Neighborhood Clean-Ups
The local police talk about the “broken window” principle. If a window is broken in a house and not fixed, within a year, the roof will fall in. That’s how we think about getting and keeping our neighborhood clean. If you don’t keep things clean, the trash just snowballs.
In the last couple of years, with the help of Keep Austin Beautiful, St. John residents have taken charge of making their neighborhood a clean and safe place to live in. In fact, so much trash was removed in 2005 that we won the KAB citywide “litter abatement” award (we are also runner-up for the Austin “Community Involvement” award for 2006)! You can see pictures of what the mountains of trash were like. Today, those mountains are gone and we work on maintaining and improving. For example, neighbors got together last spring and completed three raised wooden vegetable beds for seniors at the rec center.
Sometimes we have volunteer groups who want to do clean-ups. They are always welcome, but we don’t let them go out on their own. The neighborhood belongs to the residents, and we always try to team them up. If we didn’t have a cookout already planned, neighbors have cooked tamale dinners for the volunteers and spent time talking about their neighborhood.
Special thanks go to Mr. Vincent Tovar, a teacher at Pickle Elementary, who mobilized his students 3 years ago to begin regularly cleaning Buttermilk Creek behind the school. Also, Keep Austin Beautiful has been incredible in supporting our clean-ups with anything we need. It’s all part of building community in a sustainable way.