Keep America Beautiful Celebrates a Year of Beautiful Moments

As 2017 comes to a close, Keep America Beautiful looks back with pride and a sense of accomplishment about many of our favorite "Beautiful Moments" from this year.

It’s a “Beautiful Moment” every time one of our more than 600 community-based affiliates — powered by millions of volunteers — bring together their local community and partners in government, business and the nonprofit sector to create lasting economic, environmental and social impact in urban, suburban and rural communities from coast-to-coast.

Here are just a few of many “Beautiful Moments” from across the Keep America Beautiful Affiliate Network in 2017:

• Keep Genesee County Beautiful (KGCB), our affiliate in Flint, Michigan, and other community partners, brought Flint's Sarvis Park back to life with the installation of a new playground and a park restoration. Read about it here. Keep America Beautiful also worked with KGCB and an array of corporate partners to launch a comprehensive recycling education and awareness initiative for the 10,000 school students affected by the Flint water crisis. Read about here and here.
   
• Keep Phoenix Beautiful celebrated its 35th anniversary on Oct. 28 with the debut of its new Keep Phoenix Beautiful Community Garden. The community garden was re-launched at its new location with a 9/11 Day of Service volunteer event. Read about it here. A Keep America Beautiful/Lowe's Community Partners Grant helped transform the space into a community resource with composting, demonstration gardens, a solar greenhouse, and much more. Read about it here.
   
• I  Love A Clean San Diego's Coastal Cleanup Day 2017 supported more than 100 cleanup and beautification sites in San Diego County. More than 7,500 volunteers removed more than 150,000 pounds of debris and recyclables. Read more here. In addition, ILACSD expanded smaller Coastal Cleanup Days in Lemon Grove and Encanto into larger scale cleanups with additional projects to improve the parks! Read more here.
   
• Keep Brevard Beautiful's Trash Bash, Brevard County, Florida's annual Great American Cleanup event, covered about 40 sites in 2017 with more than 1,100 volunteers removing more than 15 tons of trash and debris from public spaces around the county. Read more here.
   
• Oklahoma City's Martin Nature Park received a facelift as Keep America Beautiful state affiliate Keep Oklahoma Beautiful, local affiliate OKC Beautiful, and city, state, nonprofit and private industry teamed up to celebrate the Great American Cleanup during Oklahoma's Arbor Week. Read more here.
   
• Gwinnett Clean & Beautiful in Gwinnett County, Georgia, teamed up with Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources to host the Third Annual Great Gwinnett Wetlands. Read more here.
   
• Keep Charleston (South Carolina) Beautiful began working with local community group The Compost Rangers to connect schools, restaurants and local businesses to a grassroots compost initiative. Grant funds were used to construct composting cubes and raised garden beds at three elementary schools, which will give the students a space for planting edibles and pollinator species. Read more here.
   
• And finally, Keep America Beautiful, in collaboration with East Side Partnership, conducted a Great American Cleanup event in its hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, in June. The service projects included painting a mural around an early childhood learning center; planting shade trees; mulching a sculpture garden; and abating graffiti and picking up litter in this East Side Stamford neighborhood. Read more here.

Thanks to the generosity of people like you, Keep America Beautiful and its network of more than 600 community-based affiliates nationwide will continue to impact millions of lives in tens of thousands of communities in 2018. Trees planted, streets and beaches cleaned, parks restored, youth empowered…lives rebuilt.

Help us fulfill a vision for America in which every community is a clean, green and beautiful place to live by making a year-end, tax-deductible donation today.

We Keep America Beautiful, so Americans can #DoBeautifulThings.