Featuring Living Lands & Waters

Good morning! Do you love a plastic bottle bobbing down a river, sea life mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, or giant islands of garbage on the high seas? We do not. Seems like a hard problem to solve, until you learn that as much as 90% of ocean garbage starts as upstream litter in the world's creeks, streams, and rivers!

Enter this week’s 52andChange Cause of the Week, Living Lands & Waters!

Why should we all chip in and give a few dollars (start with $1!) and spread the word?

The Living Lands & Waters crew lives up to nine months a year on their traveling barge operation, visiting communities throughout the Mississippi River watershed to host river cleanups, free education workshops, and native tree distribution and plantings. Each year, they work with thousands of volunteers and students as well as hundreds of local organizations, clubs, businesses, and sponsors in partnership to pursue their mission to restore, protect, and preserve waterways and inspire the next generation of river stewards.

They’ve cleaned 24 rivers in 21 states, and cleared out more than 11 million pounds of garbage... and counting! They’ve also planted more than 1.6 million trees.

They are our heroes. Thank you Living Lands & Waters for working to solve this seemingly insurmountable problem, with inexhaustible enthusiasm, collaboration, and drive. We need more of that! Thanks to the LL&W crew for getting their hands dirty and pulling tires and appliances out of rivers, all the while educating people and bringing them along to help. What an inspiring model.

Find ways to connect and check out more of their story here; it’s incredible!

How can you help? If, like us at 52andChange, you aren’t able to hop on a barge to help clean up, you can make a microgift through Sunday to support LL&W. Then, let like-minded people know about it, to multiply and maximize the value of your microgift! We want to build our impact, much as one person’s desire to clean a river grew to the magnificent cleanup and restoration operation we see today! What starts with one tire removed, or one donation made, can grow to so much more.

If we all give a little, together, we will change the world. Thank you for helping us get there.