• Volunteer Group of the Year: Wildomar Beautification Volunteers

In the most recent issue of Supervisor Kevin Jeffries' newsletter he announced that Wildomar Beautification Volunteers were selected as this year's Volunteer Organization of the Year, and last of the original Wildomar city council members, Bridgette Moore, was selected as Volunteer of the Year.

The group will be honored at the April 26th Board of Supervisors Meeting.

Early on a Saturday morning, getting ready to beautify Wildomar.

Link to Supervisor Jeffries' Newsletter

If the font is too small to read on the image, here it is again. 😁

Supervisor Jeffries has selected the Wildomar Beautification Volunteers as the First District Volunteer Organization of the Year. 

In July 2020, Wildomar Councilwoman Bridgette Moore asked Mayor Pro Tem Joseph Morabito if he would accompany her on a litter pick up. They quickly saw that once a month would not make a dent so they planned for every week. Residents started joining in and a movement was started! The residents have created this wonderful group and have about 20 dedicated volunteers that are out in the community consistently. 

In 2022, they started picking up litter everyday. In addition, they have adopted 4 miles of the I15 freeway within the City. 

Their totals for 2021: Hours 1, 323 hours Bags 1,352

Bridgette spends countless hours out in the community cleaning and organizing daily events, supplies, and encouraging others to get involved in the community. 

Thank you Bridgette for all you do in the community. 

Bridgette and members of the Wildomar Beautification Volunteers will be honored at the April 26th Board Meeting during our Volunteers of the Year Presentation.

Link to September 2020 Blog About The Group

Bridgette has always been kind enough to include me (Joseph Morabito) as one of the founders of WBV. 

Yes I was there, much like the McDonald's brothers were there at the start of McDonald's, but it was Ray Kroc that made it a household name, and it's Bridgette Moore that breathed life into Wildomar Beautification Volunteers.

Ok, here's the reverse angle of the story... before Covid hit, there were a couple of residents that had been picking up litter on their own, most notably was Kathy Bundy and Jerry Orchard. I'm aware of a couple of others that regularly picked up litter, but they had been flying below my radar at that time.

In early 2020 a couple of friends and I went and picked up a couple of bags of trash at what used to be the Baxter/Central curve. I wrote a blog about it, but it didn't become a regular thing by any means. 

Then in the Summer of 2020, after a lot of chatter on Facebook about trash on our roadways, Bridgette asked if I'd join her in picking up litter in town, I said, "Sure." 

We thought that we'd pick up from McVicar to Grand and all the way to Clinton Keith. We were rookies then and had no idea how much time it actually took to pick up trash. We barely made it to Grand and back to the creek before we ran out of time.

We realized that once a month wasn't going to do anything, so we upped it to every other week, and then weekly. I remember the first time that other people joined in. I believe that it was Ann White and another person.

I was pretty regular with picking up trash on a weekly basis until the weather changed in December and it was barely light outside at our start time (great excuses, right? 😅). I went MIA until late January, and when I returned about eight weeks later, I saw how there were many new volunteers ready to make Wildomar beautiful. 

This is where things really changed. I was concerned that we couldn't keep up the pace of weekly, and was trying to lobby for twice a month or even monthly. I'm glad that Bridgette didn't listen to that and now the group has a couple of dozen regular members, all with great personalities and stories of their own, plus many others that come now and then. 

Not only is it a weekly thing now, there are some in the group that go out several times during the week, and the impact of all the volunteer hours really shows as Wildomar roadways continue to look better and better.

Thank you Bridgette Moore for having the tenacity and sticktoitiveness to take this from its humble beginnings to the point that you can take a week or two off and the group won't skip a beat. 

If you'd like to join the Wildomar Beautification Volunteers (even just one time), please reach out to either Bridgette or Joseph... but mostly Bridgette. ☺

Here's a link to the group's facebook page if you'd just like to take a look at what we do.