KUDOS and Krazy for the Kzoo event results and photos
Friday was the annual Kalamazoo United Day of Service.
KUDOS is a volunteer weatherization project aimed at helping to prepare the homes of people who face economic hardship for the harsh winter season thats ahead.
This year ten teams worked to serve thirty homes! I am still in awe at how well planned and organized this event was. Shout out to the events director, Christina Dorett, who did such a great job coordinating it. This event had a lot of moving parts, and it all came together perfectly.
I'm very thankful to have been able to lend a hand at KUDOS and I can't wait to be there for it again next year!
Saturday was Krazy for the Kzoo, a volunteer cleanup event organized by the Kalamazoo River Watershed Council with support from other local groups.
Twenty four volunteers split up into three teams and worked at different sites to pickup over a ton of garbage!
Volunteers used waders to cleanup in Portage Creek, and pulled out so much waterlogged trash and scrap metal. Working in deep water with a current flowing around you, and pulling bicycles and weed eaters out of the mud under water is no small task, and it takes a specific type of hardy volunteer to accomplish it.
A short distance away, other volunteers cleared the garbage off the shoreline of the Kalamazoo River at the Jack Coombs Trailway. This area gets littered almost every day, and several areas of the trail spill garbage directly into the Kalamazoo River. This preventative trash picking of the garbage on the shoreline is critical to keeping it all out of the river, where it becomes even more hazardous to the environment.
Upstream just a ways a third team picked away at the Trash Pit Of Despair. This group was comprised nearly completely of employees from Jones and Henry Engineers LTD. I am blown away by the level of dogged determination they showed. This area is pretty intense (thus the name) and they never once wavered. They followed some crazy trash pickin guy down a deer trail to a trash Pit and got right to work in there. To say I was impressed with them would be a massive understatement.
All of this hard work was done safely and without any incident 😊
Shoutout to my friend Bela Ballez, Executive Director at the KRWC for organizing this project. Her hard work and thoughtful planning shows in the great results of the day.
I'm honored to have been a part of it.
It was a cleanup event that all of us will no doubt remember for the rest of our lives 🙌
Ian 🗑 ❤️