Disclosure: Cara Hollis is an employee of Clean Up The Lake, where she works as Youth Program Coordinator.
The Pay It Forward Project donated $10,000 in October 2022 to Clean Up The Lake, a Tahoe-based non-profit organization, to launch a litter education program in the Tahoe Basin. The goal of the education program is to teach K-12 students about the impacts of litter in Tahoe, both above and below the surface, and how they can take action to keep the environment clean and litter free.
The donation allowed Clean Up The Lake to visit classrooms to teach students about the prevalence of trash in Lake Tahoe and the surrounding environment, the negative impacts it has, and show them how their decisions, both big and small, can help protect the natural environment.
By the end of May, Clean Up The Lake will have reached over 200 students at schools throughout the basin and the Pay It Forward Project has committed to another $10,000 donation in October of 2023.
Clean Up The Lake, whose mission is to fight back against plastic and all forms of pollution in the natural environment, uses SCUBA and dive teams to remove litter from below the surface of Tahoe, and other alpine lakes. It removed more than 25,000 pounds of trash during a 72-mile circumnavigation that went from May of 2021 to May of 2022.
For people who only know Clean Up The Lake for its trash removal efforts, the expansion to include education programs might seem like an unusual move.
“So many people see the organization as a non-profit that just goes out and cleans up litter, but that is a reactive measure that fixes some of the mistakes of our past,” said Colin West, founder and executive director of Clean Up The Lake. “But it does not prevent it from happening again.”
Sadye Easler, director of programs, highlights the importance of the education program.
“There is not a ton of intentional litterers out there,” she said. “But there is a culture around awareness that needs to be improved and an education program really is the foundation of culminating a new generation of highly aware environmental stewards that are not only holding themselves personally accountable but know how to interact with others to spread awareness and knowledge.”
The partnership with the Pay It Forward Project was a crucial step to bring the education program to life.
“As a non-profit we have so many different deliverables, and projects, and funders and partners that we are working on with, that we hadn’t set up a full youth program yet,” said West. “We didn’t have any deadlines that we had to meet for any kind of partners in the community. We explained that to John McDougal, founder of the Pay It Forward [Project], and he donated $10,000 to the organization and in return we began meeting a bunch of deliverables for getting this youth program off the ground.”
McDougall, a Tahoe native, founded the Pay It Forward Project in 2015 to encourage youth to make positive contributions to their communities. The project provides everything from scholarships for students, from both high schools and local community colleges, who have a history of performing community service, to grants to student groups that are working to improve their communities and the environment.
The idea for the Pay It Forward Project came from McDougall’s time in the Rotary Club in South Lake Tahoe. The Rotary Club gave scholarships every year and one year it had a family come back and give some money back to the club and say “please pay it forward” to someone who needs it.
“That just triggered something in my mind,” said McDougall. “I kept focusing on that thought of youth making a difference by paying it forward.”
He started the Pay It Forward project after a successful career in real estate investment. He says that the reward is worth the effort, “It’s very rewarding for me because I want to see kids and get involved in helping others and taking some responsibility for the environment that they’re going to inherit.”
The goals of Clean Up The Lake and the Pay It Forward Project are aligned. Both organizations want to get the youth of the Tahoe Basin engaged in keeping the environment clean and beautiful.
“The work we can do with kids today is going to be more effective than pulling 25,000 pounds of trash out of Tahoe in the future,” said West.
More information
To learn more about Clean Up The Lake, visit Cleanupthelake.org. For more information about the Pay It Forward Project, visit their Facebook page.
Cara Hollis is a sustainability and journalism major at UNR at Lake Tahoe and is the Youth Program Coordinator at Clean Up The Lake. She wrote this story for Journalism 493, Independent Study, with Professor Jim Scripps.
