ADOPT ONE PLACE

JUST ONE PLACE, THAT’S ALL IT TAKES

Please report what you did to support the OUTDOORS

Adopt One Place

1. Pick Your Place, & Let Us Know

Pick a convenient place near your home, school, work or in a place that really needs help.

2. Do a weekly cleanup for about two months

You can go it alone, but we suggest you find a partner. One can act as a spotter to locate trash and within easy reach. When you’ve done this consistently for roughly two months, you should see others helping out, thanking you and there will be a permanent change in behavior for this one place.

3. Have Fun!

You can have fun hiking, biking, skiing, climbing and riding! Have fun and tell us about it! Take a PIC or VIDEO and post it with the #adoptoneplace.

Advocacy

Advocacy is the primary tool through which Clean Trails works to promote natural, pristine, and litter-free wild-places and the trails that lead to them. We encourage, enable, and empower our members and other individuals to raise awareness for the disparaging effects of litter on our local, regional, and national trail systems.

Our Clean Trails’ advocacy program promotes general awareness, responsibility, and educational activities for individuals, schools, businesses, and organizations. Through our Clean Trails advocates, we provide a local point of contact for city, county, state, and federal agencies to coordinate for a better outdoor experience.

Theory of Change

With reduced funding for park and wilderness maintenance, litter is becoming a growing problem on our nation’s trail systems.

Trail Trash

In the wake of budget cutbacks and the focus of our public systems on other activities, the role of maintaining our trails needs to fall upon us, the users. Our objective is to create a sense of pride and purpose for our trail systems; to keep them as pristine as the wild places to which they take us.

Studies show the highest indicator that someone will pick up litter is if they witness someone else picking up litter. Community Based Social Marketing (CBSM) studies are proving that peer group norms are more powerful than incentives, and when worked in concert with each other, they can provide impressive behavioral change impacts.

Clean Trails: The Science…

Our plans include development of a national network of trail stewards, as well as, educational and advocacy programs. Specific areas of service include: developing trail stewardship networks, awareness programming, Adopt-A-Trail, and Trail Box installation and maintenance. Our first course of action is to begin building our network by leveraging existing social media avenues through current channels and by encouraging responsibility through trailside events and activities.