Project Build A Park!

Objective:
Work with Austin Parks Foundation and perform maintenance at a local park to promote leadership, scholarship, service, and fellowship.

Purpose:
Represent Austin Community College and our Student Clubs and Organizations. We are members of:

*Alpha Gamma Pi, ACC Chapter of Phi Theta Kappa

*Sigma Alpha Pi, ACC Chapter of The National Society of Leadership and Success

Our work:
Austin Community College has worked in association with Austin Parks Foundation for ten consecutive years with Project Build A Park. Last year, November 6, 2010, we worked at Zilker Park in Austin, Texas, clearing trails, mulching, and picking up litter. Over a hundred students and guests helped out. This year, November 5, 2011, we worked at Roy G. Guerrero Colorado River Park in Austin, Texas, performing the same tasks.

The park project began early in the morning. Students, faculty, and guests of all ages joined together to take on a six mile trail. Our group, the Nomadic Mulchers, teamed up with one other group to work on a section of the trail. Two other teams separated from us to work on mulching and clearing bamboo.


Our two teams began together clearing out unwanted plants along the trail and picking up trash. Last year, we encountered a lot of poison ivy; this year, we were lucky and only had thorny Palo Verde saplings to deal with. Our task was to clear anything that was five to eight feet on either side of the trail that was at eye level or below.

Team members had root clippers, miniature saws, picks, and these cool little yellow plant pulling contraptions.

Most of the guys were out cutting limbs off of trees, yanking out plants, moving fallen timber, and using picks to cut out deeply rooted weeds. Girls focused more on easier tasks: cutting little things with root clippers. One girl found her inner eco-self and took on plant pulling. After several tries she became an expert at it!

We helped another team member pull down a dead tree. It took about five minutes of hanging, pulling, pushing, turning, and twisting to finally get it down. Not to mention, it got tangled in a nearby tree which made the process even more amusing for onlookers.

Sidenote: Since we are taking a geology course this semester, we constantly tried to identify rocks we found on the ground using the knowledge of rock identification we learned in class. We found several samples of Granite (Amphibole, K-feldspar, and Quartz), fragments of Chert, and Calcite. [Calcite and Quartz look very similar, but if you look closely at the cleavage you can tell it's Calcite by the cubic structure; you don’t need Hydrochloric acid to test it!]

After two and a half hours of hard work we finished with our part of the trail. We had pulled out dozens of hostile saplings, cut off hundreds of dangerously low branches, filled an entire black trash bag with litter, and had piles of plant debris lined up along the trail for park service collection. The park service will continue our work by collecting the debris and mowing down all the little weeds that were left behind. Next year Project Build A Park will happen again and we would like to invite you, and even if you do not live in Austin, Texas, to help clean up local parks in your area. We should not need to wait until Earth Day to do something for our ecological community. As a national team, let’s rebuild our parks!

Here are some videos from our work last year!

(We're in this video!)