By Addy Silberhorn, January 2024 Intern
How often do you overlook roads? Sure, you drive on roads. You use roads to get from one place to the next. You probably even curse roads from time to time, especially when traffic gets backed up on it.
But do you take the time to really see roads?
We do.
Roads, quite literally, connect us to family, to destinations, to home.
Roads connect communities together.
And roads say something about a community.
When you drive into a new place, we bet you notice if there’s potholes or litter all across the shoulders.
A clean, well-maintained place says “we care about this town” and “we take care of the things we love.”
That’s why Consociate Media adopted Guinea Road at Gloucester Point, just around the corner from the main office, through the Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) Adopt-A-Highway program.
It’s also why we came together as a community on January 15 for the first Guinea Road Trash Pick-Up day of 2024.
A total of 11 volunteers gathered for the day – a freezing, wet winter day – for a deeply personal and glaringly obvious reason. As one volunteer said so perfectly, because “we live here.”
Why Guinea Road?
Despite being a thoroughfare to one of the culturally richest areas of Gloucester – home of the watermen who embody the reality that water drives life in this rural coastal community – trash piles up.
The team collected 19 bags of trash, a crate full of bottles and a shopping cart on January 15.
Why trash pick-up as a way to give back?
The answer can be found in the community and the watermen, too.
“We all have a shared mission of keeping Virginia beautiful for residents and visitors,” VDOT says officially through Adopt-A-Highway. “This is a key part of Virginia’s environmental strategy to prevent litter from entering wild areas and waterways.”
We’re proud to be among the 20,000 volunteers in Virginia who know that you can make a different one piece of trash at a time, and that all you need is a strong community, a pair of gloves, a trash bag, and some brightly colored vests to make a difference.
