The group of youth that are helping to clean up Winnipeg

Community Connection: How youth are giving back Find out about a youth group that’s helping clean up garbage in their area and giving back to the city.

A group of Fort Garry youth are working together to keep the city clean and give back to the community,

One of these youth is Abigail Mitchell-Lawson, who picks up garbage around the city as part of her volunteer work. She was only 17 years old when she started doing this.

“I work in the Community Cleanup Series so we go around the school and the Fort Garry area and pick up all the trash to make sure our community is nice and clean,” she said.

Mitchell-Lawson is a volunteer with the Winnipeg Community Drive and Cleanup Series, an initiative that began two years ago during the pandemic when there was a lack of volunteer opportunities for young people. It was also a time when there were many people in need.

“[There was] the disproportionate impacts of the social and economic effects of the pandemic on people of low-income backgrounds and underserviced members of the Winnipeg community,” said Shiven Srivastava, who is part of the initiative.

Srivastava started the Winnipeg Community Drive and Cleanup Series with students from Vincent Massey Collegiate, who set out to create their own volunteer opportunities when everything was shut down.

“A lot school programming was shut down. A lot of organizations were shut down, and we thought, what can we do about this problem? Let’s just fix it ourselves,” Srivastava said.

“And so we decided to get that spirit of creation and make our own opportunities.“

Two years later, they’ve expanded to other schools and there are now more than 90 volunteers helping out.

As part of the initiative, the group helps clean up their community and also puts together community drives. They’ve done these community drives for a number of organizations including Harvest Manitoba, the West Central Women’s Resource Centre, Siloam Mission, and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Winnipeg.

“We do community drives in a different neighbourhood every single month,” Srivastava said.

“And basically what a community drive entails is we start off with dropping off flyers between 300 and 500 homes in a given community saying, ‘Hey, we're going to be back in four to five days to collect items for donation for [a] charitable organization.’”

When people from different neighbourhoods donate their gently-used items to the initiative, the volunteers say it makes them feel good too.

“Honestly, we've had so many words of affirmation from different members of the community, even when people sometimes don't have things to give in that exact moment, they always give us their support.They encourage us to keep doing it to expand and to make this a part of the spirit of our organization and we've done just that,” Srivastava said.

Not only does the initiative clean up neighbourhoods and help those in need, it also builds leaders.

“I feel like each one of us needs to have a purpose in this world and to give back to the family's in need as lots of us are very privileged -- it makes me happy to know that I can be a part of that,” Mitchell-Lawson said.

The Winnipeg Community Drive and Cleanup Series' next community drive is happening July 5 and July 8. The community cleanup runs once a month.