Brian Bell has collected more than nine tons of trash from public spaces with his nonprofit, Keep Virginia Cozy. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Take a walk down to the James River Park System’s Texas Beach after a busy weekend, and it’s hard to ignore the litter left behind.
Longtime outdoors enthusiast Brian Bell grew tired of seeing such careless behavior and began organizing litter cleanups around the river in 2016. “I’d post about it on Facebook and say, ‘Hey, I’m doing this if anyone feels like joining,’ and I’d get a solid group,” he explains. The cleanups garnered enough interest that he was inspired to leave his job with a Richmond-based civil engineering firm in July 2017 to start Keep Virginia Cozy, a nonprofit dedicated to caring for Virginia’s public lands.
The initial idea was simple: Clean up public spaces, and inspire others to do the same. The group’s first events were outgrowths of Bell’s social cleanups, and as these efforts grew in size, Keep Virginia Cozy added other events, such as Wildlife Wednesday, in which wildlife specialists educate participants about particular animals or ecosystems, and other outdoor education classes based on Bell’s background in wilderness survival and Leave No Trace training, as well as trail maintenance and cleanup efforts in Shenandoah National Park.
So far, the grassroots organization has collected more than 9 tons of trash from trails, parks and waterways in Virginia. Attendance at 2019 events more than doubled to an average of 35 participants at the weekly cleanups, including one event at Gillies Creek Park that netted nearly 500 pounds of waste. Asked about the strangest things they’ve found, Bell chuckles. “We’ve found everything from sex toys to discarded wallets to face masks that look like they were probably used in crimes,” he says. “Just all kinds of weird stuff.”
The group introduced new branding in a relaunch this January, and they expanded their funding with a membership program, business sponsorships and additional partnerships, including with outdoor retailer Patagonia’s 1% for the Planet initiative.
“Everyone, absolutely everyone, wants to feel that they are making a difference in this life, and they will take more pride in a mountain trail if they know they invested their time and energy into it,” Bell says.
