International Coastal Cleanup with NICA

Paso Pacífico has been managing Nicaragua's participation in the Ocean Conservancy's annual International Coastal Cleanup for five years. This past weekend, Comunidad Connect, TESÓN, and Barrio Planta helped us round up hundreds of volunteers who picked up over 2000 pounds of trash along the beaches and waterways of several coastal communities. You can read more about it (in Spanish) at El Nuevo Diario. This coming weekend is part two of our International Coastal clean up, when we'll recruit more volunteers to pick up trash from other beaches.

Photo courtesy of NICA

For the third year in a row, we were also joined by NICA, who coordinated the cleanup on the beaches of the fishing village El Transito (pictured above), gathering 48 volunteers to work alongside 13 municipal employees who collected 4500 pounds of garbage and recyclables on Saturday.

NICA's mission is to empower Nicaragua through community development, helping the country become more self-sufficient and a greater participant in the global economy. They work on sustainability issues in rural communities and we look forward to future collaboration with them, especially after brainstorming with them at the Clinton Global Initiative this week.

Photo courtesy of Erin Orias

NICA's Individual Aid Program organizes a group of women to clean the coast three days a week for a few hours each day. After completing 78 hours of community work over a 13-week period, the women receive benefits of food and/or construction materials. Since the program was founded in 2006, El Transito Beach has been among Nicaragua's most pristine.

We are pleased to partner with NICA. When we asked how they felt about this weekend's event, they said this:

"The best part of the cleanup was that we sent the message to local people that when we join forces with other organizations and we work together, we can achieve our goal of a clean coast and show to our next generations that they can participate in this change."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.