zac199708
Registered: December 2015 City/Town/Province: Pflugerville Posts: 1
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During my junior year of High School in Pflugerville Texas I became interested in our local city and state parks. As I had recently begun driving, I set my hopes on visiting as many of the parks as possible. I loved everything the parks had to offer, from hiking, biking, fishing, swimming, to mountain climbing. I had made a long list of the parks, and set my goal to explore them all.
During my adventures, it occurred to me that some of the parks that were closest to my home were very run down. So much trash littered the area, that even the wildlife was suffering, and the fish were dying in the water. I knew I needed to do something to help. In addition to this, I had discovered the Nicodemus Wilderness Project, and after reading some inspiring information on the website, I knew that even a teenager could make a difference.
I also had my hopes set on attending Texas A&M in the future, and was inspired by their school-wide community cleanup event, “The Big Event”. I decided to discuss this with my school principal. I attend a very large 6A sized school in Texas, and had over 2,500 volunteers available if I could get approval for a one day “Big Event” in Pflugerville.
So once the approval was set, my entire high school set out on a “Big Event” day last spring (2015). On that day we sent teams to all of the local city parks, neighborhood parks, soccer fields, hike and bike trails, rivers and streams, and the Pflugerville Lake to perform a massive clean-up and restoration day for our community. On that day we planted over 100 trees for our community, we repainted all of the park benches/bathrooms, we cleaned the water areas, and took out over 3,000 bags of trash. We had nearly 3,000 volunteers, and saved the city thousands of dollars in cleanup costs.
It was an amazing experience, and I was blessed to be honored at a city meeting by the Mayor of Pflugerville with a certificate for planning this project. It was such a success that we have already begun the planning of the second annual “Big Event” day in Pflugerville.
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