Volunteers in Bloom in North Charleston

Volunteers

in Bloom

By: Carmen Hanlon, Beautification Coordinator, City of North Charleston

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Keep North Charleston Beautiful (KNCB) staff members have been tasked with coming up with creative ideas in order to maintain programs and events within the City of North Charleston. The challenge is to maintain the KNCB butterfly gardens with a smaller number of large groups regularly volunteering. This limitation took some careful planning and much hard work to overcome. After returning from mandatory closures, KNCB staff started promoting several independent volunteer opportunities, such as the bloom kit program and providing free litter supply kits to the community so that volunteers could work with their own small groups, limiting their exposure to others who they were not normally around. Despite the limited number of large volunteer groups due to COVID-19, KNCB has been working hard to maintain many programs and events, particularly in the Park Circle Butterfly Garden which has seen an increase in the number of visitors. With safety guidelines recommending outdoor activities, KNCB’s project sites have become even more popular with individuals and families looking for a safe space for outdoor recreation. Since returning to work after the mandatory closures, KNCB has been able to have several small volunteer events each week where staff members work

one-on-one with individual volunteers. This allows KNCB staff to focus attention on more individualized projects that are best suited to each volunteer, which aids in volunteer recruitment and retention. KNCB has found that volunteers return on a weekly basis now, where the trend in the past has been one-time volunteering. KNCB offers volunteer incentives based on the number of hours volunteers have served. This new trend in volunteering has given KNCB the opportunity to work with preschool children and high school students more as school schedules are more flexible due to the school closures and hybrid schedules. This provides a valuable educational opportunity, as staff can spend more time emphasizing to students the need to become life-long environmental stewards. Through all of these activities, volunteers are required to follow safety guidelines, including following CDC recommended social distancing protocols, wearing masks when interacting with staff and other volunteers, and consistently sanitizing any shared tools or equipment. KNCB’s ultimate goal is to keep all volunteers safe and healthy while they are volunteering to make North Charleston bloom with beauty!