Month: September 2017

Local Saturday Beach Cleanup at Venice Beach

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Venice High School students at Venice Beach

Author: Claire Combredet

The club leaders, including myself, first arrived around 9:45 am at Venice Beach for our local cleanup. We organized the tables near the Venice Pier and brought gloves, buckets, water, and snacks for our members. We made a sign-in sheet for the members to mark the number of hours they worked, so we could later assign community service hours. Our members arrived little by little, signed in, and were given gloves and buckets. They then set out to clean the beach and the leaders took turns supervising the tables and equipment, and joining the other members for the cleanup. After a couple of hours, everyone returned to the tables for snacks and water and chatted. Around 2pm, we packed up the equipment and left the cleanup site.

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Bucket in hand, ready to keep the beaches clean!

At one point, myself and another leader, my friend Haley, headed out on the beach for our cleanup shift, and met up with a club member, Jack. He pointed out that he had found a drenched sock near the shoreline, which was quite interesting – not exactly in its natural habitat!

This cleanup was great, as always, because we were able to see our members in action, being proactive community members, which is a notion that is implied as a Heal the Bay member. In efforts to reduce our global impact, we have reused our buckets year after year, and hope to get more supplies to support future cleanups with the club. It would be amazing to to provide our members with the best possible equipment to show that we truly care about them and are thankful for their deeds. The project today made our club members feel like they were contributing to something positive and beneficial in their community, and were being proactive with their Saturday morning.

Follow Venice High School Heal the Bay club on instagram for more pictures from their events! @venicehealthebay

 

 

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CCD 2017 – Campus Cleanup at Mark Keppel High School

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Members of Mark Keppel High School’s Heal the Bay Club

MKHS Campus Cleanup – 9.16.2017
Author: Valerie Dao

On September 16, 2017, the Heal the Bay club of Mark Keppel High School held a campus cleanup at their school’s track field. The event started at 9 am and lasted about one hour and five minutes. There were 31 participants. The board members split up the event participants into groups of 4-5. These groups then dispersed throughout the track area, cleaning up the field and taking note of the type of trash they collected.

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Taking a break from cleaning trash to pose for a photo!

Some of the unusual trash items they found were a baseball, a football, a plunger, and a whole pie in its pie tin. The participants were surprised to find out how much trash they had collected, as the track field did not seem to have that much trash at first glance when the cleanup started. By the end of the event, the Heal the Bay cleanup group had collected about eight full bags of trash and half a box of glass. The club calculated, using the Clean Swell app, that 192.93 pounds of trash were collected.

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An interesting find during the cleanup!

Most of the trash that was collected were paper trash, food wrappers, plastic bags, and miscellaneous plastic/foam pieces.  The event ended with tired participants having satisfaction to have prevented all of this trash to be going elsewhere. Volunteers were provided with snacks and cold bottles of water, which they happily enjoyed.

This was Heal the Bay club’s first event, and the board members and advisor were very glad about the outcome of the event. They hope to continue having events like this one in the future.