DIY Native Bee Hut Project

Helping Ninjas helped a local school with a DIY native bee hut project.

The student made huts will now be part of the Helping Ninjas native bee hut project – an iniatative to educate youth about the importace of native bees – and how they help our environment. With this iniatative we are helping to encourage the community and learn more about how you can help native bees.  Helping NInjas have been guided through local park educators and Crowne Bees, who is the founder of the The Native Bee Network and plated a large role in  helpping this school leader to create a DIY design that will help native bee habiats.


Milkweed & Monarchs FieldTrip

Helping Ninjas were very excited to have had the opportunity to bring this idea to life! A first for ESE students to take a field trip to plant seeds at a Carmel Clay Parks West Clay Park!

ESE Helping Ninjas are on a mission to help save milweed and monarchs!

These ESE Ninjas got to help restore land from invasive species and to plant native milkweed seeds that will encourage a sustainable environment and give monarchs a place to lay their eggs!

Approximately 30 ESE Helping Ninjas planted native milkweed seeds donated by Helping Ninjas — in which Hamilton County Parks donated to us for use on our mission to help them save Monarchs!

ESE students learned about milkweed, how to harvest and plant it – and got to plant it in the ground as well as plant seeds to take home a compostable pot and soil!

This activity marked the first “official” ESE Helping Ninja club! A program in in which we are pilotiing at ESE with Carmel Clay Parks and Recreation at a local Carmel Clay School .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recycle Halloween Costumes

Why should you recycle Halloween costumes?

There are several reasons to recycle Halloween costumes!

One, they are expensive and others in need could benefit from you doanting or recyling them! And, from an environment stand point, Halloween costumes that go are thrown away stay in the llandfill for many years– some Halloween Costumes even forever!

Polyester costumes are made from petroleum products — and they will NOT decompose. Cotton costumes are take years to breakdown due to lack of oxygen in landfills.

Halloween Costume Exchange Cool Creek Nature Center, Hamilton County Parks, Saturday October 13th and October 20th 1-4pm at Cool Creek Nature Center

Want to volunteer at Cool Creek Costume Exchange?

Helping Ninjas Cool Creek Costume Exchage Volunteer Opportunity

To view more opportunities to volunteer in Indianapolis and surrounding areas, please email  or submit a request to join our closed FaceBook page: @helpingninjakidsindy

Live Near Cool Creek? They collect costumes all year round! Please choose to donate and skip the Landfill!
Host a Costume Collection Drive

Join Helping Ninjas and help collect old Halloween Costumes!

Find one near you! 

See More Pictures:

Re-Boo, Re-Wear, Re-Scare Cool Creek Costume Exchange 2018 

Cool Creek 2018 Costume Photos

Cool Creek Costume Exchange 2017 

Re-Boo! Halloween Recycling Exchange

Help Get Costumes in the Hands of Foster Chidren!

Donate to the National Organzation: Ween Teen

 

The National Retail Federation does an annual survey to measure consumer spending around Halloween. Its 2014 survey found more than two-thirds of Americans planned to buy costumes. Of the $2.8 billion people were expected to spend on costumes, $1.4 billion was for adult costumes, $1.1 billion was for children’s costumes and $350 million was for the ever-growing category of pet costumes. With all these Halloween costumes floating around, it seems like someone would have come up with a good way to recycle them.

Milk Grows Gardens

Milk. It does a garden good.

Did you know milk grows gardens?

Helping Ninjas and their elementary school’s cafe students used milk as a fertilizer on their school’s cafe gardens’s vegetable and herb and flower gardens.

Helping Ninjas won a Micro Green Teen Grant Award for a Green Community, School and Garden Outreach Project. Hleping Ninja students  helped to create awareness about farm to table, organic fertilizers, composting, garden fresh foods and how to help promote a more sustainable  community and environment. The three students who won the grant award, included was an outreach effort and initiative in which they worked alongside the guaidance of    Mrs. Susan Eva McCord, College Wood Elementary Cafe Manager & CWE Cafe Garden Director with helping to create awareness about a more sutatinabilty and food “from the garden” and “farm-to-table foods.” The CWE gardens were located at the Carmel Clay Plots to Platess Organic Community Garden.

Students learned you can take food to the garden also. Including milk.

Milk is a natural fertilizer and pesticide. Milk gave students an organic farming/gardening method and helped to produce healthy crops!

Helping Ninjas students helped to successfully grew over 400 lbs of tomatoes this year at both the school’s cafe gardens and at a helping ninja home organic-garden. Tomatoes among green peppers, jalepneos, basil and other herbs and flowers. Students grew 100% organic vegteble gardens. The school’s cafe garden was located at Carmel Clay Schools Plots To Plates Community Garden. 

Helping Ninja students helped their schools cafe gardens fertilize tomatoes and other plants with diluted milk and water, and also used milk waste in their compost. That’s right! Milk can be composted too! Milk helps keep soil healthy and the calcium helps plants grow. Milk also derters unwanted bugs and helps prevent fungas growth. Learn more about the school’s cafe garden Helping Ninjas had the opportunity to help this year.

Milk helps compost. Milk helps plants grow!  Milk helps us grow too! 

Milk diluted with water can be sprayed directly on tomato plant leaves or at the root of the plant.  The calcium in milk  is great for tomatoes!  Milk helps tomatoes fight common fungal disesases, like blossom end rot, and helps to deter unwanted pests too! And, milk can be used as to create a healthy comppost! The vitimins and micoobes in milk help the process of compostiing, aiding to create a renewable energy – compost that can be used to grow tomatoes! Helping NInjas  used milk in their compost — and used it to grow tomatoes!

Helping Ninjas  hope to spread awareness about the power of milk.

On World School Milk Day, students in their school’s caeteria celebrated milk and how students used it as fertilzer to help grow gardens this summer.. This schools cafteria garden used  up-recycled milk cartons made into pots with flowers that students grew in the their cafe’s gardens! Helping Ninjas helped to create a bulletin board to display infomation to help edcuate and create awareness about the power of milk and showing others how they were able to use it to grow gardens as part of the outreach efforts. Helping Ninjas donated the board to their school cafeteria.

Septemeber is National Action Against Hunger Month

Students who attend College Wood Elemenatary donated organic tomatoes that they were able to grow this summer as part of their outreach initiative and had enough harvest to be  able to to help those in need in their community.

Second Helpings, is an organization in Indianapolis that rescues s unwanted food from local grocers — reducing waste that would normally go into landfills, and repurposes it make nutritious meals to help feed families in need.

Students learned that milk can be used to help our planet in more ways then one! Millk helps ourself, each other, and the planet!

You can be a helping ninja too!

Drink Milk. Compost Milk. Grow Gardens!

To learn more aobut milk and how it helps to replensih soil, helps gardes ad ensures a healthy harvest: www.milkgrowsgardens.com  

 

“My mission is to feed our children the healthiest most economically efficient meal in a postive and genuinely caring environement for them to enjoy.” – Susan Eva-McCord  

 

Happy Harvest!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ninjas Books 4 Youth Games 2018

Helping Ninjas of Indianapolis and Ninja Zone at Grand Park Acadmey collected 439 books for Indiana Department of Child Services Books For Youth Prorgram!

HOW YOU CAN STILL HELP BOOKSFORYOUTH  

First Annual Ninjas Books4Youth Games

Let the Games Begin Video

Books4Youth Games Video 

Books4Youth Games Video

Books4Youth Games Video 

Migration Celebration

Helping Ninjas recently volunteered during a local park’s celebration of monarchs! Cool Creek Nature Center of Hamilton County Parks in Westfield Indiana held their 3rd annual Migration Celebration! Helping Ninja kids and moms and dads volunteered their time to help at the event on Saturday morning – and got to take part in a monarch butterflies release!  Cool Creek Migration Celebration consisted of live music, games, crafts, face painting. a boucne house, learning and interactive stations, tagging of butterflies, butterfly release and tons of family fun!

Thank you Cool Creek! Thank you for creating awareness and helping to educate youth and the community about monarchs and for your continuous efforts to help the monarch species.

These Helpoing NInjas give Cool Creek’s Migration Celebration a helping ninja high five!

Learn more about. Mission Moarch. 

See more Migration Celebration Pictures

 

 

Want to learn more about pollinators? Helping Ninjas loves hearing about ways you are learning — learning is helping! Share with others what you have learned – and be a helping ninja! Share with us or tag us @LearnHelpShare

Popcorn&Pollinators.  Learn more about our popcorn and pollinators educational program for students birth through teen. Helping Ninjas believes it is important to teach our youth about pollinators, native species, native plants, healthy soil, organic fertilzers, endangered pollinators, eco-system balane and sustainability — and how you can help. Learning what you can do at home to help is a beginning step to conservation.

 

Harvest Helping Hunger

Helping Ninjas recently donated organic, home grown tomoatoes to Second Helpings – an organzation that rescues food and creates meals to feed those in need in the Indinapolis and surrouding areas.  Helping Ninjas grew tomatoes from seed, using organic and natural gardening methods. Such as home made compost, organic tomato seeds, organic soil, orgnaic fertilzers: egg shells, milk, banana peel tea and epsom salt. They also used herbs as natural pest deterrants.

Helping Ninjas made homemadre pesticides from garlic and cayenne pepper to deter the unwanted pests that attemped to eat their transplant seedlings. The kids planted the tomato seeds in mid-Feburary and kept them well-cared for indoors using natural light from windows and light from a house-lamp. We turned the seedliings daily, rotating them towards the sunlight, and assemalated wind by having our hands over the seedlings. We replanted the seedlings three different times, into larger containers as they grew – using home made compost and eggshells as fertilizer. By May, the seedlings were grew into healthy plants ready to go into the ground. A Helping Ninjas dad created a tomato garden in their backyard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

 

Second Helpings Helps Environment

Helping Ninjas give Second Helpings a Helping Ninja high five!

Learn about Second Helpings in Indianapolis and how their food rescue program encourages helps to feed others in need all while creating a sustainable environment!

Did you know that they also compost  any leftover or unused food scraps?

Want to see more pictures of the Helping Ninjas Volunteering at Second Helping? Click Here. 

https://www.secondhelpings.org/what-we-do/environmental-responsibility/

An Excerpt from SecondHelpings.Org

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www.SecondHelpings.org

Food Rescue Environmental responsibility is at the core of our mission to reduce waste. We take food resources that no one else wants or needs to fulfill the most fundamental needs that people can’t life without — nourishing food and careers that lead to self-sufficiency.

It’s estimated that every man, woman and child in the U.S. wastes up to a pound of food every single day. In Indianapolis alone, that’s almost 1,000,000 pounds of perfectly good food headed to the landfill every day. We work with our partners in the food service industry—distributors, caterers, restaurants, grocers, and others—to safely and efficiently collect surplus and perishable food that was headed for the landfill. Every year Second Helpings rescues more than 2 million pounds of nutritous food and uses that food to transform lives through our Hunger Relief and Culinary Job Training.

Recycling Often when Second Helpings takes in food, we also take in a great deal of packaging. It would be incompatible with our mission to merely throw away this extra packaging. Second Helpings recycles all cardboard, crates, plastic and bottles that hold our food. We also recycle all of our office paper and packaging as well.

Garden In 2011, Second Helpings partnered with Keep Indianapolis Beautiful to build a water-friendly herb garden at Second Helpings. Volunteers worked hard to erect the structure, grade the land, and plant all the herbs. Now, the garden is providing the kitchens here at Second Helpings with fresh basil, parsley, mint, and oregano. These herbs will season Second Helpings’ food long into the winter.

Want to learn more about Second Helpings Mission: Transforming Lives through the Power of Food

Magic Yarn Project

 

The Magic Yarn project, is a program for kids suffering from cancer.  Hundreds of thousands of kids have cancer. The most common type of kids’ cancer is Luekimia, Luekimia is a blood cancer most commonly found in kids. kids going through Luekimia usualy go through a Drug treatment called “Limo-Therapy.” People going through this treatment have hair loss due to the effects of the medicines. The Magic Yarn Progic makes beanies in the style of princess hair styles and Superheros. The use yarn to make these beanies, which make them much more comfortable than store bought beanies. These beanies are also very uniqe do to their creative styles. People have said that their children have felt like normal children again after recieving these magnificent gifts. The Magic yarn Project also accepts cards with Superhero stickers, and Princess stickers. My school has been praticapating by collecting Superhero and Princess stickers, and then they have been turning those into cards for donations. Help The Magic Yarn Project accomplish their goal by donating today! Link to donate: Magic Yarn Project

Siddarth Chavali, age 11, 2018

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