Take Pride Winnipeg! Inc. is a registered Canadian charity whose mission is to inspire community pride, raise public awareness and promote citizen responsibility in making the city of Winnipeg clean and beautiful.
What does this mean? A number of programs run each year, co-ordinated by just four staff. They include:
Cleanliness programs: Team Up to Clean Up, a spring and fall litter clean-up campaign, which helps to reduce litter across Winnipeg. Registered volunteer clean-up groups can receive free garbage bags to help with their cleanup. Take Pride Winnipeg has a cigarette litter reduction program, where cigarette butt receptacles are installed in many areas of Winnipeg and pocket ashtrays are supplied to summer festivals.
Seasonal graffiti control staff help remove graffiti throughout the city. Green Wave, another summer employment program for youth, helps to improve the cleanliness of our neighbourhoods, through park restoration projects and BIZ zone maintenance.
Beautification programs: Brush Up Winnipeg is a program of exterior house painting for senior citizens and permanently disabled homeowners, which adds pride not only for the home owner, but also for their entire street. Winnipeg in Bloom, a front-yard garden contest, is aimed at improving the curb appeal of the entire city. The mural program brings local artists’ work to exterior walls to add personality to a neighbourhood and reduce graffiti.
Education programs: Bag Up Manitoba, a province-wide recycled plastic bag contest, collects over one-million bags each year for recycling, keeping them from landfills. Take Pride Winnipeg also has education programming and stand-alone presentations for schools, with the goals of reducing litter and graffiti, caring for the environment and encouraging our youth to become involved in taking pride in their neighbourhoods. In addition, the charity has a popular mascot, Louie the Lion, who visits schools and special events each year. Presentations are free of charge.
How do they make all this happen? With the support of sponsors, donors and tens of thousands of volunteers like you! Whether you are four or 94, you can help take pride in our amazing city.
Coming soon: Take Pride Winnipeg is pleased to have the WinnipegREALTORS® as a perennial sponsor of Winnipeg in Bloom, which has been revamped in 2014. Details about the new Garden of the Week contest will be revealed in the next two weeks.
Take Pride Winnipeg is planning another recyclathon October 4, 2014, at Grant Park Shopping Centre, where people can drop off their non-standard recyclables, such as electronics, light bulbs and used oil. Over 50,000 pounds of electronics alone were recycled at this one event in 2013. Details on this year’s event will be coming this summer.
A fund-raising dinner is also being planned for October. Details will be available this summer.
How can you get involved? Details on Take
Pride Winnipeg! programs can be found at www.takepride.mb.ca. They also have a Twitter handle (@TakePrideWpg) and Facebook page, with contests, program updates and photos of this year’s projects.