Volunteers of all ages help keep Covington beautiful, and visitors notice the effort.
COVINGTON, Ky. - With green-colored “map pins” arrayed like a general’s strategic deployment of resources, a new map on the City’s COVDATA website identifies a veritable army of volunteers working in neighborhoods across Covington to beautify their surroundings.
It’s called the “Adopt-A-Spot” program, and organizers hope the map encourages more “spots” to be adopted.
“Right now there are 177 partners actively engaged in cleaning up their little corner of Covington,” said Sheila Fields, Covington’s Solid Waste & Recycling Coordinator. “That’s great participation, but there are many more areas that need attention.”
The program is a collaboration among the City, Keep Covington Beautiful, the Center for Great Neighborhoods, and the Covington Neighborhood Collaborative.
Partners register to “adopt” a spot and then focus on beautifying it, but the program is flexible on many levels:
- “Spots” can be adopted, for example, by an organization, a neighborhood, a business, a group of students or a family.
- The spots themselves can be a street, parking lot, park, trail, community gateway, storm drain, a block, or even a planter or two. “If you come up with an idea, we can help make it happen,” Fields said.
- And work typically can include a range of activities, such as picking up litter, sweeping up cigarette butts, pulling up weeds, removing illegally posted signs from utility poles or traffic islands, keeping drains free of debris, planting flowers and trees, spreading mulch, and other landscaping, said Danielle Holdcroft, an intern working in the City’s Solid Waste division.
The frequency of activity varies by spot and sponsor, but Adopt-A-Spot organizers suggest the spots be visited and litter removed about once a week.
The Adopt-A-Spot program has clearly made a difference in the appearance of the City, said Holdcroft, who is from Louisville. “The first thing I noticed about Covington’s downtown was how clean it was,” she said. “That’s why increasing participation in this program is important: Visitors’ first impressions of any city are usually based on how streets, sidewalks and public areas look.”
Organizers can provide a variety of tools for volunteers, including litter grabbers, gloves, pruners, litter bags, buckets, hand trowels, weed forks and safety vests.
“We want to make it as easy as we can for people and groups to participate,” Fields said. “The more people out there working, the more beautiful Covington will be.”
To see the Adopt-A-Spot map, look
HERE.
For more information about the program or to register at Keep Covington Beautiful's website,
CLICK HERE. Once you register, you’ll receive an e-mail with follow-up information.
# # #