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A group of students from The University of Alabama came to Selma Friday to help plant trees to beautify the city.

The group was brought to the city through the Selma Ripple Initiative through the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business. Preston McGee, community outreach coordinator, said the goal is to not only help the students give back to the city, but it also exposes them to the Queen City.

“We don’t want this to be just a working trip for them” McGree said. “We want them to have a chance to explore Selma and learn more about the city.”

On Friday, the students were planting trees in Ward 3 along Mallory Drive. Councilman Clay Carmichael said the trees they were planting were helping to replace some of the more than 700 trees lost during Hurricane Zeta and the January 2023 EF-2 tornado. In all the city, lost over 2,000 trees including those on private property.

“What we’re trying to do is to help replenish the canopy of Selma that was lost during those storms,” Carmichael told the students.

Currently, Carmichael said they are trying to plant as many as 50 trees in his ward this year and to do more tree planting in years to come to help replace all of those trees.

The students, which were mostly freshmen and sophomores at Alabama, were from all over the Untied States. There were students from Arizona, Utah, Michigan and Kentucky along with a few others from Alabama.

Owen Nesbit, a freshman from Michigan, said he loved getting the chance to come to Selma.

“It’s a cool opportunity to get a chance to get out and visit places I’ve never been to before,” Nesbit said.

After the service project is complete, McGee said they will allow the students some unstructured time to explore the city.

“We will give them some time after lunch to get a chance to explore the downtown area,” McGee said. “They can walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge if they want. If they want to explore other parts of downtown, they can do that as well.