2013 GRANT SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN!

KVB is proud to bring back our very successful and highly anticipated “30 Grants in 30 Days” program.  We would like to thank our generous sponsor for 2013; Lowe’s Home Improvement.  Without them, these grants would not be possible!

The 2013 “30 Grants in 30 Days” program  is once again designed to help communities, schools, parks, neighborhoods, and civic groups battle Virginia’s environmental issues on the front lines.  These grants are categorized in 3 areas; (1) Litter Prevention, (2) Recycling, and (3) Beautification and Community Greening.  Thirty grants of $500 will be awarded to 30 geographically different areas around the Commonwealth within the 3 categories, to be dispersed amongst small to large communities, schools to universities, city parks to state parks, civic clubs to environmental groups.  These grants will be awarded in the 30 days of June.  Please fill out the grant application below.

Important Dates:

Application Deadline: May 15,2013

Applicants Notified: Starting May 31, 2013

Winners Announced Daily: June 1 through June 30, 2013

Grant Projected Completed By: October 31, 2013

Results Reported By: November 15, 2013

Categories:

• Litter Prevention – Grants will awarded to parks, communities, government or non-profit entities that implement programs within targeted geographic boundaries in Virginia to reduce litter. Funding would support educational outreach materials,  and clean-up events.  The purpose of these grants is to support sustainable prevention and a measurable reduction of  litter within Virginia’s communities.
• Recycling – Grants will be awarded to schools, parks, communities, government or non-profit entities that implement programs within targeted geographic boundaries in Virginia to reduce waste and increase recycling. Funding would support educational outreach materials, receptacles, and recycling launch events.  The purpose of these grants is to promote waste reduction and a measurable increase in reuse and recycling within Virginia’s communities.
• Beautification and Community Greening - Grants will be awarded to schools, parks, communities, government or non-profit entities within targeted geographic boundaries in Virginia which support programs that beautify and clean including community gardens, restoring vacant lots, highway and shoreline enhancement, plantings, and graffiti abatement. Funding would support community clean-ups, revitalization projects, and sustainable neighborhood gardens.  The purpose of these grants is to support beautification efforts within Virginia’s communities.

2013 Sponsor

To apply for a “30 in 30″ Grant, http://www.keepvirginiabeautiful.org/outreach/grants/

Are you ready for Earth Day?  Our home base is in Richmond, and there are two great events right across the river from each other.  There are other Earth Day festivities just outside of town, and we’ve heard of celebrations in Northern Virginia, Tidewater, the Shenandoah Valley, the Mountains…

It would seem that Virginia is excited about celebrating Earth Day and giving at least time and thought into how we can all do more to be better stewards of our planet and Keep Virginia Beautiful.

But can we suggest just a little bit more?

At Keep Virginia Beautiful, we don’t make anything or sell anything.  We’re kind of like Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything:

“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”

But that doesn’t really pay the bills.

Our mission is to be the statewide voice for advocacy and communication in our impact areas of litter prevention, recycling, waste reduction, beautification and education.  We’ve designed this website and embraced the world of social media to help connect all of you and spread the message of keeping our Commonwealth beautiful.  We try to engage you in this process, and try to cultivate and support sustainable programs that can help us to achieve our goals.

Most often, this involves asking you to do a little something.  Clean a neighborhood or recycle something.  Paint a peeling playground or plant some trees.  Sometimes, we are able to provide seed money to help you start your own programs.  Sometimes we are able to offer recycling bins or litter bags or pocket ashtrays.  But again, we don’t sell anything, buy anything or process anything.  The money for these programs comes from generous corporate partners like Altria and Waste Management who feel that it’s their responsibility and the right thing to do to help to Keep Virginia Beautiful.

But we still need help paying the bills.

In order to continue our mission we need your help.  And there are a variety of ways that you can do that.  You can continue to perform your good works and keep spreading the good word.

But wait, there’s more…

2013 marks sixty years of Keep Virginia Beautiful, so to us, 60 is a pretty magic number.  It takes sixty seconds to step from the curb and pick up a discarded can.  One could plant a pretty good number of flowers in sixty minutes.  And we could buy several recycling bins with sixty dollars.  So pitch in!

There is no better time than now to Give 60.  Let Earth Day be the real impetus for your action to truly take shape.  Commit those seconds or pledge to spend an hour.  Catch your friends in a Beautiful Act and send us the pictures.  Think of us on your birthday as we celebrate ours and give $60.  Or $600.  Or just $6.  Join us at our Gala in October at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  The proceeds from that fun party will help us to continue.

We would very much like to do more.  We added recycling bins to the Virginia State Parks.  How about to the schools and other public places?  We hand out pocket ashtrays and shopping bags when we go to events.  But there’s so much to do.  There are so many places that could use a community garden, and so many children that need to experience an outdoor classroom.

This is where you could come in and help us to Keep Virginia Beautiful.  Thanks for thinking about us.

We’re like many of you and gearing up for Earth Day.  What started as an environmental movement has become an organized day of celebration and awareness of all that is great and good about our Earth.  Did you ever wonder how it all got started?

Water.

Our environmental movement isn’t really a new idea.  It’s been around for generations.  Our father’s father’s fathers and grandmother’s mothers saw the need to protect our lands and water.  For most of us in America, this was the source of our food.  And it still is.  But the modern movement really arose from a disaster in 1969.  An oil platform off of the coast of Santa Barbara in Southern California experienced a catastrophic blow out, releasing almost 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific Ocean.  This then polluted the beaches and channels of the Southern California coast, and still ranks as the third worst ocean spill behind the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the more recent Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson saw the ravages of the spill and called for an environmental teach-in, and on April 22, 1970 over 20 million people took in the lesson.

Activism spurred by the original Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act, and began a very real and timely discussion of what we were doing to our waterways and how we could fix it.  It had only been a year since the Cuyahoga River in Ohio had experienced its most recent fire.

You read that right.  What was once the most polluted river in America would routinely burst into flames, burning off the toxic chemicals that laced it.

While our stewardship has expanded to include our air, the ground we walk on, replacing greenery, disposing of trash, and creating sustainable solutions to our lives, water has remained a focus of what we do.  The first big campaign for our parent organization, Keep America Beautiful, was the famous “Crying Indian” commercial, featuring a Native American, weeping as his canoe navigated a litter-strewn river.  Here in Virginia, water is a tremendous part of our natural heritage.  We have majestic rivers in the James, Shenandoah, Potomac and others.  Natural and man-made lakes dot our Commonwealth, providing drinking water, food, and hours of recreation.  Virginia is practically split by the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in our country.  And we’re bordered on the East by miles upon miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline.

We recently met the folks at The Wyland Foundation.  Based in Irvine, California, they were created to “promote, protect, and preserve the world’s oceans, waterways, and marine life.”  Their founder, marine life artist Wyland, has painted over 100 life-sized marine wildlife murals, bringing awareness and education to people all over the world.  You may have seen one of his murals in Norfolk.  From their site:

• Approximately 400 billion gallons of water are used in the United States per day.
• American residents use about 100 gallons of water per day. At 50 gallons per day, residential Europeans use about half of the water that residential Americans use. And residents of sub-Saharan Africa use only 2-5 gallons of water per day.
• The average faucet flows at a rate of 2 gallons per minute. You can save up to four gallons of water every morning by turning off the faucet while you brush your teeth.
• A running toilet can waste up to 200 gallons of water per day.
• At 1 drip per second, a faucet can leak 3,000 gallons per year.
• Nearly one-half of the water used by Americans is used for thermoelectric power generation.

One of their current initiatives is the National Mayor’s Challenge for Water Conservation.  Running this entire month, it’s a contest between cities across the country to see who can be the most “water-wise.”  There’s a short list of steps that you can pledge to take, and at the end you’ll see how much water you’ll be saving and impacting.  Plugging in your home city will create a ranking of how your home town is doing.  As of this writing, Hampton and Virginia Beach were in the top-ten.  That includes every state and town where someone took the pledge.

So, nice work, Virginia!  Let’s see how many more Virginia towns we can put on the chart!  Click here to take the pledge.

KVB TURNS 60!  How did we get here…

There are a number of signature events that we really like to get behind.  We are proud to help many each year with our 30 Grants in Thirty Days program.  We got to spearhead an initiative last year at the Richmond Folk Festival that turned it into a green bonanza, with recycling, cigarette litter prevention and thousands signing our pledge to Keep Virginia Beautiful.   One of the things that really set things moving last year was America Recycles Day.  In addition to the many Virginians who did their part, we were able to pitch in (with some help from Dominion Virginia Power and Virginia Green!) to begin installing recycling bins in all of our State Parks.

Possible our biggest impact, though, came with the Great American Cleanup National Days of Action.  We established some great partnerships with the United States Military, corporate partners like WalMart and Farm Fresh, and joined askHRgreen to get things going in the Hampton Roads area, where a ton of people joined us over the course of a few days to clean, plant, paint, beautify, and share our commitment towards making our state better.

But many of these actions started with the work of one person.  And that person was most often someone just like you.

Our parent organization, Keep America Beautiful, is starting to spread the message about this year’s Great American Cleanup (GAC).  The GAC begins now and runs through Friday, May 31, 2013.  Recently, they shared some details about the 2012 GAC:

• Over two million people got the message to get in gear and help to recycle.
• Over fifteen hundred events were organized across the country.
• Over sixteen thousand groups like us hosted events.
• Almost 100,000 took the pledge to do more in 2013.

As big as last year was, consider that the previous year, 2011, saw almost 4 million volunteers spent over 5 million hours participating in the GAC.  And our numbers keep getting better.  For a nation that wasn’t very good at it, we’ve grown to recovering over 30% of all of our waste.  That means over 82 million tons of material.  Part of that was 53 billion aluminum cans, 3 million tons of glass, and enough paper to cover almost 30,000 football fields three feet deep.  That’s a lot of paper.

The key to all of these amazing facts and figures, and the thing that drives these numbers upward, is the participation of a single individual:  You.  We’re certain that we can count on your help this year to Keep Virginia Beautiful.

It’s not every year that you get to celebrate something like 60 years, and we’re starting ours out in style! You may have heard about our Give 60 program, or Get Caught in a Beautiful Act. You may have even heard that we’re throwing a shindig in October to cut some cake and blow out some candles.

So what can you get us for our birthday? A few minutes of your time. Sixty of them, to be more specific. Sure, there are also opportunities to donate a few dollars. We have long been blessed with some great corporate and business partners to run individual events and programs, like our 30 in Thirty and putting recycling bins in all of our State Parks, but we often count on the generosity of folks like yourselves.

But here’s the easiest part: Getting Caught.

Many of our partners and members take a very active role in helping to Keep Virginia Beautiful. People plant flowers and keep their sidewalks clean. Youth groups renovate playgrounds and city parks. Schools install rain gardens and start recycling programs. Groups like Earth Korps and Bull Run Mountains Conservancy muck around in our rivers and mountains. Businesses like Altria spend a day sprucing up a James River Park.

It’s really easy if you just devote the time to do it. And this year we ask you to do just that. But we like to share, and so are asking you to post a photo, photos, or a video of your group engaged in your project. Let us see you being Caught in your Beautiful Act. As we get closer to our Birthday Party (October 5th at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) we’ll sort the submissions by category, like School or City/Town, and recognize those who had the most Beautiful Acts.

The neat thing is that with this sort of “contest,” everyone is a winner. You’ll feel better for having contributed, your friends and neighbors will appreciate and enjoy your hard work, and our Commonwealth will be cleaner and more beautiful for your efforts.

Our friends at Rocket Pop Media thought that it was a great idea, and took ownership of the block around their office in The Fan District of Richmond, Virginia. They have sort of an advantage because video and media is kind of what they do, but we really appreciated the hour that they spent on city streets to help Keep Virginia Beautiful.

We’ve accomplished a great deal over the past Sixty years.  And yes, it has been six decades since the Virginia Anti-Litterbug Council became the Keep Virginia Beautiful that you know and love today.  We’ve awarded grants, recognized greatness in areas like recycling, litter prevention and beautification, and seen a whole bunch of Virginians grow up to raise the next generation of concerned and active citizens.

2012 was certainly no different.  Here are some highlights:

• We participated in the Great American Cleanup.  This state-wide event saw Keep America Beautiful choosing us to lead Virginia, and the Nation, in a National Day of Action.  Starting in Hampton Roads, groups like Ask HR Green joined us in uniting thousands of volunteers in hundreds of projects across the state.  And that was just a small portion of what got accomplished during the Great American Cleanup.

• Year Two of our Thirty in 30 Grant Program.  To celebrate Earth Day, each April we award thirty grants in 30 days to deserving civic groups, non-profits, schools and neighborhood associations across the Commonwealth.  Each of these groups are committed to the Keep Virginia Beautiful impact areas of beautification, litter prevention, recycling, education, and waste reduction.  From the ocean to the Western mountains, groups got a little seed money for trash cans, recycling bags, educational programs, community gardens and more.

• We gave a great gift to our State Parks for America Recycles Day.  Our State Parks do a great job of showcasing the most beautiful aspects of our Commonwealth, educate many about what our natural expanses have to offer, and try to do their best to keep Virginia beautiful.  They’re understandably eco-minded, and do a great job with litter programs and reducing their footprint, but recycling has been hard for them.  With a generous grant from Dominion Virginia Power, we were able to install the first of many recycling bins in some of the parks.  By the end of 2013 we hope to have bins in all 35 of our parks.

• We got our groove on at the Richmond Folk Festival. One of our favorite opportunities is participating in events and festivals where we can meet large groups of people and enlist them in our mission to Keep Virginia Beautiful.  The Folk Festival is the perfect opportunity.  It brought hundreds of thousands of people to Richmond to enjoy folk, world and ethnic foods and music on the banks of the James River over the course of three days.  Many of them signed our pledge to Keep Virginia Beautiful, and we were able to spearhead an effort to place recycling bins throughout the event, sending tons of trash out to be reused instead of sending them to the dump.

And 2013 promises to be as exciting a year as we’ve ever had.  We’ll once again hold our annual Golf Tournament, we’re gearing up for another fantastic Great American Cleanup, and we’ll be at the various fairs and festivals throughout the state.  We’ll be back and stronger with more grants with our third Thirty in 30 program, and so much more.  We’re especially excited about an event that we just started planning:  Our 60th Anniversary Gala.  This will be a blow-out event to meet many of you, raise some funds to move some of our programs forward, and recognize some groups and individuals who have done so much to keep Virginia Beautiful.  As part of that celebration, we’ll be catching people in a Beautiful Act, we’ll be holding an art auction, and partnering with some of the many like-minded groups and organizations across Virginia.

Thank you to all who have helped to make 2012 such a banner year for Keep Virginia Beautiful, and keep your ears open as our 2013 continues to unfold.

Many people worry about their environmental impact around the holidays…not to worry there are many things you can do to lessen your load on the planet!

10 things you can do to make your holidays green:

1. Consider making a donation to an organization in your friend or family’s name…it shows that you care about others and that you know what they care about as well, plus there is no impact on the planet other than a positive one!

2. Recycle your wrapping paper…unless it some kind of foil coated wrap, it is recyclable…better yet toss all that left over paper in a bag and save it for next year’s packaging filler for all your shipped gifts!

3. Cut out the pretty and festive parts to this year’s holiday cards…use them as next year’s gift tags, it will absolutely make someone’s day to get their old christmas card as the gift tag in the future (plus you don’t even have to label the “To:”)!

4. Send an electronic holiday card…there are tons of greeting card sites that allow you to make really personal and multi-tiered cards to email and share, they are even printable if the recipient so desires!

5. Use gift bags…not only are these pretty and easier than paper, they are so reusable, I reuse my bags until they give out!

6. When replacing lights choose LED lights…if you need to purchase lights this year, buy LEDs, they use less energy and last 10X longer!

7. Shop online…you use no gas and the gift is only shipped once (now I will say that this goes against my “shop local” ideals but at least its less harmful than big store shopping)!

8. Go Reusable for Parties…use real plates, napkins, and cups for your holiday get-togethers (and if you have to purchase paper or plastic items, buy recyclable and/or compostable varieties)!

9. Homemade is best…whether its homemade cookies, treats, soups, dips, crafts, cards, ornaments, etc., make them yourselves, nothing says you care more than homemade goodies!

10. Plastic vs.Real…this is something I struggle with every year. Fresh trees are a no no for me because I cringe at taking the life of a tree for my own festive satisfaction, however today there are more options…like potted trees! You can get hundreds of varieties of trees and evergreens that are very festive, smell great and then can be planted in your yard after the holiday season is over to enjoy year after year (and decorate too)! Now I purchased a plastic/fake tree 14 years ago and I presume that it was made in a very ungreen way and probably still contains many nongreen chemicals, however I concole myself with the realization that I use the same tree year after year (and will until it can no longer stand)…14 trees are alive because I choose for them to live on!