Over 300 Keep Riverside Clean & Beautiful (KRCB) volunteers participated in the City of Riverside, California’s Festival of Lights on Nov. 25. The volunteers passed out programs, picked up litter, monitored the event barricades, and worked as a team to make the festival a clean and green event.

“If that’s not LOVE of community, I don’t know what is!” exclaimed KRCB Executive Director Connie Librenjak.

The Festival of Lights is one of many major cleanup and beautification events that KRCB conducted this fall.

The Council Ward 4 Beautification Event took place earlier in November with more than 230 volunteers completing projects at Villegas Park, California Citrus State Historic Park, Casa Blanca neighborhood and Woodcrest neighborhood. Results included:

• The Graffiti Team used 25 gallons of paint to remove over 120 tags and 100 yards of restoration along the wall near the railroad tracks by Mary St.
• The Planting Team planted 150 white roses on Bountiful St. between Trautwein Rd. and Van Buren Blvd.
• The Litter Team collected 2,445 pounds of litter and bulky items at Villegas Park and all throughout the surrounding Ward 4 area.
• The Citrus Park Team collected 1,485 pounds of green waste at the California Citrus State Historic Park.

Overall, a combined 3,930 pounds of litter and waste was removed from Ward 4.

Earlier in the fall, a Keep America Beautiful/Lowe’s Community Partner Grant provided KRCB with funding that helped make its annual Santa Ana River & City Waterways Cleanup a great success.

This cleanup is a community event that provides hands-on environmental stewardship with the cleanup and beautification of local waterways in Riverside. KRCB continues to raise community awareness and addresses the need to protect the river as a natural habitat by preventing litter, debris and illegal dumping from flowing into the Pacific Ocean from its local tributary.

Nearly 500 volunteers participated in this year’s Santa Ana River Cleanup. The volunteers collected more than 33,000 pounds of litter and bulky items, used 70 gallons of paint to remove over 500 tags, and planted 100 bougainvilleas and daylilies at Riverside’s Market St. underpass. The Santa Ana River & City Waterways Cleanup project brings together entities throughout the region for a large scale collaborative event and engages scores of community volunteers each year.

KRCB’s mission is to instill a sense of community pride by creating partnerships that work toward beautifying the city. A water restoration project of this scale also brings vitality and sustainability to a region where it is most needed.