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Keep America Beautiful
Get Children Involved With Helping the Community By Penny Powell
Imagine organizing your family or a group of your children's friends into teams, giving each individual or team a large trash bag and challenging them to a competition to see who can pick up the most trash the fastest! Can't you easily visualize little busy bodies hustling for full bags of trash at a public park or another area in your community?
April is Keep America Beautiful Month, and according to Keep America Beautiful, the nation's largest volunteer-based community improvement network, "The Great American Cleanup, the nation's largest annual community improvement program held March through May, rallies people to make sweeping, dramatic changes from coast-to-coast." Last spring, "more than 2.3 million volunteers worked for more than seven million hours cleaning, beautifying and improving 15,000 communities during 30,000 Great American Cleanup events." The community leaders involved with the Great American Cleanup report that cleaning up communities helps increase safety in several ways.
For starters, a sense of unity and peace are felt in neighborhoods by volunteers who participate in the Great American Cleanup experience. Additionally, A Keep America Beautiful survey revealed that "communities are 'healthier' because cleanups help eliminate illegal dumpsites, reducing the risk of mosquitoes, rodents and the threat of West Nile Disease; children can play more safely in parks and recreation areas where dangerous objects and trash have been removed; and water cleanups help remove health hazards from drinking water." Reduced crime has also been linked to a cleaner community, which is not surprising, as cleanliness and de-cluttering provide feelings of renewal and self-worth.
Keep America Beautiful has numerous ideas for involving our children in efforts for keeping our country spic and span. Of course, the first lessons begin at home with parents setting an example. Set a we-absolutely-do-not-litter example! We must not only tell our children but show them that trash belongs in a trash bin. Keep America Beautiful suggests letting our children see us putting trash outside the home with care being careful to tie all trash bags tightly so the trash actually makes it into the trash can. Securing the lid so that trash doesn't topple out of the can is also a must.
