Planting trees. Revitalizing vacant lots. Engaging our community in environmental stewardship. All exciting efforts being championed by the team at Keep Omaha Beautiful. It’s a group that’s been a part of our community since 1959, but their efforts have had a growing impact in recent years with some exciting new projects underway. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Keep Omaha Beautiful on our upcoming annual Holiday Gala. And here we share a bit about the valuable work they’re doing in our city and how you can join the cause.
The Impact of One Year
It’s inspiring to see the passion and effort that Keep Omaha Beautiful puts into making our community a better and more beautiful place to live year after year. In 2018 alone, volunteers serving with Keep Omaha Beautiful racked up an astounding 21,415 hours of service – a benefit to the community of almost $370,000. Powering these amazing contributions were a record-breaking 9,554 volunteers – an impressive increase from their yearly average.
Executive Director Chris Stratman says some of that increase is just due to the nature of the work that volunteers get to participate in. Teams from businesses across the city are donating their time through a range of projects scaled to engage groups as small as a few people to over five hundred. As Chris says, “People want to do the right thing. They want to get involved in our community. Our programs have not only the community element, but the environmental benefit as well.” According to Chris, a big part of it is motivated citizens just wanting to help make their city a healthier, more enjoyable place, but also a valuable habitat for natural plant and wildlife communities as well.
And with well-managed projects, complete with clear direction and tangible goals, volunteers leave knowing they’ve made a difference and feeling motivated to return to help with other projects – sometimes bringing new recruits with them.
Throughout the year, Keep Omaha Beautiful teaches and trains youths and adults – over 9,000 in 2018 – in over 140 environmental education activities. They and their volunteers plant hundreds of Great Plains native trees, label storm drains to prevent pollution in our waterways, and revitalize vacant lots – repurposing them as valuable rain gardens and pollinator gardens.
The Nature Connection
According to Chris, the foundation of their work is about giving people an opportunity to connect more deeply with the natural world around them – and the knowledge to better engage in environmental stewardship. “It’s realizing how powerful it is just to spend time in nature,” Chris says, “even urban nature.” As he reminds us, having access to a beautiful landscape can have a tremendous impact on a person’s mental and physical health, academic performance, productivity, and so many other aspects of their well-being.
The more we all come to understand the value that healthy, thriving ecosystems bring to our neighborhoods and communities, the more likely those resources will be respected and protected. Keep Omaha Beautiful hopes that as citizens appreciate how insect, plant, and wildlife communities interact, the more they’ll understand how even small decisions made in their own back yards can have big beneficial impacts on the local ecosystem. And a community full of small positive changes can add up to a collective impact much greater than we realize – something Chris feels many people don’t fully appreciate.
To spread the word, Keep Omaha Beautiful hosts educational activities and presentations for classrooms and other groups that help citizens better understand their connection to the natural ecosystem. They conduct free, hands-on activities and presentations tailored for different age groups and designed to complement school curriculums in art, science, literature, and other subjects. They offer presentations that explain waste reduction through recycling and repurposing materials, water quality and storm water run-off, the benefits of trees in the urban landscape, and more.
Bringing New Life to Abandoned Spaces
One of the many programs that Keep Omaha Beautiful implements every year is their ongoing Community Beautification program. Working in partnership with the City of Omaha, schools, and neighbors, they identify and take on beautification projects across the city. One way they do this is by bringing sustainable landscape practices to vacant lots where illegal dumping often results in environmental hazards and higher crime rates in the neighborhood. In a current project, Keep Omaha Beautiful is working with neighbors to transform a vacant lot into a beautiful community space by planting native grasses and wildflowers, developing a rain garden and a permeable pathway to allow stormwater to absorb into the ground, trimming trees, and installing benches and signage to help visitors enjoy the new space.
Restoring our Urban Forest
One of Keep Omaha Beautiful’s newest programs, Trees for Omaha, was launched in 2018 in response to the discovery of the destructive emerald ash borer in Omaha. Through this program, Keep Omaha Beautiful partners with Omaha’s Parks and Recreation Department and the Nebraska Forest Service to plant thousands of native trees across the city – over 2,000 in the last two years. Going forward, Trees for Omaha will move throughout the city, with tree plantings in parks and public rights-of-way replacing our lost ash trees.
With Trees for Omaha, the goal is to develop a long-lived urban forest by planting a diverse population of resilient native trees that can be enjoyed for generations to come. Keep Omaha Beautiful gets the trees from local nurseries and works hard to identify and implement best practices for how the trees are grown, planted, and maintained to ensure their survival. In fact, all of the trees they plant have been grown using root-promoting grow bags – a specialized system for growing trees that results in a healthy, fibrous root system and increased planting success. Some of Chris’s favorite native trees to see around the city include bur oak, American linden, and eastern redbud.
Even More Great Things
In addition to these two amazing projects, Keep Omaha Beautiful engages individuals and groups in city-wide projects through their Adopt-a-Spot program. They label storm drains to reduce the amount of pollutants being dumped into our waterways. Keep Omaha Beautiful also organizes periodic litter cleanups and seasonal bulk material collections. In fact, they’re hosting a Youth LitterBusters event this week where registered youth groups from across the city will descend on Levi Carter Park, picking up trash and recyclable materials.
Meet the Incredible Team from Keep Omaha Beautiful
Join us at our Holiday Gala on Thursday, November 21st for an evening with friends in our Greenhouse and Christmas Shop – and a chance to meet the team from Keep Omaha Beautiful. Last year, our Holiday Gala raised over $5,900 to support worldwide plant conservation efforts going on at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, and we look forward to building on that success in partnership with Keep Omaha Beautiful this year. Be sure to mark your calendar and watch for more information coming soon! We hope you’ll join us and help support this important work taking place here in our community.
