Group outreach activity

Clean-up Teams

A group activity that both supports our neighbors and creates an opportunity for a fun time together is to volunteer to do clean-up and trash pick-up of public properties. You’ve probably seen the signs along roads about some group responsible for that road’s clean-up. Likewise, there are probably public parks that need clean-up activities from time to time. No doubt the local highway department of the parks and recreation department need you to sign up to do so; give them a call and ask.

Here’s a report of one such experience by bro. Seth Thomas, involving work in South Africa with the Christadelphian Cuddle Trust charity. Another example of a similar project can be found here, thanks to the Pittsburgh ecclesia!

“In January of 2022, Bekah Thomas and I went to South Africa and volunteered with a non-profit run by Christadelphians called Cuddle Trust and participated in a lot of amazing programs. Some of them were hard to implement worldwide, but some of them are very do-able! One of our favorite things that we did was “Clean up for Christ” where we simply gathered a group of people, garbage bags and gloves, picked a beach/ park and spent a couple hours picking up trash together. We wore matching shirts that made us look like an obvious group, and we had people come up to us and ask who we were, which gave us the perfect stepping stone to preach. It’s a great way to practice preaching for brothers and sisters alike! It’s also a great way to put our faith into action and preach by doing! And even if no one came up to us, it was just a couple hours out of our day, cleaning up God’s creation that we’ve been called to take care of and bonding with our brothers and sisters in our group. Over the past two years, we have encouraged others to join in these clean-ups with others nearby and organize clean-ups in their nearby community! We have a FB page called “Clean up for Christ” and an Instagram page @cleanup.for.christ where we have posted updates on cleanups that brothers and sisters are doing all across the country and around the world. We have been aiming to do cleanups on the last Saturday of each month (just like the South Africa group does) and have each group take a picture of their group on their beach/park with their trash that we can upload to the page. We also have kept an ongoing tally of how many bags of trash we have picked up as a group and love to hear from people who have taken the time to go out and serve in their community and care for God’s creation in this way. It’s an easy way to tie our community together do a little bit of good and give back.”

Image source: Rotary Club of Rigby