The Wake

In the midst of the brutal Minnesota winter, most freezing pedestrians would hardly consider the grey and barren University of Minnesota campus to be particularly beautiful. But as the weather has grown warmer and the days sunnier and longer, campus has slowly shed its wintery grit and grime to reveal green grass and blooming flowers. While the university’s grounds and buildings (many of them, anyway) could be considered quite pretty on bright spring day, it takes a considerable amount of work to keep them that way.

On April 20, the university celebrated its annual Beautiful U Day, even though the weather wasn’t quite so gorgeous. Despite the rain, volunteers turned out to partake in a little spring cleaning and gardening, including picking up trash, planting flowers and tidying up buildings. “We still had hundreds and hundreds of volunteers,” says coordinator Lori-Anne Williams. “People were everywhere in the rain and mostly people still did what they’d planned to do—it was great. I was excited that so many people wanted to be a part of it in not-so-perfect weather.”

Since its inception in 1997, Beautiful U Day has become an annual campus tradition that is held on or near Earth Day and involves faculty, staff, students, alumni and members of the surrounding communities. Each year, volunteers come together to clean, paint, plant, and “generally revitalize the university.”

Beautiful U Day is a three-time Minneapolis Committee on Urban Environment Award winner for “innovative approaches to campus improvements” and is considered a success by those who work for months to organize it. “It’s to celebrate what we’ve already accomplished—we have made the campus more beautiful,” says Williams. “I think we’re taking better and better care of it.”

Many different student groups and organizations sponsored events in coordination with Beautiful U Day and offered their services as volunteers. MPIRG handed out free reusable coffee mugs to students outside Coffman. “The only condition for students getting a mug was signing a pledge that they would fill the mugs with fair trade products whenever possible, and that they would work to reduce their personal waste by using the mug as opposed to repeatedly buying paper cups,” says Andrew Thomas, MPIRG’s organizing intern.

One of the major goals of Beautiful U Day, though, is encouraging students to try to beautify their environment more frequently than once a year. While doing so might occasionally involve picking up litter or washing windows, people can make a more consistent impact by reducing their “environmental footprints” with certain changes in lifestyle. “Part of it is to raise awareness so that people are thinking,” Williams says. “I think students need to think about what kind of footprint they’re leaving. We can all become a little bit greener. I believe that what we can do is just to take little steps until these things become habits.”

One way to develop these habits is to become active with other students on campus that are working to encourage sustainable and environmentally-friendly lifestyles. “Cornercopia” is a student-run “transitioning to organic” farm on the St. Paul Campus that grows over a hundred varieties of fruits and vegetables. It was started in the spring of 2004 when students wanted to develop a place on campus to grow organic foods. The student group What’s Up in Sustainable Agriculture received a Beautiful U Day grant to plant perennial trees, shrubs and flowers on the student farm as part of a design for a natural ecosystem. The design includes plants that will grow well together—for instance, an apple tree might be used as a trellis for a grapevine.

The farm also has a highly educational mission and it’s designed to get students as involved in the process as possible. “It’s important to give students hands-on experience and it also teaches them skills you need in the business world,” says Courtney Tchida, student programs coordinator for the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. A farm planning and growing class is offered during spring semester and internships are available for students during the growing season.

But it’s not just students who are working beyond Beautiful U Day. The university as an institution is working to create a more sustainable campus, from teaching and research to waste management, building design, and purchasing decisions. “All the departments are working on different ways to be more efficient,” Williams says. “We want to be a greener university.”

For more information on the university’s sustainability mission, visit the Sustainability and U website at . To get involved with the student farm, go to .