Bloomington, IU leaders celebrate $16M Lilly award to support Trades District development

At a Thursday gathering that filled the event space at The Mill, leaders from Bloomington and Indiana University celebrated a $16 million award from the Lilly Endowment.

The money is designated for collaborative projects involving The Mill, the Trades District, and Indiana University.

The first announcement of the $16 million award had come a month earlier, as part of a news release from Lilly.

The award to benefit Bloomington and Indiana University, which was made to the IU Foundation, comes in the context of $300 million that was awarded statewide through Lilly’s College and Community Collaboration (CCC) initiative.

One of the specific projects the money will help to fund is a 2,000 square foot expansion of The Mill, where Thursday’s celebration was held. According to John Fernandez, who is vice president for innovation and strategic partnerships at The Mill, the addition will provide 1,000 more square feet of coworking and conference space for each of two stories.

The Mill is a coworking space and business incubator, which has been developed by Bloomington’s redevelopment commission (RDC). It’s an adaptive reuse project of the old Showers Brothers furniture factory’s dimension mill, where raw lumber was processed into standard-sized components for furniture building.

The building’s historic status means that the expansion project will have to be approved by Bloomington’s historic preservation commission (HPC).

Another specific project that the $16 million will support is the buildout of the “gray box” space in the technology center that’s currently under construction, and nearing completion, across the street from The Mill.

Now branded as The Forge, the technology center is a 3-story 22,000-square-foot building—which will stand in the southeast corner of the Trades District, just south of The Mill coworking space. The Forge is supposed to provide office space for technology companies that are beyond the startup phase.

The nearly $13-million budget for The Forge is supported by a $3.5 million grant from the federal Economic Development Administration (EDA), in addition to TIF (tax increment finance) funding approved by Bloomington’s RDC.

The idea is to use some of the Lilly Endowment funding to support negotiations with potential tenants for the conversion of the “gray box” condition of the space they might lease, into the finished office space they would want configured to their own specifications.

Fernandez says the building is expected to be complete in the first week of November, with a ribbon cutting on Nov. 22. The target for the first tenant move-ins is Jan. 1, 2025. On Thursday, Fernandez also reported one tenant is now firm with another tenant that is almost committed.

In addition to remarks from Fernandez, the local celebration of the Lilly award included turns at the mic for Indiana University president Pamela Whitten and, as well as Bloomington’s director of economic and sustainable development Jane Kupersmith.

In her remarks, Whitten stressed the idea that Bloomington and the university are not separate: “You can pretend there’s a place where IU starts and Bloomington ends, and vice versa. But everyone in this room knows that’s not true—that it’s all Bloomington and it’s all IU and we’re all partners and we’re all friends.”

Whitten also foreshadowed part of IU’s role in connection with the Lilly award, which involves public art, which she called the “Trades Arts Pathways Initiative.” The initiative would add to the Trades District public art that will be designed and created by IU faculty, students and local artists in the community, Whitten said.

The Trades District is a 12-acre portion of a larger area that forms Bloomington’s certified technology park.

It’s the area north of Bloomington’s city hall building, but south of 10th Street. The real estate was purchased by Bloomington’s redevelopment commission more than a decade ago.

Kupersmith took the chance to recite some of the history of the Trades District as a part of the city’s economic development strategy, including the purchase of the property.

Among the successes that Kupersmith talked about was another Showers Brothers furniture factory adaptive reuse project—by The Kiln Collective. The Kiln is named after the factory’s kiln, which was used to dry the lumber, before it was milled to its proper dimensions in the building next door.

The Kiln project can trace its history to pre-COVID times in early 2020,  when then-president of Bloomington’s RDC Don Griffin handed over the keys to The Kiln Collective’s Mike Trotzke.

Before Kupersmith took the mic, the Kiln project had already received an indirect mention during Ravi Bhatt’s turn at the mic. Bhatt is founder and CEO of Folia.

Bhatt said he had thought about moving to Bloomington 15 years ago but didn’t follow through on it. He and his partners didn’t move his first company to Bloomington, because they did not see real “proof of life” in the form of infrastructure or an ecosystem for tech.

When he returned for a visit in 2021, Bhatt said he met Trotzke and Brad Wisler, among many others. Totzke and Wisler are a part of the Kiln Collective group. Bhatt said, “I was like, wow, this is really a community that I’d like to be a part of, and help build something here today.”

Trotzke and Wisler, as well as another Kiln partner, Don Weiler, attended Thursday’s celebration. Weiler told The B Square that a key electrical component for the HVAC system had finally arrived—a year after it was ordered—which means the inside finishing work can proceed. So The Kiln is looking for completion later this year.

Bloomington’s mayor, Kerry Thomson, could not attend Thursday’s event due to illness.

Speaking with The B Square after the formal presentation, Indiana University provost Rahul Shrivastav provided some insight into how the $16 million award came to fruition.

Around a year ago, the Lilly Endowment’s call for proposals focussed on community needs for projects specifically led by major universities, Shrivastav said. So IU started talking with various community groups, including the city of Bloomington, local nonprofits, and others, to identify pressing needs.

Shrivastav said those discussions highlighted areas such as economic development, mental health, and housing. The working group came to focus on economic development based on data showing lagging local wages and a “brain drain” of students leaving the area after graduation, he said.

Also a factor for IU’s proposal to Lilly was the endowment’s indication that the goal was not to start new projects from scratch, but to amplify and scale current efforts, Shrivastav said.

The already existing efforts that will be helped by the $16 million award include IU Innovates and the The Trades District. The request to Lilly was around $16 million, according to Shrivastav, which is the amount that was awarded.