On Friday, Oct. 11, 2024, students on the University of Toledo’s engineering campus were greeted with an interesting sight. A group of volunteers in the newly opened Palmer Plaza were hard at work, preparing soil and putting plants in the ground.
These volunteers are members of Greening UToledo Through Service Learning, also known as GUTS. Different tasks and volunteers came and went throughout the day, but the mission of beautifying the Palmer Plaza remained all the same.
“GUTS began as a student-directed initiative to begin incorporating native plantings on campus,” Dr. Todd Crail, a faculty advisor to GUTS, said. “The goal of GUTS is to reduce the amount of turf grass and installations that are not a part of the ecosystem. A lot of plants do not interact with the ecosystem, they’re not part of the food web…students wanted to get that changed.”
Since its inception in 2017, GUTS has evolved from a small project to an organization whose footprint spans the entirety of campus. The group’s newest installation at Palmer Plaza is one of 14 locations on campus that GUTS maintains.
“It’s essentially turned into a small landscaping company at this point,” Crail said. “Originally, it was one student who was funded by the Student Green Fund who was taking an inventory of what we had and doing some interpretation of [that].”
GUTS is involved with the entire process of creating a native landscape on campus from “collecting the seed, to germinating the seed, to growing the plants, to planting the plants.” GUTS is able to achieve this level of success and scale thanks to its library of 125 different seeds and the help of student volunteers.
“For the last two years, each semester we have had on average just under 100 people participate and perform 500 hours of volunteer work. 300 of that was for course credit, and 200 of that was completely voluntary,” Crail said. “On campus, we’re taking on bigger projects that just need more infrastructure, more people…so it’s turned into quite a bit.”
GUTS’s work is entirely supported by its student volunteers. Crail mentions that GUTS is available to all students who are interested in creating an improved and healthier campus.
“Right now it is just limited to a GroupMe which people can join,” he said. “They would need to get a hold of me to get included in that, but otherwise it’s students who are enrolled in our courses who are doing a large part of the work.”
GUTS’s creation of green spaces has provided many benefits to the University of Toledo’s campus. Crail believes that the ecological benefits of GUTS’s native landscapes are especially important.
“You get into a whole series of feedback on these ground-plant interactions,” he said. “The plants work with the ecosystem and with the climate, they’re from here. They don’t need extra water once established…they begin to break up these hard, compacted soils that we have on campus and allow water to flow into the ground. [They] sequester carbon from the atmosphere into the ground, and as the water is going down along those roots, it’s bringing nutrients that may have run off into the river and deeper into the ground where they can be utilized by those plants.”
What does the future of GUTS look like? It may involve expanding the program even further on campus. The interim president of the University of Toledo, Matt Schroeder, has expressed support for GUTS and their work.
“The president used the new marketing slogan that GUTS is the ‘To do’ in Toledo. He said, ‘You all could take a lesson from what they’re doing over there,’” Crail recounted. “We’re discussing with the university right now some different roles that they could fund because this is saving a lot of money for landscaping.”
While GUTS is a University of Toledo exclusive program at the moment, GUTS has also been considering expanding its messaging beyond campus. Getting the wider Toledo community involved is a goal that Crail would like to achieve in the near future.
“Ideally what we will have is something that is something that anyone is able to participate in, and that includes the surrounding community. Not just what is on campus, but people in surrounding neighborhoods or people who are just interested,” Crail said. This is a way of being and I’m very motivated to share that way of being with as many people as I can.”
GUTS projects have also been noticed by other universities. The University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Eastern Kentucky University are among the universities that have expressed interest in replicating the actions and lessons of GUTS on their campuses.
“Freeing me up would allow me to go to these other places and discuss how we did this successfully and what their administrators need to do to put this into place in their own spaces,” Crail said. “At a higher level, we’ll be working to find donors and community foundations that appreciate this sort of thing.”
Whether it’s to other campuses, the community at large or just the University of Toledo, Crail stresses that the best way to spread GUTS’s influence is to have people become connected with their natural environment. By creating natural landscapes and getting students to appreciate them, the message of GUTS will spread no matter where people are.
“What it does is it changes it from the campus to our campus. And that is very important at the University of Toledo right now. There is nothing that will transform that conversation more than people feeling they have ownership in this place,” Crail said. “It stops just being a place you go for a service to gain skills and the employment force. It literally becomes your space on the planet. And that’s what I love about this program…this is us making this campus our space.”