Youth Action

It’s the first day of spring, which means it’s time to kick off the annual Keep America Beautiful® Great American Cleanup®, the nation’s largest community improvement program. Through this far-reaching effort, which takes place from March 20 through June 20, national nonprofit Keep America Beautiful and its network of more than 600 community-based affiliates and partner organizations host cleanups, green-ups and fix-ups in more than 20,000 communities across the country, engaging more than 1.5 million volunteers and participants.

In celebration of the International Day of Happiness, LG Electronics USA and Discovery Education, the leading provider of standards-aligned digital curriculum resources, engaging content, and professional learning for K-12 classrooms, today announced the International Day of Happiness Day of Learning – a nationwide, day-long conversation designed to create meaningful dialogue around the importance of happiness and deliver new resources and tips for practicing happiness skills with teachers, students and families.

Kirk Middle School of Newark, Delaware, today was crowned national champion of the Keep America Beautiful® Recycle-Bowl, the national recycling competition for K-12 students, teachers and school communities. Recycle-Bowl engaged nearly 730 schools spanning four weeks in the fall, culminating on America Recycles Day on Nov. 15, 2018.

For 40 years, Hallmark supported the Girl Scouts in their mission to build “girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place.” In 2017, Hallmark was humbled to receive the Girl Scouts’ Corporate Philanthropy Award in recognition of its long- time commitment.

Three winners of the eighth annual Hormel Foods MLK essay contest visited the Hormel Foods corporate offices today to read their winning essays to company employees. The students – Patrick Brown from Little Rock, Ark., Blessyn Champ from Minneapolis, Minn., and Ben Kim from Atlanta, Ga. – claimed the top honors among hundreds of entries from 19 different schools this year. Their visit to the corporate office marks the second time the company has invited essay winners in for a reading.

This March, Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful (KTNRB) will launch the "Tennessee River Grand Slam Cleanup," bringing four major cleanups spanning 400-plus river miles in four weeks.

On 14 March, join the UN Global Compact, UN Women and the UN Office for Partnerships at the UN Headquarters in New York for the 2019 Women’s Empowerment Principles Forum. The WEPs Forum aims to accelerate the pace of progress on gender equality and inspire responsible businesses everywhere to empower women.

With one out of every six children in the United States living with hunger each day, young people are leading the fight to end child hunger to make sure their peers have access to healthy meals. To celebrate the role of young people in addressing this critical issue, Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation and Generation No Kid Hungry proclaim February 21 National Youth Day.

“Every day, the babies in our community are having adult experiences.”

I’ll never forget listening to a community gardener talk about the challenges facing young children in his east-side neighborhood. Violence, drugs, poverty, absent parents, hunger. It was heartbreaking. The conversation started when another community garden leader explained that a portion of our ScottsMiracle-Gro grant was used to purchase pairs of cheap, plastic flip flops.

Why? I asked.

Listen to Common Impact's new Pro Bono Perspectives podcast episode featuring Daniel Horgan, Senior Director of Corporate Engagement at MENTO and hear how he uses his experience in the private and social sector to develop unique and impactful partnerships that engage corporate volunteers as mentors and champions of the mentorship movement.