I Love A Clean San Diego

I Love A Clean San Diego is the leading advocate for environmental awareness and zero waste living in San Diego County. It acts as an educational resource and community organizer, with the goal of inspiring San Diego County residents to actively conserve and enhance the environment through example, outreach, and local involvement. The organization strives to turn residents’ appreciation for the region’s beauty into local action by not only cleaning up waste, but also completing restoration projects such as painting, graffiti removal, non-native vegetation removal, mulching, trail restoration and weeding. I Love A Clean San Diego’s Education team brings real-world issues and solutions to students, adults and businesses by teaching individuals how to reduce their waste at the source. The goal of empowering the public to implement lifestyle changes leads to a sustained reduction in environmental pollution and increased waste diversion from the landfill.

I Love A Clean San Diego uses a three-pronged approach to achieve its goals. Educational programming, recycling referrals, and community programs provide a multifaceted resource to the County of San Diego. Environmental educators foster awareness from the classroom to the boardroom, encouraging audience members of all ages to incorporate small changes that greatly benefit our shared environment. WasteFreeSD.org, a zero waste database and call center, serves for one-stop informational instruction on where and how to dispose of, recycle, repair, and donate items responsibly. I Love A Clean San Diego’s Community Programs Department provides frequent regional opportunities throughout the year to inspire and empower a broad audience of volunteers to be part of the solution. Participants gain hands-on experience through community cleanups in beaches, canyons, waterways and urban areas, storm drain stenciling and Adopt-A-Beach programs. Annual events such as Creek to Bay and Coastal Cleanup Day bring out thousands of volunteers county-wide, which garners media attention and creates a positive, large-scale impact in a single day’s work.

I Love A Clean San Diego has over 65 years of experience protecting our local environment, organizing volunteers, and empowering the public to make a lasting impact. The organization hosted 558 educational programs in 2020, including virtual classroom presentations and webinars reaching youth, adults, and businesses, as well as 40 virtual close to home cleanups, which included two large countywide cleanups. With volunteers spanning the entirety of the county, ILACSD is the only entity that can mobilize over 30,000 volunteers every year to address the changing nature of pollution and be nimble enough to respond to the current trash and litter crisis. Successfully facilitating these programs and events requires strong relationships with funding partners (such as the City and County of San Diego) and media outlets, effective volunteer management, and lasting connections to teachers and schools. Consistent partnerships with various community leaders, organizations, and corporations also increase reach and bandwidth of the organization’s message. An engaged Board of Directors, with 13 members across multi-disciplinary fields and backgrounds, represents the organization’s interests and strategic actions. With an easy-to-navigate website, zero waste database, and social media pages, I Love A Clean San Diego regularly updates the public on ways to get involved, environmentally friendly lifestyle suggestions, and local issues.

In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I Love A Clean San Diego took immediate action to shift to virtual programming to continue serving county residents, specifically within our education programs and volunteer cleanups. By redeveloping our programs into the virtual realm, we continue to engage community members across the region to address current needs through volunteerism and education that protect the local environment and ensure clean and safe outdoor recreational spaces that benefit both tourists and residents. As a non-profit organization, our response to COVID-19 is helping to address the significant increase in litter caused by shipping and to-go packaging. In addition, we are now finding discarded personal protective equipment; gloves and masks; an entirely new anomaly in the world of pollution. In conjunction with our volunteer cleanups, we will continue to educate residents about these issues facing our county. Our programs, both through our Education and Community Programs departments, directly serve more than 80,000 people and indirectly impact the county’s entire population of over 3.3 million and millions of annual tourists. The organization’s current strategic plan prioritizes increased volunteer stewardship through the expansion of its new volunteer database, diversifying its fundraising efforts through a new online donation and donor management system, and increasing capacity alignment and intentional growth of the staff team and Board of Directors.