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The New Year is a great time to adopt new habits, improve your routine, and bring an all-around positive change to your life.
Ramzi Rosario, a student at Cutler Bay Senior High, saw an excellent way to practice this with a cleaning platform he created called “Pick It Up Mission,” at Coconut Grove’s David T. Kennedy Park.
Pick It Up Mission is a cleaning initiative Ramzi started with one main goal, creating a cleaning culture in communities. He achieves this goal by taking photo submissions of people picking up everyday trash and posting them on the @pickitupmission Instagram page.
His hope is that the more people see others getting posted, the more will want to get posted themselves. Eventually, people will see picking up trash as an effortless and vital part of community structure, all thanks to the page.
In addition to this method, Ramzi also does cleanups, but not in the format you usually see them. Instead of picking his own cleanup locations, Ramzi allows his followers to choose the destinations, which is precisely how this cleanup started.
His friend, Santiago Quiros, a La Salle High School senior, goes to school near Kennedy Park. Whenever he walked to the park after school, he noticed the abundance of trash near the mangroves and shoreline. Santiago sent Ramzi a direct message on the Instagram page, and they both drove out to give it a look. Sure enough, there were thousands of small plastic items scattered along the shoreline that needed immediate cleanup. They acted quickly on the scene, filming, editing, and posting a call-to-action video on Dec. 29, 2022, advertising the park cleanup on Jan. 1st. This is the same approach Ramzi takes with all his cleanups. He usually films a minute-long call to action advertising the location, time, date, and materials provided to generate maximum community outreach.
On the day of the cleanup, Ramzi and Santiago handed out bags, gloves, food, and snacks to volunteers. In addition to this, South Florida’s premier volunteer work outreach organization, Volunteering Miami, showed up to film a mini documentary on the cleanup and Ramzi’s mission. The day may have started off slow at the front of the park, but as the group made its way to the mangroves, the number of discarded plastics found increased.
What Ramzi thought would be a quick cleanup effort turned into a more difficult mission, and what he thought would be sufficient volunteers, turned out to be not nearly enough.
Ramzi and his group cleaned the area for two hours. They found mostly straws and bottlecaps, outlining how detrimental casual plastic waste can be to the environment.
These small plastics are hard to dig up and severely pollute the park’s mangroves and blue crab habitats.
They did all they could, and made a considerable dent in the problem, cleaning well over 1,000 pieces of plastic in a short time. Pick It Up Mission participant were thrilled to help this much, but the problem at the park remains, and they will be back out there again with even more volunteers and more time to completely rid that area of trash.
Pick It Up Mission listens to suggestions from all members of the community. Meaning, if you are reading this right now, and you know a specific area with a big trash problem, Direct Message @pickitupmission on Instagram. Ramzi will talk with you and see if he can bring a cleanup group to an area where you don’t see enough action being taken.
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