Innoveyance, parent company of C&M Conveyor and Ohio Blow Pipe, donated a $3,300 conveyor belt to Bloomington Ivy Tech Community College.
Tim Schoch, director of the Center for Lifelong Learning at Ivy Tech Bloomington, said the conveyor belt was custom built for their art supplies storage closet. He said the program fills the ceramic studio with thousands of pounds of clay a year and the conveyor belt will streamline the process of transporting and storing it.
“It starts with things like the conveyor belt and creating a sustainable, streamlined logistical process, and it ends with ceramic students having everything they need to create the projects they're working on,” Schoch said.
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Boxes as heavy as 50 pounds of art supplies were stacked on the ground in the closet, Schoch said. The conveyer belt creates a safer environment by eliminating the need for boxes to be shuffled around whenever more clay is needed.
Ivy Tech Bloomington alumni Mitchell Brown works as the parts and service manager for Innoveyance and created the initial design for the conveyer belt.
Brown said he discovered C&M Conveyor at a booth during a career fair on Ivy Tech Bloomington’s campus. C&M Conveyor handles the building material side of business while Ohio Blow Pipe oversees scrap collection. He said they primarily provide support to companies making cardboard for boxes.
“I love this job. This is, in a lot of ways, a dream job for me,” Brown said.
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After Brown and a group of coworkers proposed the idea to donate a conveyor belt to Ivy Tech Bloomington on Feb. 16, he said their management team took two business days to begin working on the project and it was shipped on March 7. He said the building process was quick, but it took a longer time to find the precise paint color to match Ivy Tech’s school colors.
Kayla Dusseau, director of career coaching at Ivy Tech Bloomington, graduated from high school with Brown and was working in admissions at Ivy Tech when he was a student.
“It's kind of been full circle for both of us being able to grow into adults, but also help out our community college and our community as a whole,” she said.
