2010 United Way Day of Caring!
What does it look like to have over 200 Microsoft & Qwest volunteers out in the Greenbelt at once? It looks awesome!
September 24th, 2010, marked the annual United Way Day of Caring. Nature Consortium is always proud to be a part of this city-wide event and this year we welcomed loads of Microsoft & Qwest employees who came out to help with our restoration efforts. It’s incredible how much work you can get done with so many volunteers being out at once: we did nearly 60,000 square feet of removal and maintenance! That’s over an acre in three hours! Huge carpets of English ivy were ripped out, swaths of Himalayan blackberry was totally demolished, and everyone emerged dirty and satisfied. Our 200 volunteers were just a drop in the bucket of the overall Day of Caring attendance–more than 10,000 people spent the day volunteering in schools, parks, and non-profits, and the estimated value of volunteers’ labor was $1.3 million! (www.uwkc.org)
My favorite part of the day was talking to some folks who had never done any kind of restoration work before, or been out in the Greenbelt. I had one really cool lady in my group who had grown up in New York City and was terrified at first of getting dirty. But by the end of the day she was totally into it and voraciously attacking English ivy with the best of ’em. Sometimes getting outside and doing restoration work can really challenge what you’re comfortable with (dirt! bugs! rain!), but at the end of the day there is nothing more satisfying than realizing you’ve done something you didn’t expect from yourself–and made a difference while you’re at it!
