Registration is now open for the 20th Annual Charles River Cleanup, which will take place on Saturday, April 27 from 9 AM – 12 PM, followed by a volunteer appreciation picnic on the Esplanade.
If you’re interested in participating this year, click here to register! Groups are taken on a first come, first served basis, so register soon to seal your spot and reserve your preferred location. In 2016 and 2017, the Charles River Cleanup was recognized by American Rivers for the Most Volunteers Mobilized – let’s keep the momentum going!
This is work that should be done by the state government using taxpayer money, not by private volunteers. I object to this privatization of public works; it always leads to private control over public assets, and ends up cost the public more.
Further, the institutionalization of such volunteerism with clubs and awards and competitions for coveted spots to do work we shouldn’t be doing only encourages public officials to cut back public services. They won’t reduce taxes when taxpayers do public work, and they won’t “use that money for other important things.” They will give more tax breaks to corporations, and hire more friends and relatives to do make-work jobs, consultant contracts, etc. They will also come to rely on volunteer-mobilization corporations to do public works — corporations that will then exploit their do-gooding to get more public subsidies.
See the Greenway Conservancy, a huge “non-profit” machine of self-serving developers and their over-paid executive servants, set up to take care of (i.e., to sanitize and exclude “undesirables” from) a strip of state parkland along which very lucrative development stands and is growing. After establishing its power by promising total self-funding, the Conservancy managed to wangle tens of millions of state dollars, like a “Stone Soup” seeded by private contributions (given or only promised) from developers and from naive citizens bamboozled by the holy grail of “public/private partnership” — all to socially cleanse the area and capture control over development regulation along the Greenway. The state has spent, and will spend, far, far more on the Greenway than it would have spent without the Conservancy — and has relinquished control over this public land and the governance around it.
Will, I could not have said it better than Shirley especially in regards to the continued privatization of public works and utilities.
Agree