Reply To: Exercise 4: 10 Friends and Family Members
Old Problem: People feel discouraged, overwhelmed, and hopeless about the trash in the streets
Old Solution: Create a city wide clean up event that focuses on taking pride in and loving our city
Advice received:
1. Decide on the day you want to do the event, make it meaningful.
2. Have businesses offer employees time off to participate, maybe even paid, then get publicity for their participation.
3. Use some extrinsic motivators like challenges/metrics that demonstrate how much garbage was collected.
4. Take photos of individuals and a blurb from them about why they are participating, of with what they have collected.
5. Photos of people doing the work
6. Use students who may need hours
7. Tweak the project to more directly address the community building that was mentioned in the discussion, maybe not just clean up but other ways to contribute that demonstrate city pride. e.g Include options like tree planting, community garden etc.
8. Talk to enough local people to know that the identified emotions/ problem identified are actually a feelings/problem for them and not just you. Talk to them about what projects would make them feel the community pride.
9. Look at other kinds of community projects for ideas/guidance like “I Love My Parks” day
10. In looking at having a “trash free celebration” at the end of the day, have people bring their own containers for food, drink.
11. Get a Mexican partner from the beginning.
12. Get the word out on the radio. Lots of Mexicans listen to the radio regularly.
13. Get professionals that are connected to kids involved so they can help bring kids into the project. Clubs, classes, teachers
14. Seek sponsorship for drinks, snacks, and celebration.
15. Share stories of people with a photo and quotes about why they participated and about their experience in doing so.
16. Use local “buy nothing” groups
17. In order to have a celebration without creating trash you could have a bring your own utensil policy.
18. Partner with an already existent organization that the community is familiar with
19. Make more options than clean up available as volunteer options.
20. Need a local person as the face of the event.
21. Utilize the help of LoveOurCities so you aren’t reinventing the wheel
22. Get a board together to work with you including at least half local people
23. Connect with local government for permit needs and to be respectful of letting them know what you are working on.
24. Focus on community building nature of the event.
25. Settle on an identifiable name for your event/group.
26. Get more specific in your own head about what you want to do, what you want to accomplish. Avoid mission creep.
27. Develop a planning committee that includes local Mexican people.
28. Connect with people who do these kinds of events and create a vision and mission.
29. Look at establishing a broad brush budget.
30. Develop a way to ensure the group you are addressing is the group feeling the feelings identified in the problem.
31. Include in your plan how to accomplish it without creating more trash (and maybe even including in your goals a way to support the community in creating less waste in the first place)
32. Think about how to identify the group in a way that doesn’t mean buying T-shirts or other things that will end up in land fills. Maybe dying shirts that people already have, making identifying “sashes” that could be made for the group and reused.
33. Consider scaling your project to first be successful. Doing something successfully is better than planning for and not doing a lot of things, or bigger things.
34. Consider getting a sponsor in local government. They might be willing to provide materials for picking up garbage for the event.
35. Look for prominent, recognizable figures in your city (think movie stars, local celebrities) that could endorse and help promote the event. You can hold a rally where that person talks and sets the tone and raises enthusiasm for participation.
36. Plant the seed in the event of ongoing events to maintain clean streets and neighborhoods. Tap into their enthusiasm when they are already participating by having a follow up event they can sign up for.
37. Celebrate with photos, the cleaned up results (maybe before and after) and create the narrative of how this activity makes a difference/matters. People want to do things that matter.
38. See if there are any local laws that should be considered. Go to local municipal government to demonstrate respect and interest in following the laws that may apply.
New problem: Same as old problem
New solution: Get a group of friends and people you have talked to about this project to do a clean up event together that includes identifying apparel.
New People to talk to:
1. Find local Buy Nothing groups
2. Organizer of “I Love My Parks” day in NY
3. Bree Komiski, a friend who has organized events
4. Stockton Mexican Heritage – woman’s name and number who organizes these to follow
5. Jeff Pishney, founder of LoveOurCities.org
6. Kimmi Suki, founder of Yucatan Giving Outreach
7. Carlos Bettencourt, local realtor
8. Padre Jose Vieda, Anglican priest very involved in the community
9. Satelite Merida, local Christian organization
10. Lupita Palafox, has school for summer camps, teaching English, very involved in the community
11. Grax Vida, local graphic designer who became well known during pandemic bringing people food.
12. Coparmex – a business entrepreneur hub on soial media
13. “Ruby’s dad” who has organized trash pick up days. Have name of person who can provide contact info.
14. “Beyond Plastic” organization that has cleaned up Mississippi River, can find info on website.
15. Chris Yeo, friend and scout leader who has organized many highway clean up projects.
Post Exercise Reflections:
Before starting this week’s exercise, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the number of people we were to talk to but just decided to focus on one at a time and proceed. I talked to 9 people.
All of the conversations were engaging and energizing for me. The people with whom I spoke appeared to be genuinely interested and engaged in helping me improve my idea. The local people with whom I spoke were enthusiastic and I think would definitely want to know more about the project and to participate. I did have a couple days of feeling overwhelmed by the scope of what I had proposed and was very uncertain that I wanted to actually do a city wide event, at least to start. My conversation with Josh helped me scale my idea to something that feels more immediately doable and helped me not give up.
The conversations definitely helped me think more clearly about what I am proposing to do and why. That is an ongoing process that I wouldn’t say is “done”. While I do want to help clean up Merida, what I really want to do fundamentally is to connect with my community and help build a community that decreases consumption and waste in the first place. My vision includes regular stewardship of maintaining clean streets, but also finding ways to reduce the trash that is generated. The idea of ensuring that whatever I do doesn’t ADD to the trash generated was a focus of many conversations.