Brentwood Clean Streets Project

Vital Stats

Yessenia C

Central Islip, NY

  • people helped70000
  • People Doing It 15

The Problem

The Brentwood Clean Streets Project, an all-day, neighborhood-wide project focused on getting people to "Do Something", through community partnerships, reduced negative behaviors, increased neighborhood awareness, and a cleaner environment in which we live. With the help of hundreds of volunteers throughout our neighborhood, we will embark on a campaign to remove over 1 ton of trash from the streets and empty lots of Bretnwood, while painting over as many pieces of destructive graffiti from the homes of our residents, to the store fronts of our business owners. In the process we will save our residents and business owner’s time and money, and take a stand again those who wish to deface and pollute our property. Our objective is to enlist neighborhood residents in a campaign to take back their streets and to remain active in taking care of our neighborhood, which will in turn reduce the negative behaviors that correlate to the recent spike in crime around town. We want to promote self respect and neighborhood awareness by providing this hands-on opportunity to clean up neighborhood blight. Progress and good work can easily be tracked through the hundreds of pounds of waste removed from our empty lots and streets, and the scores of newly painted fences that will start lining blocks. It is our hope that with a campaign focused on immediately addressing litter and graffiti concerns over property as soon as it’s vandalized that those said vandals will feel hopeless in their efforts to pollute and deface property. This in turn could reduce the recidivism rate of this segment of the population; in other words, they may find something better to do. During our event we plan on taking before and after shots of homes and businesses that have been rehabilitated through our volunteer’s efforts as a way of documenting the entire process. We will also use social media sites such as Facebook, local print media, and local television stations to promote the event and track progress.

Plan of Action

Our project divides Brentwood Streets into several categories: Gateway Roads, Major Road, Neighborhood Watch Areas, and Commercial properties, which can then be addressed through volunteer efforts on the day of the event. Volunteers will be broken into groups of 10, and provided the materials necessary to get underway. Each group of 10 volunteers will be responsible for removing litter from a 1 mile stretch of road, or an empty lot in the neighborhood of choice. A special graffiti removal crew will work to address vandalism spots along the gateway and major road corridors. To advertise the event, we will partner with our local ambulance corps, to mail out to their membership as well as post on electronic billboards. The same agreement will be in effect for our volunteer fire department, as they have the similar resources for advertisement. We will create a Facebook page to track all progress and sign up volunteers before the event. Solicitation letters for supplies and refreshments have been produced to distribute to potential contributing businesses. We plan on implementing a full-scale partnership with our municipal agencies as well. We will work with our local garbage companies for containers for our empty lots, and garbage trucks to pick up all garbage bags filled during the event. We will also be partnering with our local town government to provide additional resources as necessary, making this project a true collaboration of volunteers, services, and industry. To date we have secured collaborative partnerships with the following agencies and businesses: Town of Islip, NY, National Waste Services, V. Garofalo Carting Inc. Home Depot Stores, Lowe's Hardware Stores, Wal-Mart, Brentwood Legion Ambulance, Brentwood Fire Department, Youth Enrichment Services, Adelante of Suffolk County, PRONTO of Long Island, First Baptist Church of Bay Shore, Keep Islip Clean Inc. By the time the project begins (5/7/2011) we hope to have a coalition of over 50 businesses, municipalities, and local elected officials working together to make this project a huge success.
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Environment
Pollution

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