KVB/Walmart’s Great Virginia State Park Clean-up Keep Virginia Beautiful - To engage and unite Virginians to improve our natural and scenic environment.

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/

30 Grants in 30 Days is Back! Keep Virginia Beautiful - To engage and unite Virginians to improve our natural and scenic environment.

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.

Think of Us this Earth Day Keep Virginia Beautiful - To engage and unite Virginians to improve our natural and scenic environment.

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.

A Drop in the Bucket Keep Virginia Beautiful - To engage and unite Virginians to improve our natural and scenic environment.

Happy Birthday KVB…KVB turns 60 on 3/24! Keep Virginia Beautiful - To engage and unite Virginians to improve our natural and scenic environment.

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.

The Power of One, Across America Keep Virginia Beautiful - To engage and unite Virginians to improve our natural and scenic environment.

While debris from this natural disaster is a rare occurrence, garbage in our oceans is not.  All of our oceans contain eddys and gyres, or circular ocean currents that rotate to distribute weather, water and sea creatures.  They also tend to trap and concentrate waste and trash.  There is one in the Pacific that has come to be referred to as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”  While, contrary to popular belief, you can’t walk across it or see it from space, it is definitely there.  Much of it is, in fact, so small that you wouldn’t see it if you were in a boat on top of it, but it’s there.

And most of it is small bits of plastic.

Here’s the thing:  When it ends up in the ocean it becomes a part of that ecosystem.  Florida did not always have boa constrictors and pythons, but now they’re there and a part of the wildlife.  The same holds true for the garbage that we put in our oceans.  Fish school around it, shellfish cling to it, dolphins play with it, and sea turtles eat it.  You also cannot simply wave a skimmer or rake and make it all disappear.  It’s there, for good or ill.

There are two things that we need to know about this debris:  What it does and how it got there.   What it does is pollute the water.  Even though it seems to last forever, it leaches out chemicals over the course of its life.  There are toxins that were used to print logos, lesser plastics that dissolve, and as the pieces get smaller and smaller, they get ingested by animals and creatures that filter sand, like shrimp and shellfish.  Now the creatures carry the same toxins as the plastic.

And these plastics come from us.  They are the innocuous plastic float that we used for fishing.  It is the fishing line that we untangled and let float away in the water.  It is the beach ball, carelessly left on the shore to be picked up at the next high tide.  Bottles and six-pack holders become chokers and garrotes for dolphins and whales.  Cheap coolers and packing materials clog the stomachs of our most voracious feeders.

This garbage doesn’t always start off on a boat or a seemingly innocent jaunt to the beach.  It often comes from the streams and rivers that feed into our oceans.  It is just our carelessness that started the journey.

There is a chance that you can, however, do something about it.  You can start with your own personal actions.  When you hike the mountains you are advised to “leave nothing but footprints and take nothing but memories.”  Why not take the same guidance when you kayak or fish?

You can also join us at a summit of professionals from the federal, state and local levels this weekend at the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center.  The Virginia Marine Debris Summit will look at the source of the problem, and try to develop solutions to mitigate and eliminate it from becoming an unwinnable battle.

The Oceans are Not a Trash Dump Keep Virginia Beautiful - To engage and unite Virginians to improve our natural and scenic environment.

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.

Keep Virginia Beautiful says “Give 60.” Ready? Go! Keep Virginia Beautiful - To engage and unite Virginians to improve our natural and scenic environment.