Volunteers clean southeast Atlanta park for Valentine's Day weekend
ATLANTA - More than 100 young professionals gathered in a southeast Atlanta park Saturday to beautify the area on the eve of Valentine's Day.
Nonprofits Community Bucket and Park Pride joined forces to clean up DeKalb Memorial Park during their second annual "Love Your City" event. The initiative encourages volunteers to spend the holiday giving back.
Organizers said the group focused on clearing trash in the park along Hardee Creek. They also put down mulch in various sections of the property.
"Atlanta is an awesome place to live, and we all owe it to the city to do more volunteer work and support local nonprofits. And since Valentine's Day is about love, we thought it would be the perfect chance to show our love for the city and also make V-day about more than Hallmark cards, candy hearts, and cupids," said Jesse Grossman, founder of Community Bucket.
Community Bucket is based around the theme of "service made social." Organizers told Fox 5 the group celebrated its third anniversary in the fall, reaching 10,000 service hours with a total of 1,546 volunteers.
"Parks have the power to bring people together - they're places where neighbors can meet and engage with each other, and that strengthens the fabric of our city. For this reason, the Love Your City project with Community Bucket will not just provide the obvious aesthetic benefits to DeKalb Memorial Park that comes with the hard work of over 100 volunteers, but it will also have a positive impact on the volunteers themselves and our Atlanta community as a whole," said John Ahern, Volunteer Manager at Park Pride.
For more information about Park Pride, visit parkpride.org