Volunteers in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles – including members of St. Athanasius’ Episcopal Church – collected large amounts of trash for disposal on World Clean-up Day Sept. 21. Photos: Mostyn Trudinger-Smith
[The Episcopal News] About 90 volunteers, including members of St. Athanasius Episcopal Church, gathered on Saturday, Sept. 21 at El Centro Del Pueblo in Echo Park (Los Angeles) for the neighborhood’s World Cleanup Day event.
Volunteers were divided into groups, provided with gloves, trash bags, shovels, and rakes, and assigned an area to clean. The effort focused on nearby sections of Sunset, Glendale, Alvarado, and other neighborhood streets.
Saturday marked Echo Park’s first participation in the annual event, which began in 2008 and has been happening around the world ever since. “We’re just a group of people in Echo Park, joining together to join the world,” said Dolores DeAngelis of St. Athanasius’ Church and a main event organizer.
The event was a joint effort of many groups, with organization and support from Friends of Elysian Park, Preserve Echo Park, Senator Durazo’s office, the Echo Park Neighborhood council, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, St. Paul’s Commons (administrative hub of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and site of St. Athanasius’ Church), and El Centro Del Pueblo, which served as the event’s headquarters. Many more local groups attended the event as volunteers, including the Dream Center, Ariari21, NYCC, and others.
Dolores DeAngelis, at left, a member of St. Athanasius’ Episcopal Church in Echo Park, was among the organizers of the annual clean-up event.
“We’ve got a lot of different folks, and I think we’re all here for the same reason,” said councilmember Hugo Soto Martinez at the event. “It’s really important to get into the community and be involved as much as possible.”
Eric Newton, an event organizer, handed out brooms, shovels, and rakes to clean curbs and gutters, and scoop up piles of trash. The tools were all loaned by the Los Angeles Office of Community Beautification (OCB), an office that supports volunteer and community cleanups as well as other beautification projects. “It’s like a city-wide toolshed,” Newton said. “There is a city cleanup apparatus. It’s good to know.”
Conrad Terrazas-Cross, a representative from Senator Maria Elena Durazo’s office, emphasized the need for community organization in conjunction with government support. “It’s all about the community, it’s about the group,” Terraszas-Cross said. “The city can’t do everything; the state can’t do everything. We all need to chip in.”
Paul Bowers, a member of the Echo Park Neighborhood Council, said that the event was organized from the ground up, with no government involvement in the planning stage. He said he would like to see more of this kind of community action and citizen engagement. “It’s clear that the city’s having a major problem keeping up with basic sanitation, and so there are these organizations, like the Echo Park Trash Club, the Silver Lake Trash Humans, who are trying to step in,” Bowers said. “We don’t just expect the city to do everything. That’s sort of what’s missing.”
Collected trash bags await pickup after volunteer crews finish their work.
Still, he also wishes that there was more coordination between citizen and government efforts. “There’s just no dialogue about that. It makes for a lack of faith in government,” Bowers said. “There’s a place for teamwork.”
By 10:30 a.m. tied bags of trash lined the designated streetcorners, awaiting pickup by the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. The event lasted only about three hours in total, but with 90 volunteers working together, even a little time meant a lot of trash off the streets.