Leadership Vestavia finishes ’16 goals

Ask this year’s class of Leadership Vestavia Hills, and they’ll tell you — they’ve got growth on their minds.

Sometimes literally.

Mitch Bevill does anyway.

He and a team of several class members are currently putting the finishing touches on a new community garden at Pizitz Middle School, an area adjacent to the school with beds available to the public for rent.

“We already have eight of the 10 beds rented,” Bevill said, who noted that local Boy Scouts helped them build the garden.

“We inherited this project from the group last year, which selected the site and began the research,” he said. “Pizitz’s environmental club built a garden for the kids last year inside the courtyard of the school, and this is an extension of that.”

And it’s a tangible hope that the community will be better because of Leadership Vestavia Hills’ work, Bevill said.

“We hope it’s going to promote healthy eating habits,” he said. “And it’s a good way to bring the community together.”

Enhancing the community is what Brian Wolfe said Leadership Vestavia Hills is all about.

“We try to pick projects that are going to be immediately impactful in the community, then have a long-term plan for how they can be sustainable,” said Wolfe, advisory committee chair for Leadership Vestavia Hills.

This year’s class of 19 took on four projects aimed at bettering the Vestavia community.

The Pizitz garden was one. The others were:

► The Wald Park Recycling Program, a pilot recycling program at the park that can later be replicated at other area parks.

► The Vestavia Hills Bike Race, a criterium-style bike race that will loop through Liberty Park.

“It’s a high-speed race — like NASCAR on road bikes,” Wolfe said. “There’s not one in Birmingham, and the team in charge of this project was tasked with putting that event together. They already have a date set on USA Cycling’s calendar.”

The race will have classes from amateur to professional and be an all-day event, he said.

► Signature events in Vestavia Hills retail districts.

“It will highlight particular areas of Vestavia and put on events that will be attractive to people both inside and outside the community,” Wolfe said.

This year’s team did extensive research, and classes to come will use that research to begin planning the events, he said.

“We feel like it’s good for the city,” Wolfe said.

All of the groups gave presentations about their projects and results during this year’s class graduation March 24 at City Hall.

“They’ve done some really hard work on these projects,” Wolfe said. “We hope that work is just going to make the Vestavia Hills community even better than it already is.”

After members of the community submit applications and are accepted into a Leadership Vestavia Hills class, they meet to hear about the proposed projects for the year, then they rank the projects in order of their interest, Bevill said.

“The community garden at Pizitz was my first choice,” he said. “With each project, we have a team of four or five and we choose someone to lead the project. We got our project in November, and we feel like we’ve gotten a lot done, but since the beginning of the year, it’s been like cramming for a midterm exam. We’ve worked hard.”

For more information about Leadership Vestavia Hills, visit leadershipvestaviahills.com.