Student Contributor -H. MacRae
The mission statement for Keep America Beautiful is “To inspire and educate people to take action every day to improve and beautify their community environment.” This organization and its volunteers are dedicated to improving recycling and end littering around the country. Keep America Beautiful, with the help of its five million 
plus volunteers, wants to educate people about the impact of recycling and the impact of littering.
The three key factors that guide Keep America Beautiful’s work to improve recycling are convenience, communication, and cause. By educating the American people to recycle at home, at work and on the go, they create jobs and provide recyclables to manufacture new products and packaging. This also helps benefit the environment and surrounding communities. Keep America Beautiful also works with the State Leaders Council, leaders from affiliates in major metropolitan areas, and consulting firm Econsult Solutions Inc. Working with associations such as these helps clean and prevent litter around the country. Along with cleaning up America, this organization focuses on creating community gardens, tree plantings, and vacant lot transformations. This helps keep America beautiful and green.
Teachers and students could partner with this organization by donating or volunteering. To find volunteer locations near you, go to their website and there is locater for opportunities near you. You can partner as a corporation, educational institution and even as an individual.
Recycling and litter pick up, become more common around the country, but still many areas are not doing either. Beginning it in your community can help support this organization and their efforts to keep America beautiful.
R. Ruff
I am happy to have contributed to Keep America Beautiful, and even happier to have included my students in this contribution. My 4th grade students and I supported this amazing organization by picking up litter around our school campus and adding a compost bin to our classroom to identify the amount of waste we have as a classroom. Our classroom is located in an urban community with variety of socio-economic status’s. The amount of trash in our community is unbelievable and this is an observation many of my students have made. After seeing and hearing about the amount of litter we have on our playground, I wanted to take action as an upper-level class to show our students the importance of not littering. The number of students that participated in this project were 22. The aspects of our project that were similar to those of Keep America Beautiful included, picking up litter around our community and decreasing the amount of waste we use daily. Something that we did differently as a class was, we focused on food waste as well by adding a compost bin to our classroom and putting our food waste in that bin. For our project, we focused less on recycling and more on the trash and food we waste daily and how to decrease this problem by taking action as a class. If I were to do this project again, I would love to add the importance of recycling into it and include a recycling bin in the classroom to observe the amount of paper we waste and how recycling can decrease waste. My class and I had a great time contributing to this partnership and we learned a lot!