I wanted to participate in Into the Streets last year, but something happened (I can’t remember what exactly) and I ended up not doing it. This year, I signed up to join the Rose House group and the experience was nice. It ended up not taking as much time as was anticipated (because we were just that good). After rain started sprinkling as we waited for taxis to take us to GIAC, it cleared up and turned out to be a pretty nice day to work outside.

We joined a few people from Bethe House who had already begun cleaning the yard. There were only a few rakes for all the leaves, so most of us began to pull out weeds. The only problem was, we weren’t really sure what counted as weeds. There were these brown stick-y things that sort of looked dead. At first, we were hesitant to pull them out, but they ended up going into the bags of yard debris. There were other plants that were entangled into the bushes beside the building, but it was hard to distinguish those and the ivy climbing up the brick exterior. The instructions for cleanup weren’t too clear, so we just tried our best, seeing as most of us had no real gardening experience.

Once most of the big weeds were out, I moved on to helping clean the leaves. Since there was a rake shortage, a group of us started pushing the leaves into piles with our feet. It actually worked pretty well, as the ground was still pretty dry, and leaf cleanup picked up from there. As we quickly filled up the bags provided, we decided to clean up the strip between the sidewalk and the road as well. There was still a section outside of the building we did not rake, but I guess they didn’t expect us to clean as much we did because they didn’t have enough bags for all the leaves.

We were only there for a couple of hours (not the 10AM-4PM time commitment I was expecting). Then we went inside to learn more about exactly what GIAC was and what we were actually helping.  We learned that GIAC is a unique community center funded partly by the city of Ithaca but also is a 501c3. They provide programming for students in the area including tutoring, specific STEM skill development, and historically programs that Cornell students have organized. We also learned that the exterior of the building isn’t always taken care of because of the limited hours they work and the amount of cleaning they have to do to keep up with the amount of people who use the inside of the building. So even though they had overestimated how much time we would spend on yardwork, it was much needed care.

Overall, it was fun to go out into Ithaca and help out with something I normally don’t do. After cleaning up the outside of the building, the goodness was validated by the thoughts of helping with the upkeep of a place that benefited the overall Ithaca community.