Originally, my plan for community service was to do a walk for Araxia in Denver, but the

planned date was April 28th, so I can’t use it for community service. Other things came up, and I
soon found that I had no time to go to planned events. So I did something that I do on a monthly
basis with my honors fraternity Phi Sigma Pi, which was to go pick up trash out of Boulder
Creek. I did this on the stretch of creek between 28th street and Scott Carpenter Park on April
15th.
The “event” was fine, it just consisted of me walking along the creek with a trash bag and
gloves, picking up any trash I could see on the creek bed and in the creek. I managed to get about
30 pounds of trash over an hour before the bag split open, which you can see in the image. I
chose this activity because it lets me be in nature, but I also feel that I am directly impacting the
community. There is so much plastic and styrofoam in the Boulder Creek, which is terrible in the
environment, so I like to contribute to cleaning this as much as I can. I think that if everyone
would pick up a trash bags worth of trash every week, the community would look so much nicer
and be healthier. There weren’t any other participants, but a passerby thanked me for doing it.
Before the activity, I felt a little stressed about how it would turn out, and worried
especially about being unable to find trash. However, during and after the activity I felt liberated
and good about myself because I had found so much trash in such a small area, and knew that the
work I was doing made an impact. I really like doing this type of community service because
trash in the creek is so unpleasant to look at, and it isn’t good for the environment. I know it isn’t
typically considered community service, but I do plan to do this once a month in the coming
months just to make the community a little bit nicer.