Milwaukee residents came together to tidy up the northside on Earth Day.
Frankie Thomas has been living in the Harambee neighborhood for 50 years.
"Last year it was raining and snowing, and I still came out here," he says.
TMJ's Gideon Verdin asked why this kind of work is important to him.
"Because nobody else is going to do it!” Thomas replied.
Hundreds of volunteers met up open MLK Drive to roll up their sleeves and clean up the city streets.
“Everbody will get their own bucket, picker and garbage bag and clean up their neighborhood, winter or summer, so this will be a continuous situation," Freda Wright, a long time volunteer, says.
Wright helped the elderly volunteers in the area clean up Clinton Rose park. Mary, 73, says her disability won’t stop her from helping out.
"It's a lot of people worse off than me, I gotta do what I can do to help them too” she says.
Felicia Williams is one of the event organizers.
"That’s where we got if from, I remember my grandma, and we would get out, pick up trash, it started with the elders," Williams says.
Williams comes out every year to help residents pick up supplies and says she sees today as a worthy investment.
“I believe that if we invest in our neighborhoods then we invest in each other," added Wright.
Music by local DJ Homer Blow, burgers on the grill and team work combined to make this a very successful event. Young volunteers told Gideon its good feeling to clean up the neighborhood.
“Its nice getting out here to help the community and clean it up," says Maryah Thames, a 10th grader at Rufus King High School. "So it won’t be as trashy. It looks horrible, so it won’t be embarrassing."
Thames hopes to lead other young people by example.
“I wanted to get out of school and I wanted to help the community” she says.
With a goal to make Milwaukee the cleanest city in the country, volunteers say this is only the beginning.
"You may be tired, you may be sore, but its worth it to find out you came out to make a difference," says Williams.
The difference could be seen within minute as volunteers filled dozens of trash bags with litter from Martin Luther King Drive.
"We all need to have a clean areas," Wright tells Gideon. "We have healing spaces, we can have different things in this areas here that need to be clean. We need to be able to sit in a clean park that has no trash. “
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