When my editor, Kynala Phillips, and I checked registration numbers 48 hours before the Metcalfe Park Big Clean and Walking Audit event we were co-hosting with Metcalfe Park Community Bridges, only about 25 people had signed up.
That put us at just 17% of the way to making our ambitious 150-person goal.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried. An uptick in registration numbers eased my concerns for a day. Then I woke up on Saturday morning to cold, overcast skies – and the worry returned.
But it turns out all that worry was for nothing – the broader Milwaukee community is more committed to helping each other out than I thought. Before the event even started, more than 20 volunteers had already gathered at Metcalfe Park Rising, a vacant lot that had been transformed into a community space by Community Bridges.
By the end of the day, more than 100 people had participated in the cleanup and walking audit.
Neighbors, Journal Sentinel staff and other Milwaukeeans ate hot dogs and burgers while mingling afterward.
It’s one thing for residents to see a reporter show up week after week. It’s another to see that work shared by a full newsroom. Fourteen of my colleagues were there − cleaning, serving food and connecting with residents like Richard Clark, Sheila Milton and Carolyn Jackson.
The connections didn’t end when the cleanup did. On Monday, investigative reporter John Diedrich told me he had picked up Metcalfe Park resident Constance Shands and her friend Marshall Hemphill on Sunday so they could attend a separate cleanup hosted by Diedrich’s church. He also shared a selfie he snapped with Jada Klippert, one of the young volunteers.
I was trained as a data journalist, and I rely on numbers to help readers make sense of the world around us. So here are some numbers to better understand the impact a three-hour cleanup had on the neighborhood:
That’s nearly 100 actionable items Community Bridges will share with the city this week.
Another impressive number: volunteers collected more than 150 bags of trash in three hours. For context, a single person in the U.S. generates about 120 standard kitchen-sized bags of trash in an entire year.
These numbers aren’t just action items for the city, though − they’ll also shape my reporting in the months ahead as the basis for new stories and a way to track city action (or inaction).
After the event wrapped, McCurtis sent a short text to Phillips and me: “We did that.”
But “we” is more than the three of us. “We” is everyone who showed up – who gave their time, resources and energy to make Metcalfe Park a cleaner, greener space.
And we can’t wait to do it again next year.
April Quevedo covers Metcalfe Park for the Journal Sentinel’s Neighborhood Dispatch. Contact: aquevedo@usatodayco.com.
Neighborhood Dispatch reporting is supported by Northwestern Mutual Foundation, Journal Foundation, Bader Philanthropies, Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and reader contributions to the Journal Sentinel Community-Funded Journalism Project. Journal Sentinel editors maintain full editorial control over all content. To support this work, visit jsonline.com/support. Checks can be addressed to Local Media Foundation (memo: “JS Community Journalism”) and mailed to P.O. Box 85015, Chicago, IL 60689.
The JS Community-Funded Journalism Project is administered by Local Media Foundation, tax ID #36-4427750, a Section 501(c)(3) charitable trust affiliated with Local Media Association, and EnMotive, a subsidiary of USA TODAY Co.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Here’s how the first Metcalfe Park cleanup, co-hosted by the Journal Sentinel, went
Reporting by April Quevedo, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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