Thursday, July 17, 2025
The garden outside Milwaukee Recreation’s Beulah Brinton Community Center is blooming with new life, thanks to a grant awarded to community member and Milwaukee Recreation participant Angie Tornes.
The grant, funded by the City of Milwaukee Neighborhood Improvement Development Corporation, was used to transform a mostly vacant garden bed outside the main entrance to Beulah Brinton Community Center into a self-sustaining pollinator garden for birds, butterflies, moths, and bees.
As a longtime volunteer in the Bay View community, Tornes is always looking for new ways to give back. When Tornes started taking weekly classes at Beulah Brinton Community Center last summer, she quickly noticed some ways she could apply her expertise in gardening and landscaping to the garden bed located outside the building's main entrance.
“When I first started coming here, the lot was pretty much vacant. There were some plants in there that were struggling,” Tornes said. “Having grown up in a nursery, landscaping, and architecture family, I thought that it could be improved.”
After consulting with Milwaukee Recreation’s staff and grounds management team at Beulah Brinton, Tornes and a small group of volunteers got to work constructing and designing a revamped space to serve both the local wildlife and attendees. The new and improved space provides a sustainable habitat for various species of birds and insects, and will also serve as a warm and welcoming focal point of the Beulah Brinton Community Center for years to come.
“It shows that someone cares about how this space looks. It's a thing of beauty, and I think that things of beauty, whether they’re natural or architectural, are a gift from whoever put them there,” Tornes said. “ I think that [this garden] tells people, ‘You are really welcome here; please enjoy this beautiful space.’ Hopefully, people will think about doing that in other locations and take on their own beautification projects.”
Beulah Brinton Community Center offers a variety of programming opportunities, including sports leagues, art, music, and wellness classes for participants of all ages and abilities. As Milwaukee Recreation’s only stand-alone community center, Beulah Brinton has remained a cornerstone for community members in the surrounding neighborhoods. By taking on this project alongside Milwaukee Recreation staff and other passionate volunteers, Tornes and her team are a shining example of how community members can get involved beyond the daily classes offered at their local community center.
“Beulah Brinton is where so many people choose to spend their free time participating in a recreation activity. Angie chose to spend her free time making Brinton even more beautiful,” said Joel Symons, director of Beulah Brinton Community Center.
Volunteers with various forms of gardening expertise collaborated with Tornes on suggestions for plant materials, weeding, watering, and planting schemes. The grant, totaling around $500, was used to purchase a selection of 30 perennials, a boxwood shrub, and new mulch from a local plant nursery, which was entirely laid and planted by Tornes and her team. Tornes emphasized that despite the somewhat daunting task of researching and applying for grant funding, she couldn’t have done it without the support of Milwaukee Recreation’s staff, grounds management team, and community volunteers.
“I would just encourage anybody who wants to do more good in the community to look around, join a group, form an idea, or come up with a project and go through the steps,” Tornes said. “It happens; it just takes commitment and asking others to help, which is essential. I couldn’t have done it without all the help.”