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Carrollton Properties

You will receive Keep Carrollton Beautiful announcements approximately once per month:

Note to our Volunteer Board members: To edit this calendar,

1. go to www.KCBadmin.org
2. log in
3. go to the calendar tool
4. add or edit events in the “KCB Public Events” calendar
5. save your changes
6. the calendar pages on this public website will be udpated.

People like us want to leave our children and children’s children a clean, livable planet. We will have to educated them to have “a range of critical-thinking skills to deal with an unprecedented future,” said Susanne Moser, Ignition, and “the ability to cooperate with others under stress to deal with the challenges.”

Medical and public health professional are “taking responsible, ethical action to protect human life,” said Bob Musil, Ignition and we need to help them. We all want healthy homes and communities and right now our laws do not adequately protect us, much less our children.

Climate change not only effects the environment around us but the environment within us – toxin levels, deformities, disabilities and the spread of disease. In 1962, during open-air nuclear testing, John F. Kennedy said, “We all love our children. We all breathe the same air. We are all mortal.” And we all need to do what we can to stop climate change.

Bob Musil, Ignition says climate change “will create serious negative effects from … flooding, wetland destruction and spread of waterborne … diseases.” Not to mention the effects of increased heat.

There is a close relationship between dirty air (high particulate levels from vehicles and power plants) and natural disasters, asthma and heat related deaths. There is also a close relationship between dirty water (pollution from pesticide runoff) and mercury poison, fish advisories and “boil” orders.

Most of us have a part of the natural world we hold dear – woods or mountains or lakes or rivers or even urban garden plots. What happens when those places of spiritual solace disappear? Who is responsible? Aren’t we Earth’s stewards?

Find a place in our community to revitalize – plant trees and involve diverse groups. Eat locally grown food and walk or bicycle to get it. Write your local, state, and federal officials to pressure them for clean energy and strong emissions policies. Speak up for your family’s health. VOTE – vote for those who have individuals’ best interest at heart and not big business’. Stand up for your right to clean air, clean water and a sustainable planet. Change your light bulbs to compact fluorescents and your appliances to Energy Star and turn them off when not in use. Caulk your windows and weather-strip your doors. Fix leaky faucets and don’t waste water. Combine driving trips and don’t idle. You are part of the solution!

Funding for grassroots organization can dramatically shift national energy policy by banding us together for a louder voice. It is ALL our individual responsibilities’ to help make giant strides against climate change for the generations to come. We can solve it! Start now.

On Saturday, it was a beautiful day and Keep Carrollton Beautiful volunteers made sure our streets, parks, greenbelts, streams and lakes are even more beautiful now! Spending their own free time in community service, 270 volunteers collected 9,740 pounds of litter and debris from 34 sites in Carrollton. “We had individual volunteers and scouts and schools and churches and neighborhoods this year. They focused their amazing ‘can do’ attitudes to plan, set up, collect trash and break down our event. We could do nothing without their beautiful spirits.” said Sharon Goddard.

The Don’t Mess With Texas Trash-Off event was a grassroots partnership with Keep America Beautiful, Keep Texas Beautiful and the Texas Department of Transportation – with 340 affiliates cleaning all over Texas. All of America should be looking pretty good today!

Locally, the Trash-Off was Keep Carrollton Beautiful’s sixth annual participation. The event is just one of many activities they host or empower during the three month Great American Cleanup. Keep Carrollton Beautiful is working with many schools, neighborhoods and corporate teams to supply smaller events during this time.

Thanks to Albertsons at Josey and Keller Springs and at Old Denton and Hebron the volunteers didn’t go away hungry. Albertsons thinks that “it’s important to be good neighbors and give back to our communities…..to improve all of our lives”. As a great corporate citizen, they have supported Keep Carrollton Beautiful since its inception in 2004. “I hope that the citizens of Carrollton won’t let this valuable asset get pushed out of our community by stiff competition” said the director of Keep Carrollton Beautiful.

Dr. Pepper Snapple Group’s representative, Bill Kirkland, has also been supporting Keep Carrollton Beautiful since its beginning. “We (DPSG) have a proud, longstanding heritage of caring … for our consumers, our customers, our employees and our neighbors in the communities where we live and do business across the United States… caring is at the heart of our business, shaping our values and the importance we place on corporate social responsibility…” Dr. Pepper really helped out at the Trash-Off making sure none of the hard working volunteers went thirsty.

Keep Carrollton Beautiful could never accommodate so many volunteers without the loyal and enthusiastic support of the Carrollton Evening Lions Club. These Lions are some of the community’s most steadfast local servants. Their website says “When it comes to meeting challenges, our response is simple: We serve…in regions battered by natural disaster, in schools and in eyeglass recycling centers, Lions are at work, helping, leading, planning and supporting…We want everyone to see a better tomorrow…we support vision screenings, eye banks and eyeglass recycling…We believe everyone deserves a healthy life…providing health programs for hearing loss, diabetes prevention and improving the health of children and adults around the world.” “Our Carrollton Evening Lions Club lovingly cooks the best hot dogs in Texas! And always with a smile.” said Sharon Goddard.

Thanks to the many volunteers, this year’s Trash-Off was a roaring success. The people involved know who they are and are very much appreciated. If you’d like to help Keep Carrollton Beautiful, go to their website www.KeepCaroolltonBeautiful.org and join.

Another fun way you can help is by bidding on their Don’t Mess With Texas Trash-Off On-Line Auction. The auction will raise funds for their programs and you can still bid through April 8.
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Keep Carrollton Beautiful started the year with a dedicated Board of Directors (Jeff Weaver our Board Chair, Mark Schallhorn Vice-Chair, Doug Tobe Treasurer/Secretary, Julie Poe and Mia Simmons) and a very frazzled Executive Director, Sharon Goddard. We had accomplished much in the last year, but it took a toll on all of us. We needed to learn how to be a board and function like one – amid all the personalities and we needed to figure out how to make it all happen without one person doing it all!

Our planet was also overwhelmed – by all the natural disasters and everyone pitching-in to help those in need a world away – making it more difficult to raise funds to sustain our local commitment. We met the challenge and exceeded everyone’s expectations while giving all our surplus supplies to Metrocrest Services for the tsunami victims.

A major accomplishment of the year was negotiating Adopt-A-Spot with the city manager’s office – Leonard Martin and Beth Bormann. We would never have gotten on the same page without our silver tongued Jeff Weaver. Trinity Medical Center signed on as our first adoptee.

As we progressed through the year, we found that we had learned a great deal about promoting programs and giving successful events. In February, our Texas SmartScape classes (with Marina Giggleman, Marian Buchanan and Mia Simmons instructing) were very well received with standing room only because the City put it on their website. The Trashy Art Contest we held for the Girl Scouts included both Cross Timbers and Tejas Councils and was a big hit with the winners – getting patches, ribbons and their names in the paper!

The relationships we’d begun last year really paid off as the older Girl Scouts came to earn leadership badges by helping to plan the Great American Cleanup 2005; and the Carrollton Evening Lions Club cooked almost 1000 hot dogs for it too. We had 655 volunteers cleaning 54 designated locations all over Carrollton, collecting 8690 pounds of litter and one live mouse! Albertsons generously gave us hot dogs, cookies and t-shirts to boot. Dr. Pepper, represented by Bill Kirkland of Carrollton, gave us all the drinks and t-shirts also. Trinity Waste Services was there with roll-offs and their mascot, Mobius. Amy Weaver (Jeff’s daughter) turned out to be a great mascot for us in her KCBee costume provided for us by Martha and Joe Grizzel (some great volunteers).

We hosted Intuit’s Earth Day River Cleanup for the second year and it went like clockwork on a beautiful spring day. Trinity River Expedition’s Charles Allen brought his boats and worked with us all day. We were pleased about only collecting 1800 pounds of litter from a much cleaner Elm Fork.

Two of our board members, Mia Simmons and Julie Poe resigned with too much on their plates and we were proud to have Matthew Marchant join us for a short while after he was defeated in the mayoral race.

To further our relationships with the City and our sponsors, we were a vendor with Fuji Film USA at the Elm Fork Nature Fest and made the City’s July 4th Celebration a litter-free event. The t-shirts that Wisdom Works donated for our great volunteers from Turner High School’s National Honor Society (lead by Michael Wu) were perfect to let the crowd know who we were.

For the first time, we participated in the regional Trinity River Trash Bash with Dallas Down River and with Carrollton Evening Lions Club cooking. We had promised volunteers lunch, canoes and life jackets and were surprised by 150 volunteers! With Dallas Down River’s expertise and boats and the enthusiasm of groups like our Board of Directors, Boy Scouts, Turner’s Honor Society, churches and individuals we cleaned 1500 pounds out of the Trinity on a very HOT day in August. With heat exhaustion and swearing never to do it again, Sharon’s brain went to work on how we could have younger volunteers with more stamina – our Teen Advisory Board was born. The Board overruled the “never again” decision with Peggy Healey (our new board member who had just run for the school board and who home-schools her four children) stepping up to head next years Trash Bash. It was so hot no one wanted to eat, so we gave all the extra food and drinks to Metrocrest Services for Katrina evacuees.

August was a very pivotal time. We composed a letter trying to help the City and the City Council (Mayor Becky Miller has always been in our corner) see what value we bring to the community with our volunteers and programs. After some research, we discovered that environmental groups in other cities received — the number of households in their city, times $0.01, times 12 months, times the number of events they hosted. We plugged in Carrollton’s 43,253 households making $5,190.36 what other cities contribute for each environmental education event provided. The Council, the City Manager and City Lawyer were not swayed. At the City Council meeting, in one more attempt to get our Community Service Assistance Grant raised, Sharon stated that we had “amassed more than 8247 volunteer hours worth 93 thousand 2 hundred and 56 dollars for the economic development of Carrollton – in just the last twelve months”. Everybody smiled and nodded, but they did not add to our Community Service Assistance Grant, leaving us to figure out how to host four specific public events on $5,000.00. If the City of Carrollton provided these events using their employees, it would cost them $102,811.95!

We celebrated our amazing women volunteers with a Ladies Luncheon at La Hacienda Ranch. We had a fun time and came up with some great ideas for fundraising and programs.

All year we worked with the Carrollton/Farmers Branch ISD (with Victor Melton) to establish a Green Team in each school that wanted to participate; encourage them to work on their school campuses for Clean Sweep for Schools; making a video for the Squirrel Brigade program with Turner’s Media Academy and filming Carrollton Elementary’s Green Team learning how to plant tree seeds and trees (Mark Schallhorn and Lela Kahn were our instructors). We established our Teen Advisory Board consisting of Michael Wu from Turner, Jessica Cravens at Smith, Minhaj Chowdhury from Ranchview and Angela Miguel at Hebron; with a representative from Creekview not far behind. Sharon also wrote several grants to revitalize the CFBISD Outdoor Learning Center planning for a fence around a “Wildflower Park”, a boardwalk out into the pond, a classroom pavillion and a director’s building with Ron Marrs of Wright Group Architects helping us with the design.

We acquired another wonderful board member, Andrew Harsch (he is in marketing). Andrew has already worked on a marketing plan for us (which we really could use!).

Texas Recycles Day was a big success with 7 recycling vendors and 87 volunteers (our Teen Advisory Board did a great job of inviting their schools) diverting 22,000 pounds of recyclables from the landfill. We unloaded more than 345 citizen vehicles!

In an attempt to give our sponsors a unique opportunity, we hosted Meeting with the Mayor. Mayor Becky Miller already writes a column for our newsletter and agreed to meet with and answer questions from business leaders who were our sponsors or were potential sponsors. It was a festive affair falling just before the Christmas rush with lots of good food from El Chico Café. Mayor Miller gave us a history of how the city had evolved and what the transit plans were for the future. Carrollton Evening Lions Club signed up as our official sponsor!

Sharon recruited or renewed 15 sponsorships (Ebby Halliday Realtors, Carrollton-Farmers Branch Rotary Club, Fuji Photo Film U.S.A., City of Carrollton, The Civic League, Babe’s Chicken Dinner House, Sam Pack’s Five Star Ford, Halliburton, Green Mountain Energy, Tom Thumb, Rhoton Funeral Home, Wright Group Architects, Trinity Medical Center, Sotherby Homes and Carrollton Evening Lions Club), with some thanks to Mayor Miller’s referrals and 28 business, family and individual members, raising $17,145.00 cash and $12,509.43 in-kind donations. Sharon wrote 4 grants and created newsletters for each season. We also continued our Yard of the Month award by giving it to the Khan family. Our Volunteer of the Season award for the fall went to Martha and Joe Grizzel.

We ended our year by following the advice of the State of Texas and setting a two-year term for our executive board members — meaning that we now have no officers until January. We have become part of the fabric of the community – people are calling from out of nowhere asking all sorts of questions. They think we’re the City!!!

Watch Alexander Selby’s (Teen Advisory Board member 2005-2007) version of what we do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84v37a1ds7U

Keep Carrollton Beautiful and all our volunteers made a major dent in the landfill with Texas Recycles Day. The cold, very windy weather didn’t slow them down, unless you want to count the tattered paper signs!

175 volunteers, mostly teens from Carrollton high schools – Creekview, Hebron, Ranchview, Turner and Smith – braved the winter temperatures to divert 109 ½ TONS (218,800 pounds) of recyclables from the landfill! 426 cubic yards of the collection was electronics!

Keep Carrollton Beautiful’s Board of Directors was there in full force to make Texas Recycles Day happen. Cindy Baxley worked tirelessly before, during and after the event to smooth all the rough edges. Paul Duddleston got them organized and kept the spirit upbeat. Diane Taheri, with her husband Mehdi, made sure all the volunteers felt welcomed. Amy Diaz and her husband Thomas Alger made sure all the 265 donor vehicles knew who Keep Carrollton Beautiful was. And Cathey Henesey provided her usually congenial leadership to make it all work out. “Without our Board, events this large could not happen unless I split myself into 8 parts!” said Sharon Goddard, Founder and Executive Director of Keep Carrollton Beautiful.

Part of the fuel that kept them going was “breakfast for everyone” DELIVERED by Baibrook McDonalds! What a warm and fuzzy feeling to watch Kevin unload his truck.

Newman Smith High School was a gracious facility host, flashing their marquee with Keep Carrollton Beautiful’s event information. And their faculty member, Allen Crenshaw, led the ever-present Carrollton Evening Lions Club, with Doug Hinton and Paula Randall, to guarantee another successful event.

Special thanks goes to Michelle, Lily, Maria, Brandon, Brandon’s Dad, Travis, Hannah, HannaBee, Kayley, Josh, Collin, Dorothy and all the others who stepped up to take a personal role at the event. These great volunteers saw a need and filled it and made the fifth annual Texas Recycles Day another big community accomplishment.

The volunteers were thrilled at the sight of all the hot pizza arriving from Nichol’s Dominos, Papa John’s, Gavitt Dominos, Josey Pizza Hut and Kelly Pizza Hut. Warm pizza on a cold day really hit the spot! Other in-kind donations from Coca-Cola Bottling Co., Clif Bar, Albertsons, ABITIBI Bowater and all the recycling vendors helped to make a festive mood.

What a collaboration. Texas Recycles Day got everyone thinking about recycling at the same time the City is launching it’s RecycleBank for single-family homes. The more you recycle; the more credits you get.

“I am so grateful for all the smiling volunteers that make Keep Carrollton Beautiful possible. I can only orchestrate; they are the ones that make our events a big success. I get to see the shining community spirit everywhere I go – what a blessing,” said Sharon.

If you were unable to shred your personal documents (due to electrical difficulties), please take them to Mosaic, Inc. and use the password TRD to get them shredded. If you would like to get involved, give them in-put on the event, or make a tax-deductable donation to Keep Carrollton Beautiful, please go to www.KeepCarrolltonBeautiful.org.

Carrollton, Texas –

Keep Carrollton Beautiful is contributing to our community in a BIG way. At a recent City Council meeting, the Mayor accepted two large illustrations of Keep Carrollton Beautiful’s support. The checks, made to represent the contributions of Keep Carrollton Beautiful to the community of Carrollton in the last 12 months, proved to be a very good way to demonstrate their assistance.

In the previous twelve months, Keep Carrollton Beautiful has provided 11,948 hours from 2,962 individual volunteers – recruited to make the community more environmentally conscious, more beautiful and more neighborly. In that same time period, they have also donated $52,657.99 worth of in-kind products and services – acquired to support community events, public environmental education and refurbishment of City facilities.

Since the budget was on the Council’s agenda, Sharon Goddard was on hand to present the checks to the Mayor. The checks symbolize a lot of hard work on the part of Keep Carrollton Beautiful’s Board of Directors: Secretary Cindy Baxley, Amy Diaz, Vice-Chair Paul Duddleston, Chair Cathy Henesey, Special Events Doug Hinton, Brenda Lalonde and Treasurer Diane Taheri. The Board and the myriad of volunteers all have one goal in mind – to engage Carrollton to enhance our community environment. They are doing an amazing job!

To find out about all Keep Carrollton Beautiful’s programs and projects, go to www.KeepCarrolltonBeautiful.org and click around. You will probably find something you want to plug-in to. If you’d like to help the schools, be sure and add your paper to be recycled to their green and yellow bins. Alll that paper doesn’t end up in the landfill and the schools get money for your efforts