LIFT Youth Center plans April ‘Clean Catoosa’ event
Ringgold, GA (WDEF) — Catoosa County, Georgia is known for its natural beauty, but just like everywhere else, litter is a problem. The LIFT Youth Center in Ringgold, Georgia has an event scheduled in April that will help clean things up.
Tina Pinkston, Executive Director of LIFT Youth Center told us, “LIFT Youth Center is a non-profit that got started out of the hearts of some moms who just saw a big need, a gap in services, especially for middle and high school students in Catoosa County. We don’t have Boys and Girls Club for example, and there’s not a lot of afterschool opportunity that can serve the whole county and so in 2018 that idea got born and we just decided maybe we could meet the need and so it took us a couple years but we got this youth center here in Ringgold up off the ground.
So in the very beginning back in 2018 we said ‘what can we do?’ We knew our students, middle and highschoolers care about the environment, it’s something they would be excited about and so we launched a small program that was just going to be an afternoon of education and cleaning up stuff, and it went so well (even in the pouring rain) that we decided to keep doing it. It’s gotten bigger and bigger every year. It’s always a Saturday before or after Earth Day and at this point, we partner with the city of Ringgold, the city of Fort Catoosa County on the whole.”
This April, the LIFT Youth Center will be at it again. They’ll be picking up litter, planting trees, and keeping Catoosa County pretty.
Tina Pinkston told us, “Typically, we have between 40 and 50 projects and between four and five hundred folks that get involved in those projects, from cleaning creeks to cleaning roadsides to planting trees and it’s just really neat. It’s just one morning. Really though it’s a big impact when you have that many people spread out that thin. It’s our ninth year doing that project.”
The LIFT Youth Center is a non-profit. They say they’ll still looking for T-shirt sponsors and other volunteers. You can find more information on their website.
