One rainy, freezing December 12th afternoon, a few brave souls ventured out into the wilderness to do what we do best - clean up. With the new COVID-19 restrictions in place, our small group consisted of mainly board members. While we would have loved to include more people, we felt it was the safest to keep our social circles tight.
The Sunset Meadow parking lot, as well as its surrounding forestry, were our main targets for this campaign. It was a repeat location, but we felt as though our last cleanup - while still quite successful - was not enough to truly make as large of a difference as we had hoped. Plus, it had been over a month since we last visited.
Group members split off into family groups and pairs, in order to further enforce social distancing. A few strange items were found. Namely, a full diaper and an entire dresser drawer. One group even found a large pile of bones! These were later determined to be deer bones by the friendly park district police officer and his bone analyst coworker - though it did give us a scare.
At the end of our cleanup, we held a competition to see who could guess how many pounds of trash were collected. Our Vice President, Libby, was right on the money. We cleaned up 90 pounds of trash total in a little under 2 hours. Overall, it was a very successful cleanup campaign. While the holiday spirit was not entirely fulfilled (thanks to the rain - we wanted snow), there was no better way to spend a colder winter day than with friends, helping the community.
Want to host your own cleanup campaign?
It doesn't matter if you're looking for a group service project or an individual contribution, we can help! Email us at cugb.oprf@gmail.com !