Little BIG Grant
This $500 – $1000 Adopt-A-Block Block Improvement-Grant program is a way for you and your fellow captains to get together and make your neighborhood better! This grant is available to residential and school captains.
Your Little BIG grant proposal can fund any project that you and at least two other Adopt-A-Block Captains in your neighborhood believe will make your community better (or 3 staff/students/parents of a school). Awards are reimbursed in the form of a check from KIB when the budgeted work has been completed.
2022 Little BIG Grant Recipients
VEGETABLE GARDEN AT MONTESSORI SCHOOL 91
IN BELLAIRE
Montessori School 91 has a beautiful cut-flower garden space, surrounded by other native plants, that the community has greatly enjoyed. Teachers at the school bring their students to the garden to observe, learn, and occasionally cut flowers. The neighborhood has hosted many events surrounding the gardens, including workdays and building DIY steppingstones for the children.
Due to the garden’s success, three Captains who live within a block of the school and whose children attend there got together to expand this project and include a new vegetable garden space. The neighbors requested funding to purchase three modular raised garden beds from Vego Garden. The school, parents, and neighbors intend to use produce harvested from the garden spaces to give back to their community.
STREET SWEEPING IN IRVINGTON
Three Block Captains in Irvington worked together to remove accumulated grit and gravel from the curbs of Butler, Julian, and Hawthorne Avenues. Prior to this project, the curbs were so full that rainwater would flow to the center of the streets, even though the streets are crowned. In previous efforts, neighbors had manually shoveled and hauled multiple wheelbarrow-loads to fill potholes in their unpaved alleys. Because they could no longer use that method, they requested a Little BIG Award to hire a street cleaner: Sweeping Corp of American, a Beech Grove company. During this project, neighbors removed weeds and loosened the rubble from the gutter, after which the streetsweeper collected the material from the curb.
NATIVE GARDENS IN THE LADYWOOD ESTATES HISTORIC DISTRICT
Neighbors in the Ladywood Estates Historic District requested a Little BIG Award that would allow them to complete the installation of native gardens that were originally created entirely by volunteers with no budget. The grant enabled the purchase of pine straw to lay as a foundation for planting and the addition of border rocks to complete the edges. The neighborhood has an area of wet ground existing on glacial till and natural springs. As result, the neighbors have been introducing gardens with native plants that can thrive in the wet soil. This garden has been created and now expanded to provide residents a place to visit, enjoy, volunteer, and learn about native plants.