Skip to main content
Donate
Young volunteers in orange Great American Cleanup t-shirts work a roadside verge with litter grabbers and black trash bags, a pickup truck parked beside them.

Volunteer & events

It’s happening near you

Local affiliates run cleanups, plantings and recycling drives close to home, and everyone is welcome to join.

Find your local group

No local group near you, nothing scheduled, or ready to start today? Take Individual Action

What to expect

What a cleanup looks like

You turn up, someone hands you gloves and a bag, and a few hours later a stretch of your town looks different. Our volunteers work through community-based groups called affiliates, and each one sets its own dates and places.

Kids and adults in neon-yellow safety vests kneel together on a wooded slope during a Keep Rome-Floyd Beautiful cross-country cleanup, holding work gloves and trash bags.

Who runs it

Run by neighbors who know your town

Roughly 700 local affiliates bring Keep America Beautiful to life in their own communities. They hosted 60,000 community events across the country in 2025.

The best place to start is with the people doing this work in your town.

About the affiliate network
Two volunteers in blue Love SD t-shirts smile on a park lawn lined with palm trees, holding green buckets and litter grabbers.

Events you can join near you

Each affiliate sets its own dates and places, so events vary by location. Here are the kinds of events affiliates run every year.

Volunteers in orange safety vests haul old tires up a wooded roadside bank under oaks hung with Spanish moss.

Cleanups

Community cleanups

Roadsides, shorelines, waterways, parks and trails.

Volunteers sorting bottles and cans into labeled recycling bins at a community collection event, boxes of gathered material stacked behind them.

Recycling

Recycling drives

Recycling drives and America Recycles Day® events, including hard-to-recycle collections.

America Recycles Day®
Volunteers painting a bright mural onto a long exterior wall at Walnut Hill, smiling as they work along the scaffold line.

Beautification

Planting & murals

Beautification days — planting, murals, gateway and green-space projects.

See beautification
Four volunteers stand smiling around a newly planted sapling in a fresh ring of mulch on a front lawn, two of them holding shovels, an ivy-covered brick house behind them.

Restoration

Restoration plantings

Replacing trees lost to storms, floods and fire.

See restoration
Two volunteers in yellow safety vests laugh as they walk across a park lawn carrying buckets and litter grabbers, trees behind them.

Every spring

The Great American Cleanup®

Each year, from the first day of spring through the first day of summer, the Great American Cleanup® brings more than 300,000 volunteers and participants together in thousands of communities. Together we clean up, plant and recycle close to home.

About the Great American Cleanup®

We help people show up for the places they love.

Neighbors at work across the country

Photos from Keep America Beautiful affiliates across the country.

A woman and a boy with litter grabbers fill blue bags on a sandy beach path through the dunes, another volunteer working behind them by the water.
Keep America Beautiful
Two volunteers in yellow safety vests, one reading Keep America Beautiful Volunteer, walk away down a sunny city sidewalk lined with shrubs and graffiti.
Keep America Beautiful
Keep America Beautiful
A smiling boy in a red t-shirt stands in tall grass at a Creek to Bay cleanup, holding a litter grabber up high, trees and green brush behind him.
Creek to Bay cleanup
Three volunteers in winter hats and safety vests stand side by side on a sunny path, each holding a full trash bag and a litter grabber.
MLK Day of Service

Your affiliate has the local calendar

Search by place and you will get the events, the contacts and the work already underway near you.

Find your affiliate