chumley Theater, thank you for coming onto the WFHB Local News.

A: Oh, thank you very much for having me.

Q: The Buskirk Chumley Theater is now requiring vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test for the fall season. What led you to make that call ahead of the fall theater season?

A: For us specifically, it came from a few different angles that we were working. We recently surveyed our audiences, our patrons, and it overwhelmingly showed support for a vaccine requirement or negative COVID test. Our respondents that came to about over 80% were in favor of that from our patrons, those are our regular ticket buyers. Also, artists are on tour right now, you know, it kind of started as this gentle kind of trickle of our requests here and there, if we could do it. And then before you know it, every artist was requiring it. So it just became a matter of practicality, as well, that all the artists were requiring it. So, to create some semblance of, or just trying to keep some stability, we decided that the whole season should have COVID vaccine or negative COVID tests along with your ticket purchase, when you come to see an event here at the BCT. All in all, it’s also what we feel like the best way to ensure that we can keep our communities as safe as we possibly can, while still being able to do what we do, which is have gatherings of concert goers and music fans.

Q: Early on in the pandemic, many of your shows were canceled due to Covid-19. This affected touring artists, the venue and the livelihood of theater staff. Would you touch on the push and pull of wanting to remain open, while trying to protect theater goers from the virus?

A: Yeah, I mean, safety is our first priority, always. We want to make sure that when we have events here that people remain safe and may remain healthy. You know, one strategy that has been great is the vaccine and masking, which is in Monroe County, is another great thing. So when we marry those two things together, along with social distancing, when possible, with enhanced cleaning, we’re doing everything we can to create an experience where the concert can still happen. We’re keeping our staff safe, we’re keeping the artists safe. And most of all, we’re keeping our community safe, while we’re still able to fulfill the mission of our organization, which is to fill the historic record company stage with programming throughout the year. And also, you mentioned the livelihood of our theater staff, which is very, very important. But you know, the livelihood of our artists is very, very important. And many of our artists, this is how they make their living. And it’s just as a financial certainty that many of them would not be able to continue on with their careers as being an artist if they did not go on tour this season.

Q: You’re the first large venue to come right out and say “we’re requiring vaccines or a negative Covid test.” I’ve seen other local venues do this, The Orbit Room and The Atlas for example. Do you think this idea will catch on at other local organizations?

A: I believe it’s the only way forward, at least for the foreseeable future, to do this in a safe, responsible manner. And you’re seeing that – both the East and West Coast had already started to require it. While Lollapalooza in Chicago started to require it, and shortly after that, several other venues in Chicago started to require it. Now, venues in Indianapolis are requiring it. I feel like it’s just a matter of time before this is just what the industry standard is. And it’s going to be much stranger to go to a place that they don’t require them to, than they do.

Q: Overall, this move is clearly to incentivize people to get the vaccine and to limit transmission of the virus. Why is this important to the Buskirk?

A: Well, we don’t want another shutdown to happen. You know, we’re very happy and very lucky that we’re in Monroe County where people are taking the pandemic seriously, and they are doing everything they can to keep themselves and those around them safe. But, we just don’t know what the future would hold for the performing arts in not just Bloomington, Indiana, but the whole region and even on a national scale, if a shutdown starts to occur again. So we feel that getting vaccinated is one of those fast tracks to being able to have live concerts in a safe and responsible manner. Again, adhering to the masking mandates is another thing we can do to keep everybody safe. And ultimately, we want to keep this communal experience alive. And we can do that as we’re looking out for each other and the members of that community, and making sure that we’re doing everything we can to not spread this very infectious disease.

Q: Would you touch on what you have planned in terms of programming for the fall season? Would you go over some of the highlights the Buskirk Chumley has in store?

A: Sure, well, we’re very excited that September 30, we’re going to be having Kenny Wayne Shepherd. He’s some you know, another artist who has been affected by the pandemic, and that we originally had him scheduled for August 30. But a member of his crew had COVID-like symptoms. So, they had to take a break from the tour, but we’re able to get them rescheduled later on. So, we’re still excited to have that show happen. Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, he’s going to be playing some of his hits, as well as some of his solo work. And we’re excited about having him, which is on September 22, I believe. And then, we have a whole list of great stuff coming down the pipe. We have Iron and Wine, a venerable indie singer-songwriter on November 19th. September 15th, we have Kathleen Edwards, another amazing singer-songwriter. So, we’re really doing everything we can to make sure that the Musical Arts continue on with another act of we’re very excited about Kevin James Thorton. He’s an actor and comedian and on October 1st, we’re gonna have him on our stage. He’s somebody who’s done a one man show and done several other things, but he got another, his career got a whole new wind when he started going on Tik Tok, and having these telling these kind of confessional stories about growing up in Evansville, Indiana, in the 90s as a as a gay man in a very conservative evangelical environment. And he’s just great. I’m very excited to see what kind of stories he tells and how he tells us. He’s somebody who can make you laugh and cry in just a 30 seconds span and is just an amazing storyteller.

Q: If folks want to find out more information on the upcoming fall schedule, where should they go?

A: Buskirkchumley.org is our website. It’s the best way to find out about this, if there’s any changes to our schedule, and everything following us on social media is a great way just to kind of stay informed if anything pops up. Or if there’s any changes to policies such as our new mat, the mask mandate when that was enacted, or our new vaccine verification and COVID-19 testing policies – social media is the best way to kind of keep up with those things. So, we have multiple different levels and of course on our website, you can sign up for our email list and that will give you new show announcements and you’ll be the first to know about things.

Q: Jonah Crismore, Executive Director of the Buskirk Chumley Theater, thank you for your time.

A: Thank you.

During sweltering heat on Saturday, Pridefest took place in downtown Bloomington after happening virtually last year.

Pridefest is an annual street festival organized by Bloomington PRIDE, a non-profit organization that advocates for the LGBTQIA+ community. 

The festival featured a vendor expo, workshops with activists and experts, live music, drag shows and MPG wrestling. 

WFHB Community Radio was a vendor at this year’s Pridefest. We set up three microphones and interviewed participants at the festival. 

We asked folks what brought them to Pridefest and what the festival means to them. 

The opposition was strong. Over 110 organizations and individuals signed and delivered a letter to the Governor’s office requesting a veto. The signers represented all parts of Indiana and multiple forms of environmental organizations. However, despite the unprecedented amount of opposition, on April 29th, Governor Eric Holcomb signed Senate Bill 389, which reduces the amount of wetlands in the state of Indiana.

Meanwhile, in a quiet part of Monroe County lies the peaceful wetlands at Beanblossom Bottoms Nature Preserve. Unaffected by the changes in the senate bill, the wetlands found here will continue to fulfill its environmental purpose for generations. However, Executive Director John Lawrence is a strong supporter of all wetlands and emphasizes the importance that wetlands have for the state of Indiana.

“Wetlands are just incredibly important reservoirs of biodiversity and they also provide really important ecosystem functions. Flood control is a big one. They act like a big sponge and soak up water and hold back water and help mitigate flooding. They also reduce pollution in waterways by collecting pollutants which can, you know, include excess nutrients. Wetlands help retain the nutrients locally so that they don’t go downstream. They are also just really important habitats for plants and wildlife. The example at Beanblossom Bottoms Nature Preserve we have recorded over a dozen species that are endangered or of conservation concern there, including the Indiana Bat, which is federally endangered, the Kirkland snake, which is a cute little snake that uses crawfish burrows and it has stayed endangered and several other things. A lot of these plants and animals rely on the wetland habitat and are not found anywhere else,” said Lawrence.

If the Beanblossom Bottoms Nature Preserve is protected then what exactly will the controversial bill the governor signed do? The bill deals with the wetlands of Indiana that are protected by state laws. Of the wetlands in Indiana, 80-90% are not protected by the federal government but have been protected at the state level. Under state protection, there are three classes of wetlands. The bill removes Class I wetlands from state protection, and also reduces the amount of Class II wetlands, while leaving Class III wetlands intact. The differences between the three classes were explained to me by Christopher Craft, a professor of rural land policy at Indiana University Bloomington.

“So again, this is back to the state of Indiana that isolated wetlands bill. They say it’s a Class 1, the lowest quality if there’s been, hydrologic alteration, like it’s been ditched or drained or filled or if it has more than 50% invasive species. So if it meets one or both of those criteria, they say it’s a class one and under the old bills, a lot of these wetlands were protected. If they are larger than a half an acre, they would be protected. You know, the Senate Bill 389 has said we’re doing away with Class1 where we’re not gonna, these are not wetlands under this bill. And if you have Class 1, isolated wetlands on your property, then you can do what you want with them. Well, let’s go to Class 3 wetlands. They’re the highest quality. They’re ones that and I think under the existing 389 bill these aren’t being affected. Um, they were protected before, and they’re protected now. They have high quality or they have high species richness, or they have rare endangered species. There aren’t that many of those you know. There’s a lot more Class 1 wetlands, and then Class 2 are kind of in the middle. They’re not, you know, severely altered or dominated by invasive species, but they’re not these super high quality sites and Senate Bill 389 affected Class 2 wetlands by saying that it used to be that I think it was more than a quarter acre in size. It would be protected. And I think under Senate Bill under 389 has said, Nah, it’s got to be bigger. It’s more than 3/8 of an acre, we’ll protect it. But if it’s less than that, it’s not going to be protected,” said Craft.

According to the National Water Summary Wetlands Resources Report, wetlands cover over 813,000 acres of Indiana and 80% of the state’s remaining wetlands fall under the categories of Class I and Class II and are now susceptible to being drained. With this information in mind and knowing the importance of wetlands, Professor Craft explained who benefits from the passing of this bill and who benefits from the change to the permits needed to remove wetlands.

“Well, I think for people who advocate growth and um, that sort of economic growth. I think that this is an argument that they would like because it’s, you know, some of this land is off the table for development or if you do want to develop it, you’re going to have to go through the permitting process. And that can be pretty lengthy and pretty rigorous. I’ve worked with, some landowners who have kind of gotten caught up in, in that, you know, that people, I think who stand to benefit, on the other hand, Indiana is not known for having, you know, the abundant natural resources, some states like Michigan have, and so when you take some of these protections away, you take away some of the limited natural resources that are still present in the state,” explained Craft.

For many farmers and land developers, the permitting process for removing wetlands is quite difficult, and the bill relaxes this process and makes it easier for Class I and some Class II wetlands to be removed. While this allows development to be easier at the moment, it does not account for the effects that the lack of wetlands could have on the future.

Opponents of the bill, including the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, have argued that the bill leaves Indiana ill-prepared to face the floods that will follow the increases in rainfall expected in future years, as well as limit essential earth processes such as water filtration, water storage, and groundwater replenishment.

Despite the passing of this bill, there is still great work being done to protect the wetlands of Indiana and restore old wetlands throughout the state. Mr. Lawrence described what effect the bill will have on the goals of the Beanblossom Nature Preserve and its organizing body, the Sycamore Land Trust.

“It certainly just means that efforts by conservation groups like Sycamore, the Nature Conservancy, our other local land trusts throughout the state to do what we can to acquire wetlands and areas that can be restored the wetlands and then put in the so large commitment of time and effort to number one, do any restoration work that’s needed and then, of course, to monitor and maintain and protect that area in perpetuity. That work just becomes all the more important when there are less efforts on the regulatory side to protect wetlands,” said Lawrence.

Lawrence says for those interested in helping conservation groups who are stepping up to the plate to protect Indiana wetlands, the Beanblossom Bottoms Nature Preserve always welcomes volunteers.

“There are a lot of ways you can support our work. The most basic is to be a donor. We have memberships starting at $40 dollars a year and it all goes into making our work possible of not only acquiring more land but also protecting and maintaining the land that is already in our care. We also have volunteer events and the best way people can get involved with that is to sign up for e-newsletter at our website at sycamorelandtrust.org,” he said.

New Hope for Families raised $3.9 million to help build a new homeless shelter and child care center.

About 40 percent of people experiencing homelessness in Monroe County are families with children, says the organization’s executive director, Emily Pike.

“Those people don’t tend to be very visible,” she said. “Those families are afraid of being separated from their children.”

Over the weekend, New Hope for Families celebrated its 10-year anniversary. In light of that milestone, Pike talked about the history of the organization and the work it does in the community.

“At that time, our community didn’t have a shelter for families,” she said. “What that meant was that families either had to separate in order to receive services, or in some cases surrender their children to foster care.”

Construction of the new campus at 1140 South Morton Street began in April and is expected to be completed in December of this year.

Pike says the new facility will increase emergency shelter capacity to a total of 12 families at a time.

“We leased five little houses on West Second Street for a dollar a year, and that was a game changer for us,” said Pike. “But the truth is, those little houses were never really designed for what we used them for.”

$85,000 of funding came from Early Learning Indiana, coordinated by Kelly Echard, a second-year graduate student at Indiana University’s O’Neil School for Public and Environmental Affairs, who studies nonprofit management and policy analysis.

Echard said her role came about through a course she took at IU. She said students chose a topic of interest and were assigned to help raise funds for a non-profit.

She said she is passionate about the issue of homelessness and that she was assigned to New Hope for Families.

“I ran into Early Learning Indiana, and they were looking to fund other child care facilities,” said Echard.

After learning about New Hope for Families’ expansion, Echard contacted Natalie Brake, the director of community outreach and engagement for Early Learning Indiana.

At first, the grant she looked into numbered in the lower thousands. After discovering New Hope’s efforts to expand access to high-quality early learning, Brake saw that the organization’s values matched those of Early Learning.

Through that partnership, Echard landed a higher amount in grant funding.

“I told her about this study of Monroe County where there were 81 homeless children in 2020, and how we’re looking to serve half of those children by providing shelter and subsidized child care,” she said.

Pike says the $85,000 grant will help fund early learning equipment and materials, including furnishings for offices and classrooms and supplies for a commercial kitchen.

However, she says there are several other partners to help provide a new shelter and child care center. She names just a few but says she’s almost certain she’s leaving somebody out.

The partners she listed include: the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County, Bloomington Township, Secretly Canadian, the Smithville Charitable Foundation, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis, the New Hope Board of Directors and the City of Bloomington.

She said about $1.6 million of New Hope’s funding comes from individual donations. To learn more, you can visit newhope4families.org.

Early this summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to declassify three PCB contamination Superfund sites in the surrounding Bloomington area.

The decommission of these clean up sites from the National Priority List draws a decades long local environmental movement to a close. For those who were there to witness the contamination and resulting fights for public health and environmental safety, perceptions of whether the EPA’s clean up was successful vary.

Yet there seems to be a consensus – that this story of community activists rallying in the wake of environmental catastrophe has earned Bloomington a spot in the history books.

Journalist and Professor Steven Higgs has been following the story of PCB contamination in Southern Indiana every step of the way, starting all the way back with the initial contamination.

“In terms of contamination from one source, Westinghouse, this is the biggest in the entire United States,” said Higgs.

In the wake of the mass contamination of such a toxic substance, public officials at all levels of government began the urgent search for a clean up solution. The EPA came out with a proposal to address the contamination along with another common local environmental issue.

“The mayor’s office along with the state of Indiana, the EPA, their solution was to build an incinerator,” he said, “that was going to burn the PCBs at 2000 degrees, and they were going to fuel it with trash.”

The idea to use solid waste as fuel to burn PCBs in an incinerator may sound innovative in theory, but in practice issues quickly begin to arise. One problem being that trash would be an extremely inefficient resource. Common solid wastes are made up of materials that would likely not be able to heat the PCBs to intense heat necessary for their destruction.

Another issue presented by the incinerator solution had community members band together in order to halt the clean up process:

“Because of the potential health risks that were going to come from the PCB incinerator,” said Higgs, “people in this community rose up and fought it tooth and nail.”

Community member Linda Greene, a member of People Against the Incinerator, was one such activist. Greene explains the difficult road those opposed to the incinerator faced.

“It was a very difficult and exhausting process, because we were up against everybody,” she said. “We just made a fuss constantly.”

Ultimately, their civic engagement and environmental activism was successful, and the incinerator plan was discarded. Professor Higgs explains that though many public officials were sure the incinerator was a safe solution, public outrage at the prospect of further toxic pollution won out.

“They never backed down from the fact that it was a good idea, but politically, it just became untenable, because when you burn 650,000 cubic yards of contaminated materials, you get 650,000 cubic yards of ash. And that had to go someplace,” said Higgs.

After the hard fought battle against the incinerator, the EPA still had to come up with a solution to the PCB problem. A local consent decree laid out the plan to capture and remove PBC from the Southern Indiana environment and take the toxic materials elsewhere for treatment.

Now, after decades of the capture and removal process, the EPA’s move to declassify the superfund sites signals a successful clean up.

However, some community members are still skeptical. With health concerns at the core of toxic contamination and years of fighting for a safe clean up, Linda Greene points out that people may be wary of believing the EPA’s claims.

“I think there’s a tremendous amount of corruption at all levels. I think the official story is making it look like it’s all taken care of. I think there’s still a problem here,” said Greene.

However, Thomas Alcamo, the EPA’s Remedial Project Manager for the Bloomington sites,

Higgs concurs with this opinion that the EPA has done all that can be done.

“It’s probably been as effective as it could be, but it’s just so omnipresent,” he said. “Every human being, you have PCBs in your body. There’s not a person on the planet, I don’t believe, who doesn’t have PCBs and honestly a couple hundred other toxic chemicals.”

Specific contamination sites are likely no longer a hazard here, thanks to the EPA Superfund cleanup process and the relentless work of community members.

However, the now widespread reach of PCBs alludes to a greater problem on the horizon – environmental threats, contamination-based or otherwise – are likely to escalate as climate change looms and pollution continues to rampage.

The story of PCBs in the Bloomington area creates a movement to emulate and one that highlights the importance of community action and protection at the local level. Let’s not forget this story of civil engagement in the face of environmental disaster.

Unemployment benefits in Indiana have been in flux for the past few months.

On Monday of last week, Indiana officials filed a second appeal asking the Indiana Court of Appeals to stay an order compelling the state to continue paying federal pandemic unemployment benefits.

The appeal marks Governor Eric Holcomb’s continued efforts to halt Indiana’s participation in three federally funded, state-administered unemployment programs.

The governor first announced his decision to withdraw from the federal programs in late May. Citing ‘help wanted’ signs across the state, he contended that generous federal benefits discouraged Hoosiers from returning to work, making it hard for businesses to find employees.

Chief Unemployment Insurance Officer Regina Ashley explained those programs, which were first authorized under the CARES Act last year.

“Those include the $300, weekly add-on – that’s called the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation Program, or FPUC. Also, the benefits to independent contractors, gig workers and those otherwise not eligible for unemployment – referred to as the Pandemic Unemployment Assistant, or PUA, program. Third, the extension of benefits beyond the normal 26 weeks called the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, or PEUC,” said Ashley.

When Governor Holcomb’s order went into effect after the week ending June 19th, over 200 thousand Indiana residents saw their unemployment benefits reduced or eliminated, according to data from the Century Foundation. However, after two legal groups filed suit, Marion County Superior Court Judge John Hanley issued a preliminary injunction. The preliminary injunction, issued in late June, required the state to continue paying the federal benefits until a final decision is reached in the case.

Professor Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, who studies labor and employment law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, explained the legal dispute over pandemic unemployment in Indiana.

“A group of five workers and concerned clergy in Indianapolis filed a lawsuit,” he said, “the basis for their argument was: under Indiana law, the state is obligated to apply for all federally provided benefits that are available for unemployment compensation.”

The state’s newest appeal argues that the Marion County judge abused his discretion when he issued the preliminary injunction. The state maintains that the governor can withdraw Indiana from the federal programs at his discretion.

Last week, the Indiana Department of Workforce Development resumed paying federal unemployment benefits. Unemployed Hoosiers could file retroactively for benefits beginning the week ending June 26th.

Economists have expressed mixed opinions about the effects of expanded unemployment benefits on the labor market. Kristoph Kleiner, assistant professor of finance at IU’s Kelley School of Business, explained the rationale for cutting the federal benefits.

“Over half of the states have decided to try to cut off these extended unemployment benefits and Indiana is one of them,” he said. “A number of businesses have said that they face labor shortages one way or another. They’re essentially trying to hire workers, and they aren’t able to get them.”

However, Professor Kleiner cautioned that reducing unemployment benefits is no panacea.

“We still have reasons why people, for one reason or another, might be out of work,” he said.

Professor Dau-Schmidt suggested that the expanded benefits might be part of a broader trend in which employers must improve job compensation to attract and retain workers.

“I think doing away with those benefits isn’t going to magically clear up the problems in the labor market,” he said. “Employers are going to have to increase wages and benefits.”

Although the fight over unemployment in Indiana is a microcosm of a changing labor market, it also affects Hoosiers at an individual level.

Lane Fulton, 27 years old, lives in Elnora, a small town in Daviess County. He’s been unemployed throughout much of the pandemic.

“I worked in food service post grad school, while working through the never-ending applications,” he said. “I got furloughed from that, then I was on unemployment from May until August,” said Fulton.

Although he landed a job with the nonprofit organization Hoosier Action between August and December last year, he’s been unemployed since the beginning of 2021. Lately, he’s been busy volunteering with Hoosier Action and filling out job applications.

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that in the last year and nine months, I’ve probably done over 1,000 job applications for career-work across the United States,” said Fulton.

He’s been able to ride out the back-and-forth over unemployment compensation in Indiana, but he worries that other Hoosiers may not be so lucky.

Lane has been receiving benefits through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA, program. PUA provides unemployment benefits to independent contractors, the self-employed and those seeking part-time work. However, although Lane filed for regular state unemployment last summer, he did not start receiving state unemployment when the governor put PUA on pause. Lane thinks that’s because the state claims they overpaid his benefits earlier in the year. Now, he says, the state is asking him to return an exorbitant amount of money.

“The state actually wants me to pay back over $11,000 of unemployment, which is basically about two-thirds of that thirty weeks,” he said.

Lane isn’t alone. According to Indianapolis television channel WTHR, thousands of Indiana residents have been told they were overpaid.

Regina Ashley, the Chief Unemployment Insurance Officer, said that Hoosiers who receive overpayment notices can appeal or file a waiver with the Department of Workforce Development.

Overpayments aren’t the only issue that faces Hoosiers navigating the unemployment system. WTHR obtained internal data from the DWD showing that the agency had 2.6 million unresolved unemployment claims and 27 thousand pending unemployment appeals as of late April. DWD Commissioner Frederick Payne denied that the agency was experiencing a backlog.

Indiana’s unemployment rate hovered at 4.1% last month. This preliminary number suggests that unemployment remained similar to its level in May, but down from its high in April 2020, when 16.9% of the Indiana labor force was unemployed.

Commissioner Payne expressed an optimistic view of the state’s unemployment numbers.

“We have processed more than 90 something percent of the claims that have come through Our Shot,” said Payne. “If there is someone who’s waiting beyond 21 days, there’s some complications.”

The unemployment report for July will be released late next month.

A local “citizen-organized group” has undertaken a coordinated effort to mobilize residents across Monroe County to challenge their potential annexation by the City of Bloomington.

WFHB met with Monroe County Residents Against Annexation member Margaret Clements who further elaborated on the function and role of such an organization.

“That is Monroe County Residents Against Annexation (MCRAA)… they’re our grassroots effort by a number of us across the county, all around the county, who are trying to stop annexation… and we believe we can do it by obtaining signatures by 65% of the property owners in each annexation area.”

The MCRAA has participated in a number of signature gathering events including “door-to-door petition drives in each zone” as well as other signature collection movements.

Clements explained how the process of collecting signatures for “property-specific petitions” could show City of Bloomington officials a significant enough level of opposition to annexation to deter the city moving forward.

“There’s general consistent opposition to annexation… in annexation area 4 inside the city they’re opposed to it… annexation area 3… they’re opposed to it… 1b is opposed to it… 1a is opposed to it… 7 is opposed to it… 2 is opposed to it… 6 has gotten out of it… 1c, they’re all opposed to it…”

“It’s been apparent, but we were waiting for the city to release their plans and to tell us what their plans were, what the territory was, what properties they intended to annex and that just happened…”

“I’ve been receiving phone calls and emails and last night I had a meeting… I had a nice turnout of about fifty neighbors who signed petitions against annexation… we’re finding that a lot of the remonstration waivers are invalid or expired, and so people who think they filed a remonstration waiver should go ahead and sign a petition…”

In a press release dated July 15th, the MCRAA explained that “if 65 percent of property owners in an annexation zone exercise their right to remonstrate, annexation of that zone will fail and the residents will remain in Monroe County.”

Within the same press release, Clements explained that “these petitions indicate to the City Council that, if they do vote to approve these annexations, the affected property owners intend to remonstrate” and that the remonstration process is “a legal remedy allowed by state law.”

When asked about whether or not this 65% remonstration rate was attainable in each of the zones proposed for annexation, Clements says she’s hopeful.

“I think we’re going to reach it… and we’re trying to tell City Council that we have the 65% to kill annexation… just stop it here… vote no on the ordinance that would annex, involuntarily, the properties that you intend to annex…”

“I am in solidarity with the people in the community who feel that this would be a financial burden on them and I think that to pay more and not get anything from that is wrong… I think that the approach by the city has been inhuman… this is not the way we’re accustomed to operating in the city of Bloomington, in the county of Monroe, in the state of Indiana… this is not how we Hoosiers like to conduct ourselves…”

With the Bloomington Common Council next meeting to discuss annexation on August 4th, the MCRAA encourages county residents to reach out with any questions or concerns they may have.

Margaret Clements directed those interested to the MCRAA email address at [email protected] .