Keep America Beautiful(R), the nation’s leading community improvement nonprofit organization, has presented Keep Alliance Beautiful (KAB) with its 2020 President’s Circle Award. The award recognizes exemplary performance by certified affiliates of Keep America Beautiful in creating clean, green, and beautiful communities.
President’s Circle recognition is typically announced at Keep America Beautiful’s national convention each winter. However, affiliates were notified via email this year since the convention moved to November. Alliance is among 16 Nebraska affiliates to receive the honor for 2020.
KAB Executive Director Kathy Worley said, “Once again it is a team effort that wins us this award . . . From the community who brings us their recyclables, to all of our employees at the recycling center who help process the bundles to get them to their respective destinations, to office staff who helps input the information to the Keep America Beautiful website, and our education efforts to inform our community. We at KAB are very pleased to be recognized by Keep America Beautiful.”
KAB has been a President’s Circle honoree nearly every year this past decade.
In qualifying for the President’s Circle Award, KAB has met standards of merit of Keep America Beautiful by conducting an annual Community Appearance Index; calculating the affiliate’s cost/benefit ratio; and administering initiatives to end littering, improve recycling, and beautify the community. KAB is one of nearly 700 community-based affiliates in the Keep America Beautiful network whose programs, initiatives, and efforts, supported by millions of volunteers, help transform public spaces into beautiful places.
Barb Niehues, KAB resource coordinator, described some of the ways the Box Butte County-based organization fulfilled the award requirements last year:
Community Appearance Index — is a tool to visually assess overall appearance of communities through indicators such as litter, illegal signs, graffiti, abandoned or junk vehicles, and outside storage — conducted for KAB by Kari Bargen, education coordinator. She usually completes the index by May, dividing Alliance into four sections and covering Hemingford as a fifth section. There are specific sites she and volunteers check in each section, noting what’s there, then giving the section a rating on a 1-5 scale with one being the best. For 2020 the KAB litter index was 1.452.
Cost/Benefit Ratio — is figured for Bargen’s and other employees’ activities as a demonstration of the ability to leverage community resources by determining the dollar value returned to the community for every dollar invested. For example, Niehues noted, Keep America Beautiful figures the ratio anytime Bargen does an activity, with specific rates for youth and adult volunteer hours. Last summer, 74 youth and 123 adult volunteers signed up to clean up fireworks waste netting a $10,671.58 in-kind total.
Initiatives to End Littering, Improve Recycling and Beautify the Community — include (littering) local participation in the Great American Cleanup; (recycling) a curbside program with 85 regular and 61 senior customers on the current list; and (beautification) painting messages on storefront windows as well as planned painting of bee/flower/honeycomb designs on crosswalks to enhance Alliance streets.
The work reviewed by Keep America Beautiful reflects KAB’s mission statement: Keep Alliance Beautiful encourages people to reduce, reuse, and recycle every day to improve and beautify their community environment.