The “Swannanoa Sweep 2009”, an annual cleanup campaign sponsored by Swannanoa Pride Community Coalition, was a rousing success. We had 36 participants, and together we collected at least 148 bags of trash, plus about half a dumpster full of miscellaneous junk and several tires! It’s just amazing how much a group of dedicated folks can accomplish in a short time, especially when it’s not raining!

It may not seem like it sometimes, but every year Swannanoa is getting cleaner and cleaner. When we return to the same areas, we notice that each year the “deeper” parts are cleaner, and we’re mostly just picking up surface litter. Still, that litter is obnoxious, unsightly and unrelenting.

What can be done? Well, in the long run, we hope to get better trash service from the County, perhaps by siting a “transfer and recycling center” here. But in the meantime, you can play a major role.

We’ve talked for years about how this needs to be a bigger, more community-involved event. To grow, however, we need a larger core group of dedicated souls, to whom litter is a special challenge, who would be willing to be a part of this effort from year to year.

To achieve that, we’d like to invite you to join us for next year’s event. We’d like to have many, many “captains”, who would help us identify areas that need attention then work to involve that neighborhood or nearby businesses or places of worship to become a part of “Swannanoa Sweep 2010”. We believe that it’s time to take this event more proactively to the community, but we need more help to do that.

It’s easy to imagine a truly community-wide event, with scores of Swannanoans swarming all over the valley on one big day (“Swannanoa Swarm”?), coming together to clean up the roads and neighborhoods, then joining together afterward for music and food and neighborly pride.

See you next year!

Yours,