For the past three years, my family has organized a community clean-up in our neighbourhood. What began as a small effort has grown into a meaningful annual tradition rooted in pride, connection, and care for the place we call home.
This year was especially exciting because, for the first time, we received grant funding to support our efforts. Having access to those funds felt like both an endorsement of the work we had been doing and an opportunity to make the event even more impactful. We began by selecting a date. Scheduling proved to be more complicated than expected. The earlier weekends we had hoped for did not work for many of our regular volunteers, which meant choosing a later date in the season. We were concerned that by then the blackberry brambles would be thick and overgrown, making garbage collection more challenging and less accessible for children and seniors. After weighing the options, we decided to move forward anyway. Community momentum mattered more than perfect conditions.
To promote the event, my two daughters and I spent an afternoon walking through the neighbourhood putting up 40 paper flyers. It felt hopeful and energizing to imagine neighbours reading them and deciding to join us. The next morning, however, we discovered that every single poster had been torn down or vandalized. We were discouraged and disappointed. It would have been easy to interpret that as a sign to stop. Instead, we treated it as a reminder that community-building sometimes requires persistence. We printed more posters, put them back up, and expanded our outreach through local Facebook community groups.
On the day of the clean-up, our resilience paid off. Twenty volunteers arrived, representing a wonderful mix of seniors, children, and adults. Together, we spread out across the area and got to work. Despite the brambles and overgrowth, the group was determined and collaborative. By the end of the event, we had collected approximately 20 bags of garbage from our streets and green spaces.
The grant funding allowed us to purchase advertising supplies, provide refreshments for participants, and offer small prizes for the children who helped. Those small gestures added a celebratory tone and showed appreciation for everyone’s time and effort.
More than the bags of garbage collected, the true success of the day was the sense of shared ownership and pride. Neighbours connected, children learned the value of stewardship, and our community felt a little more united. The experience reinforced that positive change does not require perfection—just commitment, collaboration, and the willingness to keep going, even when obstacles arise.
