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The downtown Camas cleanup event takes place each year on the Sunday closest to Earth Day.
For more information about the Downtown Camas Association or the May 9 plant fair, visit:
downtowncamas.com
CAMAS — As Adrianna Glover drove her family home last year after a volunteer event to beautify downtown Camas, she said, one of her daughters paused to reflect on their hometown.
“Mom, I love where we live,” Kya Glover, now 13, said. Adrianna Glover added that part of the reason her daughter appreciates their city is that she’s active in making it a better place.
The Glover family was back again this year, alongside the roughly 50 volunteers who were planting begonias, petunias and other annuals, spreading bark dust, and watering and fertilizing plants Sunday afternoon as part of an annual downtown Camas cleanup. The event along Northeast Fourth Avenue was scheduled to last four hours, but the group had most of the work done in about an hour and a half.
Volunteers had some added help this year: The city of Camas hired a crew to weed the planting beds in the downtown area before volunteers arrived. In previous years, weeding was up to the volunteers. Camas High School Principal Steve Marshall also was rumored to have been out beautifying the street the morning of the event.
“There is a lot of city involvement and a great deal of pride that is reflected in this,” said Frank Lednicky, lead pastor at Journey Community Church. Most of Sunday’s volunteers are members of the downtown church.
Making Fourth Avenue look better helps add to the charm of downtown Camas, drawing more commerce to a number of locally owned shops and eateries there, said Carrie Schulstad, executive director of the Downtown Camas Association. The volunteer event also allows members of the community to work alongside each other, and gives volunteers, especially the children, a sense of belonging, she added.
“They feel connected to their downtown in a more powerful way,” Schulstad said.
“It’s something our kids can do with us,” Adrianna Glover added.
She was there with a rake, shovel and four of her five children (one was home sick). She has volunteered at the event all four years. One of the main reasons she brings her kids is to teach them the importance of volunteering.
“We keep coming back because it gives them a purpose of serving others,” she said.
As Adrianna Glover planted flowers, her 4-year-old daughter, Clarice Glover, brought over a paper food tray with a mound of dirt in it. It was home to three roly-poly bugs, some worms and a beetle the girl had found while working.
“That beetle, that beetle,” she said while asking her mother to watch her bugs so she could get one of the hot dogs being served to volunteers.
People also had the chance to spruce up downtown by sponsoring hanging flower pots for the area. The cost of all 42 of those flower pots had been covered by Sunday, said Caroline Mercury, board president of the city’s downtown association.
The flower baskets will go up on May 7, just in time for the 18th annual Camas Mother’s Day Plant & Garden Fair on May 9 in downtown Camas, Schulstad said. “When people come down for the plant fair, everything’s beautiful.”
