ALAMOSA — Close to 60 volunteers gathered for more than four hours Friday morning to thoroughly clean a stretch of land that runs along the banks of the Rio Grande.
Included in the group were about 40 men and women from Advantage Treatment Center (ATC), 16 students from Colorado College, a few folks from Center for Restorative Programs, one person doing court-ordered community service, folks from street outreach plus the volunteer coordinator for La Puente and others.
The entire project – spontaneously named “Getting (Stuff) Done” – was conceived and organized by Tim Dellett, a tenured co-responder with the Alamosa Police Department whose job takes him to places like the banks of the Rio Grande where people who are homeless might be camping.
The photo doesn’t fully capture the amount of trash the group had collected, as another pile equally as large if not larger was behind the group. And the scope of the project is especially impressive when learning that, according to Dellett, twice as much trash had already been hauled off to the dump.
What the photo illustrates is the amount of effort and energy the volunteers displayed in collecting piles of trash, putting it in trash bags and even wading into tall bushes to make sure everything was cleaned out
“There were abandoned campsites and years of accumulated debris just in that one stretch,” Dellett said, “and there’s a lot more that needs to be cleaned up further down the river. This is the first of many (clean ups) and we’re going to keep at it.
Gesturing to the diversity of folks who had been working hard all morning, he said, “We’re all part of a community that we value. We’re all neighbors.”
And that was precisely the atmosphere Friday morning. It may have been hot. The job was undoubtedly not easy. But the smiles, the joking, the camaraderie and sense of a job well done was as obvious as the stretch of riverbank restored, after years, to what it once was.
