KAB At A Glance
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2011 AT A GLANCE
Keep Akron Beautiful received the America Recycles Day Award from Keep Ohio Beautiful for 2010 programming. The annual America Recycles Day is held on November 15th each year. The agency’s Program Manager, Melissa Adams partnered with the Akron Public Schools to boost mixed paper recycling rates in November, 2010, 118% over October statistics in the parking lot collection bins! She then was asked to serve on the national committee that took her concept and offered it to the Keep America Beautiful, Inc. network for 2011.
In May 2011, at the agency’s 30th anniversary luncheon celebration, Keep Akron Beautiful, presented to the Akron community a 30 foot trailer, called the Community Pride Trailer [CPT]. With the help of grants received from Dominion Foundation and Charter One, KAB has been able help ten community organizations cleaned up and spruced up 91 sites, mostly vacant and abandon properties, within their neighborhood. By using the garden and landscape equipment supplied within the trailer, citizens who want to take the initiate to improve their immediate neighborhood and re-purpose the clean and improved site are able to reserve the trailer free of charge. Approximately 3,422 volunteer hours were logged collecting 116 bags of litter, planting 3 trees, planting 618 flowers and bulbs, as well as painting a house a commercial building and eradicating graffiti!
A Ford 1500 pick-up truck has been purchased with a private grant and matching funds from KAB. This previously owned 2001 vehicle will be used to transport the Community Pride Trailer and by our Litter Collection Coordinator on a daily basis as he surveys the city for litter, illegal dumping, and graffiti.
The agency held its first photography contest as part of the agency’s 30th anniversary celebration. The contest focused on photographs taken at the 39 Flowerscapes in the city. The 30 entries were displayed at the 30th anniversary celebration held at Hazel Tree Interiors who hosted the evening of family, friends, fun and good food. Major sponsors of the fundraiser were SummaCare & Summa Health Systems, Akron Plastic Surgeons and River Valley Paper Company.
Keep Akron Beautiful (KAB) was recognized for high performance within the Keep America Beautiful, Inc. network at the 58th Annual Conference in New Orleans by receiving the President’s Circle Award, December, 2011. Melissa Adams presented at the annual conference on Akron’s roll-out of the Community Pride Trailer.
KAB was awarded one of 4 Keep America Beautiful/Pennsylvania Horticultural Society City Partners 2011 grants to send 2 City of Akron Planning Department representatives with Paula Davis, all expenses paid, to Philadelphia to observe their successful Clean & Green program for restoring vacant lots, LandCare program for maintaining them and their City Harvest/Garden Tenders programming.
Two contracts presented earned income opportunities, one with the new Service Department Inspectors to help remove posted dumping from private property and a second for bi-weekly litter sweeps at selected Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority (AMHA) developments, for litter programming revenue. Through a beautification subsidy with the Downtown Akron Partnership (DAP), the agency has been able to continue Flowerscapes at three Summit County sites within the Special Improvement District.
Keep Akron Beautiful handled the public graffiti eradication of 69 public properties in 2011. In 2008, KAB created a grant-funded graffiti eradication system for blasting sodium-bicarbonate and hired a full-time Supervisor to eliminate tagging of public buildings also using solvents and re-painting. In 2010, the eradication of graffiti services became available to private citizens for a fee of $50. KAB eradicated 32 private sites.
Volunteers donated 34,564.5 hours to planting, picking up litter, judging, delivering, and promoting, planning and setting policy for a volunteer value of time invested in Keep Akron Beautiful for the year July 20010-June 2011, estimated at a value of $714,477.17.
On Arbor Day, April 29, 2011, three Akron elementary schools celebrated with tree planting ceremonies. The three classes that were judged 1st through 3rd place in the annual slogan contest received donated nursery trees as their prizes. “Tress are awesome-they deserve to blossom” was the first place slogan written by Connie Kubilus’s fourth grade class at Smith Elementary School. Also, 2,500 Flowering Dogwood seedlings were distributed to each fourth grader in town. The Education Specialist visited 57 fourth grade classrooms to present her Arbor Day PowerPoint show and Jeopardy Game to 2,344 elementary students.
Keep Akron Beautiful, the one investment guaranteed to grow, raised $81,230 from the private sector primarily to plan, plant and maintain Flowerscape sites in downtown Akron, at Alexander Park and Derby Downs. The season wholesale flower bill was $18,888 for 26,407 plants!
A subsidy from the City of Akron’s Service Department provided necessary operating funds for the agency to facilitate the implementation of The Greenprint for Akron sustainability plan, released to the public on Earth Day 2009. Paula Davis serves as the Director of the Greenprint, coordinating the 8 Green Ribbon Panel meetings to facilitate the living document’s progress by learning about sustainable best practices. With the help of a University of Akron intern, the Engineering Department and Affinity Consultants, in November the follow-up greenhouse gas emissions survey was completed comparing emission reductions to the baseline year of 2005. Both the community and government indexes showed a greenhouse reduction. The Climate Action Plan addendum to The Greenprint for Akron will be released in 2012.
Flowerscapes for sale! For the seventh year donors could donate the full cost of a site, $3,500, and have the opportunity to put their name on the signage for a year. There were six corporate and foundation contributors in 2011 that provided the funding, or the equivalent in-kind support. Children’s Hospital of Akron joined the naming partners.
The Flowerscape Director supervised 73 volunteer groups gardening Adopt-A-Sites on public land located in all ten wards of the city. There were 3 new Adopt-A-Site during the 2011 growing-season. Volunteers purchased and planted over 19,887 annuals, raising $4,786 to pay for them wholesale. Our appreciation to the residents of over 20 AMHA
developments for pitching in and gardening around their development signs.
Keep Akron Beautiful conducted their eleventh Community Improvement Index survey, a requirement of membership in the Keep America Beautiful, Inc. network for close to 564 state and local affiliates. On a scale of 0 - 4, a drive-by tour of all ten wards rated Akron an overall 1.1, moving closer to a 1.0 rating of “no litter” for a rating city-wide! The most littered land uses were commercial and the least littered areas were commercial. This year the volunteers also rated the amount of graffiti (1.03) and temporary illegal signage (1.3) they observed.
Keep Akron Beautiful has managed a litter and illegal dumping collection program for 30 years. Three supervisors, under the direction of a full-time Litter Collection Coordinator, canvass the city’s expressways, roadsides and parks daily, year-round. As of December 31, 2011, our employees had supervised 1,445 community service-sentenced crewmembers as they picked up 70 tons of litter and 31 tons of dumping off public property. They source-separated 967 bags of recyclables and recycled 210 scrap tires.
The 30th Annual Clean Up Akron Week/Great American Cleanup™, April 30-May 7, 2011, mobilized 5,587 volunteers who cleaned up 106 public sites of litter and illegal dumping. Thirty-four [34] schools had 3,457 students cleaning their campuses. A total of 9.3 tons of trash and 121 scrap tires were recycled from public property. The Akron Zoo provided free admission on Super Saturday, May 7th for about 650 cleanup volunteers who came for a free lunch and awards ceremony, planned by our Beautification Board members.
For every $1 of government money used to implement Keep Akron Beautiful programming, the agency benefited from $7.08 worth of private sector in-kind services or product support!
Keep Akron Beautiful mailed out 3,710 Beautification Watch Awards in September, 2011, to residences, businesses and institutions that did an outstanding job of private property beautification and litter control. Congratulations, people DO notice! Neighborhoods were canvassed by Beautification Board members and Board of Directors and their spouses, members of Torchbearers, and agency staff during the month of July.
Dreamscape Makeover Raffle 2011 returned for the eighth year and Board members sold 1,138 $25 raffle tickets to give one Summit County private property owner a chance to win a $10,000 professional front or backyard makeover! The net profit from five months of ticket sales was $24,640 which supported the Flowerscape program. The winner was Joe Kidder, of Ellet, who chose a front yard makeover. Twenty-seven Vendor Partners donated seven days plus of labor, expertise, materials, and love to the success of this project. The landscape designer Jim Gates, of Gates Landscaping, provided the project coordination and the vision for enlarged flowerbeds, the removal of a tree, expanded irrigation and design. The Flowerscape program is alive and healthy in 2011 because of a little help from our talented green industry friends!
Operation Coverload brought together the following partners the March 25, 2011 to enforce the tarp and litter laws on Akron’s expressways: Akron Police Department (APD), State Highway Patrol, Keep Ohio Beautiful and District 4, ODOT. State Highway Patrol and APD Traffic Division stopped 19 vehicles issuing 11 citations, 2 for un-covered loads. Awareness brochures were distributed at the Waste Management Transfer Station in Akron and at landfills north and south of the city.
Flowerscape crews, in October 2011, collected spent plant material in kraft bags and delivered 11.4 tons of yard waste to the Akron Compost Facility for recycling into EarthPro for next season. Litter Collection crews normally use KAB logo litter collection bags which are heavy-metal free and are designed to biodegrade in as little as 9 months. The crews also recycled all the plastic pots the plants arrived in from the nurseries in May at Legacy Polymers in Streetsboro.
In August 2010, Keep Akron Beautiful hosted the second Greenprint Enrichment Bus Tour for Akron Public Schools science educators. The day-long trip, made possible by a grant from the Smith Foundation, visited 8 different facilities, sites and organizations that are integral to meeting the city and community’s sustainability plan goals.
KAB portable receptacles are available through Keep Akron Beautiful for litter prevention uses during civic events. Organizations are required to sign an acceptance form that they will make every effort to return the 45-gallon ($6.50 each) containers to KAB following the event to be recycled. Ninety-one [91] organizations requested use of the receptacles.
KAB’s plastic recycling program - Recycling-on-the Go! - is available to the public for civic events. A metal frame and 2 large plastic bags are available for borrowing through KAB. This began as a pilot program in 2009 and was made possible through a grant received from the Nestle Corporation. Fifty-two [52] organizations borrowed the recycling containers.
ACBC – Aluminum Cans for Burned Children – KAB is the distribution agent for receptacles and liners – we coordinate and encourage new sites for collection to benefit the burn unit at The Children’s Hospital of Akron. Twenty [20] organizations borrowed the recycling can containers.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame STEM Middle School sixth graders and their science teachers partnered with KAB to solve the problem of how to get the community engaged in the Greenprint mission of energy efficiency. The resulting presentations ranged from creating education websites to educational game shows, brochures and rap routines!
The Greenprint for Akron awarded three monetary prizes to the top sustainable secondary science projects at the January, 2010 Akron Science & Technology Fair. Top prize of $250 went to seventh grader Benjamin Carter of Miller South, for his project entitled, “Water-An Energy Source?”
The Education Specialist and the President worked with the Akron Boys and Girls Clubs to create environmental opportunities for their students in 2011. Pam Ray did the Arbor Day celebration presentation for the After School Program participants at headquarters in the spring, while Paula Davis did the Household Energy Efficiency presentation for the teenagers over their spring break at their Clubhouse. Both groups got either seedlings or energy efficiency home kits to take home to their families.
