Here’s an idea to give a boost to your neighborhood: Hold a community cleanup. 

A week ago last Saturday, three sites in Savin Hill saw some community love when 40 residents picked up rakes, shovels, and other implements and gave a few hundred hours of volunteer time.  On the menu were Savin Hill Park, Patton’s Cove, and the new Wildlife Garden and adjacent highway berm on Savin Hill Avenue.

Though the volunteers faced some pretty cold weather, huge amounts of trash and debris wound up in bags and in areas of Savin Hill Park that have been set aside for compost.  Gravel was purchased to cover the stairway along the cliff walk on the south side of Savin Hill Park.

This event, the 40th annual cleanup in Savin Hill, is a product of the Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Association Events Committee and has many community benefits.  The obvious one is that parks and open spaces look attractive following a cleanup. 

The less obvious one is that long-time neighbors and newcomers get to know one another by working together.  Having coffee (courtesy of The Daily) and doughnuts (courtesy of the civic association) for breaks helps build relationships.  In addition, volunteers experience how to solicit donations, and how to work with city government. 

Our team learned that Home Depot provides some tools for such events and found out who at the Parks Department and the Boston’s Love Your Block offices can help with tools and trash removal.  Volunteers also saw how ubiquitous single use plastic bottles and Styrofoam are in our environment and why public policy needs to be changed to eliminate these pollutants.
It doesn’t take much to organize a cleanup.  The Savin Hill event started after I moved into Savin Hill and was aghast at the amount of trash, burnt cars, and glass from broken beer bottles in the park.  After giving up on getting the Parks Department of the 1980s to deal with the problem, I started raking up the glass myself. 

A neighbor approached me and said that he’d join me if I let him know the next time I was raking.  I made up some fliers advertising a cleanup of the park, and fifty people showed up.  

The first years of the cleanup focused on the glass and thorn bushes that made much of the park unusable.  Volunteers also rebuilt puddingstone walkways and retaining walls and cut down dead trees.  They cut the grass of the two-acre space at the top of the hill for 35 years after the Parks Department said it was an area that didn’t require cutting.  Super-volunteers keep the park clean during the year, such that we essentially no longer need to pick up much trash as part of cleanup day. 

Over the past few years, the cleanup has grown to include Patten’s Cove (the park next to the former Boston Globe headquarters), and the Wildlife Garden (the rocky open space that overlooks the Southeast Expressway).  

The movement continues to grow.  There will be a Savin Hill Beach Cleanup on Sun., June 9.  

There are many reasons for communities to organize these events.  They’re relatively simple to organize and they give participants the satisfaction of making their public green spaces look better, while strengthening the social fabric of a neighborhood. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

Bill Walczak’s column appears regularly in the Reporter.