CELEBRATING COMMUNITY CONSERVATION EFFORTS
Keep Austin Beautiful Honors Local Environmental Stewards at Beautify Bash
AUSTIN, Texas – Since 1985, Keep Austin Beautiful has given annual awards to recognize the outstanding efforts of individuals, community groups, and businesses to make Austin a better place to live through environmental stewardship and community engagement. The awards distinguish those who inspire friends and neighbors to care for Austin’s open spaces and natural resources, through involvement with their neighborhoods, schools, community groups, and workplaces. Keep Austin Beautiful will celebrate the community-building achievements of award winners and raise funds for the organization’s mission at Beautify Bash on Thursday, November 15, 2018, from 6:30 to 9:30pm at the UMLAUF Sculpture Garden and Museum (605 Azie Morton Road, Austin, TX 78704).
At this time, Keep Austin Beautiful would like to recognize the 2018 Annual Award Winners. These inspiring awardees have gone above and beyond in their work to engage community members, neighbors, family, and friends in protecting and improving Austin’s environment. They have spearheaded recycling initiatives, raised awareness about the negative impacts of litter and single-use plastic, coordinated the removal of materials from illegal dumpsites, and led by example as volunteers dedicated to cleaning up public spaces and enhancing shared community resources. Each has engaged with Keep Austin Beautiful’s programming and resources to amplify their efforts. The 2018 Annual Award Winners are:
Visa Beautification Award – TX Sprouts
Samsung Litter Abatement Award – fitppl
Emerson Community Involvement Award – Waste Management
Dennis Hobbs Individual Achievement Award – Karen Eshliman
Applied Materials Education Award – Doss Elementary School
Dell Youth Achievement Award – Sheridan Ray, Akins High School
Cooke & Mullen Community Leadership Award – Julie Sondecker
Visa Beautification Award – TX Sprouts
TX Sprouts has helped numerous schools in and around Austin create beautiful and functional gardens. In building edible gardens at schools, TX Sprouts provides students with beautiful outdoor spaces and food resources, but also teaches them important lessons about caring for the green spaces around us. By engaging students in projects to build gardens and grow food, the organization shows students how maintaining and improving our shared outdoor spaces can keep us happy and healthy, too. Their collaborative work perfectly demonstrates how green space beautification projects can serve broader community needs and goals. TX Sprouts truly embodies Keep Austin Beautiful’s mission. We are thankful that our Tool Shack lending library is able to serve a program that does so much positive work in Austin communities, and we look forward to working with TX Sprouts for years to come.
Samsung Litter Abatement Award – fitppl
fitppl puts serious muscle and dedication into efforts to remove plastics and other litter from the environment, while emphasizing the overall importance of community health. Their Active Cleanups combine exercise with community service, and fitppl has mobilized volunteers in creek beds, greenbelts, and other challenging terrain to remove large, illegally dumped items, from couches to mattresses to tires. A passion for keeping plastics out of our waterways led their founder, Patrick Schecht, to become a Lake Leader for Keep Austin Beautiful’s Clean Lady Bird Lake program. Six times a year he is at the lake bright and early to provide volunteers with a unique cleanup experience. fitppl embodies the belief that by inspiring individuals to take small, daily actions to reduce waste and clean our environment, we can make a meaningful, collective impact.
Emerson Community Involvement Award – Waste Management
Waste Management has been a long-term partner in Keep Austin Beautiful’s work to remove litter from public spaces, and without their support, many Keep Austin Beautiful projects would not be possible. They provide dumpster services at major events such as Keep Austin Beautiful Day and the Lake Travis Cleanup, as well as at numerous community organized projects, ensuring that the trash, recyclables, and bulk items volunteers clean up end up where they belong. Without these Waste Management dumpsters, many of these materials would go right back into the environment. Paul Daugereau and the Waste Management team have also distinguished themselves for many years as the grill team at the Keep Austin Beautiful Day Volunteer Appreciation Party, cooking up burgers and hot dogs for the 1,000 or more volunteers who attend the event. This kind of service perfectly illustrates Waste Management’s dedication to supporting the volunteers who do so much to keep Austin clean and beautiful.
Dennis Hobbs Individual Achievement Award – Karen Eshliman
Karen Eshliman is a true volunteer leader, in every sense of the word. She began volunteering with Keep Austin Beautiful’s Clean Lady Bird Lake program in 2011, and her love of volunteering motivated her to become a Lake Leader the very next year. In the past seven years, she has led some 40 lake cleanups (missing only three events in her tenure), coordinating hundreds of volunteers and picking up more than 3,000 pounds of trash. Volunteers are sure to have a great experience and learn a lot about the impact of cleaning up litter from Austin waterways when they volunteer at Karen’s site on the lake. Karen also shows a knack for getting people out to participate in a cleanup. She is the first to strike up a conversation with a neighbor or friend about Clean Lady Bird Lake, and this dedication ensures that new people are always learning about the program and how they can help solve the problem of litter in Austin.
Applied Materials Education Award – Doss Elementary School
The teachers and students at Doss Elementary School are consistently undertaking projects to make their campus more sustainable. After participating in Keep Austin Beautiful’s Generation Zero education program, the second grade students were so excited by what they had learned about recycling and litter that they organized their own “Keep Doss Beautiful” club. Second grade teacher Ms. Means reports that students took it upon themselves to clean up their campus at recess twice a week, an effort that became part of a bigger “Garbage Challenge” led by the fifth grade, to see who could collect the most litter and recycling on campus. This year, the school was temporarily relocated for campus renovations, and Doss teachers partnered with Recycle Austin to recycle as many materials as possible during the move. At the new campus, kindergarteners are maintaining a pollinator garden while other grades are supporting cafeteria composting and recycling and caring for two chickens and a composting worm bin. As one student summed up the efforts at the school, “I hope I can make a difference in Austin and Doss!” Doss is a shining example of how schools can encourage and support students to see how their actions can have a meaningful impact on our environment.
Dell Youth Achievement Award – Sheridan Ray, Akins High School
Sheridan shows outstanding leadership and commitment to environmental stewardship in many aspects of her life. As a freshman participant in the Akins High School Green Teens organization last year, she took an active role in fundraising for a reusable water bottle filling station at her school. She sold Green Teens-branded Nalgene bottles to peers, encouraging them to move away from disposable water bottles to reusable containers, and thanks in part to her efforts the hydration station is being installed at Akins this fall. Over the past summer, Sheridan served as a Green Teens intern at Keep Austin Beautiful. Sheridan consistently demonstrated her creativity and passion for environmental science as she taught Keep Austin Beautiful’s environmental education curriculum to youth at local parks and summer camps and developed her own Activity Kit curriculum about the nitrogen cycle. As a sophomore at Akins, she is now a Park Ranger Cadet in the Akins Green Tech Academy, and continues to encourage her friends and peers to move toward more sustainable practices and zero waste lifestyles. She plans to expand on these efforts in her future career as a marine biologist.
Cooke & Mullen Community Leadership Award – Julie Sondecker
As the community member who nominated Julie for this award puts it, “For Julie Sondecker, every day is Earth Day…literally.” Many know Julie through her Instagram handle, @365daysofhiking, a project that got its start on a hike after Memorial Day in 2017. Encountering litter all over the ground from the recent holiday festivities, she picked up as much trash as she could hold in her hands, but saw there was much left to clean up. Where some might have stopped, Julie decided she wanted to do more. She challenged herself to pick up trash on a hike every single day for the next year, and to share what she picked up with the public through Instagram. The project has reached countless people in Austin and beyond, and Julie continues in her efforts to complete 500 trash hikes by the end of this year. She has also led walking tours of Austin greenbelts, hosted trash cleanups in partnership with other organizations, and helped educate youth at Camp Impact. In all these efforts, Julie has been an incredible advocate for raising awareness and educating people from all walks of life about the importance of protecting and preserving our outdoor spaces. In leading by example, Julie is an inspiration to us all to do more to keep our city clean.
Media Contact:
Andrew Gansky, Development Coordinator
andrew@keepaustinbeautiful.org
512.391.0617 x708
