Daisy Martinez, the founder of Trash Free Earth.org, is one of the guests on the first Blightsites Trashcast.
Trashfreeearth.org educates communities about the impact of trash on our environment through park, trail and skid row cleanups and turned one year old at the end of May. They often schedule events in Elysian Park, which was my neighborhood park until I moved to the desert.
While working in Los Angeles earlier this month, I was able to join one of their Skid Row cleanups along with 20 others. (They cap numbers of volunteers for safety).
Here’s some information on the blightsite at this location from a TFE Instagram post:
Skid Row is a 54 Block area in downtown Los Angeles with the nations largest concentration of unsheltered homeless individuals. Needless to say, sanitary conditions are appalling.
We are making progress. We have been establishing relations with the individuals in skid row over the last several months, and we are working on not only cleaning the streets, but finding viable solutions to the issues at hand so that one day our services will no longer be needed and we can move forward to the next area in need. Thank you to everyone that helped out today! Great group of volunteers.
And that they were – despite the heat, we had a great time as a team lead by Mark Davis, working alongside skidrowcleanup.com and community. I am thrilled to be working with TFE and these wonderful people on the Giant Rock Cleanup, June 11.
Visit trashfreeearth.org to learn more and sign up for a cleanup!
All these great images are by Antonio Carranza, who documents all of Trashfreeearth.org’s activities.