Daisy

Adopt-A-Park Community Project

For my community service project I decided to participate in the Adopt-A-Park program. This restoration project started in 2006 and encourages the Union county community to become a part of the commitment to help enhance and care for green spaces in the community. This event took place on Sunday March 24, 2019 at the Warinanco park in Roselle.

The Union County Parks consist of 36 parks spanning 6,200 acres. These parks are maintained with the help of dedicated volunteers throughout the year. The Kean University Center for Leadership and Service and the Union County Parks Environmental Specialist encourage students to participate in removing debris and litter from the parks, restoring park area streams, and fixing fenced areas in the different parks of Union County.

I registered and my petition was approved to volunteer  for the Adopt-A-Park project. We met at the Wilkins theater bus stop at 9:15 a.m and were scheduled to depart at 9:30 a.m to Warinanco park. We were advised to wear comfortable clothes that we didn't mind getting dirty because we were going to work in an open area.

The photographs above show a small portion of trash (plastic bags, bottles and paper) inside the lake, which is contributing to the pollution of the water and is causing the fish to die. 

I found this very outrageous because this clearly shows how humans are polluting the environment and destroying nature.

This last photograph shows the satisfaction and pride that I felt as a volunteer helping clean the park on that Sunday morning.

The main reason why I decided to participate in this community project was because even though I knew how serious climate change is, prior to taking this course I didn’t think of how important it will be to help keep our surrounding environment clean. I always try to clean up after my family and myself every time we go to the park or to the beach, but when I saw the “Adopt-A-Park” project on the cougar link site, I thought this was a great way to contribute to the community and start creating a habit of responsibility as a citizen to help keep our community clean.

We regularly try to keep our homes in optimal conditions to avoid pests, bad smells and other undesirable things. In the same way, public and recreational spaces, such as squares, parks, beaches, rivers, forests and many others, are special places that we can visit with family or friends, having fun and being amazed by its beauty.

If we do not want them to disappear and transform themselves into insecure places, we must take care of them as we do with our homes.

Therefore, it is important to learn and teach easy ways to maintain and take care of these public spaces so we can be able to enjoy them for a very long time.

A clean park is a safe park. To start and motivate us, we must not only leave the park clean as we found it when we arrived, but it’s important to contribute little by little with our help.

For example, before leaving the place, we can pick up all the garbage we generated and also helping pick up the one we find when leaving the site, and doing whatever is necessary to leave the park impeccable.

During our visit to the park we must avoid damaging the place, taking care of plants, structures, animals, etc. Another way to have our parks clean is to have with us a handy garbage container or bag to collect all the waste that we generate and find through the way. These green spaces are key to improving environmental health of the population, as they act as lungs that renew the polluted air.