It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s an Adopt-a-Street sign. You’ve spotted them around town. Bright green, announcing not a direction nor a traffic signal, but a volunteer commitment to keep Austin beautiful. Behind every sign is a group of volunteers – neighbors, coworkers, classmates – who dedicate themselves to cleaning that section of street four times a year.
As you can imagine, there are a lot of groups to manage and signs to oversee. In partnership with the City of Austin, Keep Austin Beautiful has worked to maintain existing signs and install new ones. City resources are limited, sometimes creating a backlog of signs. Serendipitously, LoneStar Logos reached out to Keep Austin Beautiful to explore partnership opportunities. We discovered our common interest – road signs! Through a contract with the Texas Department of Transportation, LoneStar Logos produces and installs street signs throughout the state. Wasting no time, they helped us inventory, design, print, and install Adopt-a-Street signs to ensure adopters are recognized in a timely manner.
Inspired by the many adopters, LoneStar Logos staff began volunteering to pick up trash. The group first participated in Clean Lady Bird Lake, then made a lasting commitment as the adopter of a half-mile stretch along South First Street.
At this stage, we could easily cheer and call the partnership a success, but what surfaced next is the remarkable thing that can happen when businesses take a genuine interest in helping on all levels. Ready to do more, we sat down to brainstorm. Offering video production and technical expertise, the LoneStar team could be found camera-ready at cleanups, restoration projects, and Green Teens sessions to capture the moment. They edited hours of footage into video stories. The lens became more focused when they led several sessions guiding Green Teen interns on how to produce instructional PSAs.
LoneStar Logos started their Keep Austin Beautiful involvement behind the scenes, but they are now front and center in the community. Thank you for illustrating the full potential of business engagement. Keep Austin Beautiful is proud to recognize LoneStar Logos as the 30th Annual Community Involvement Award Winner. LonesStar Logos accepted the honor along with winners in multiple categories at Beautiful Bash on November 18th. We look forward to our continued partnership with LoneStar Logos and seeing who emerges as dedicated community partners in 2016.
