Keep Iowa Beautiful is encouraging residents to sign up for the annual Pick-Up Iowa event from April 15th through July 31st.

The group’s executive director, Andy Frantz, says it’s part of the national Keep America Beautiful effort to pick up litter from public areas.”What we’re trying to do is get local communities to engage and start to develop, if they want to call it a committee or just volunteerism, it’s all about helping them, enabling them,” he says.

Frantz says the local groups will lead their volunteers. “They picked a park or their downtown or their town square or, or whatever works for them locally, excuse me, that they want to organize around  a school or church organization, Frantz says. He says there’s a little bit of an incentive to get your group signed up.

“The first 35 that that sign up through the website, Keep Iowa Beautiful will receive some support –. some support in the in the form of we’ll reimburse them up to $50 each community to do whatever makes sense for them to go out and promote the effort and get it together and actually make it come to fruition,” Frantz says.

He says this is a little boost to get things started. “It’s not a huge amount of money, but it can buy some bags they can buy some pizza for the volunteers, whatever whatever they want to do,” he says. He says Pick Up Iowa volunteers in 36 communities spent over 6,500 hours collecting 2,000 bags of litter and debris in 2022.