Clean Memphis will bring a community cleanup effort to the Soulsville USA neighborhood on April 9 as part of the Earth Day 30 Days Straight effort in the city.
 
Volunteers will meet at Chandler Park at the corner of College Street and Walker Avenue next to Cummins School at 9 a.m. and clean up the community until noon.
 
Earth Day 30 Days Straight is part of a citywide effort to clean up Memphis. Every day for the month of April there will be efforts in different neighborhoods in the city, spearheaded by Clean Memphis.
 
The Soulsville USA effort comes out of the Community Partnership, which is a collaboration of city and county officials, Clean Memphis and the Soulsville Neighborhood Association, led by LeMoyne-Owen College. Those organizations and community volunteers canvassed the neighborhood in January during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service effort.
 
“The Soulsville USA Blight Team and the other partners realized during the January MLK Day of Service, when several volunteers helped clean up the neighborhood, that one day was not enough,” said Rebecca Matlock Hutchinson, Soulsville USA Site Director. “There’s a lot of blight in our community and needed are more clean-up efforts held periodically throughout the year.”
 
The April 9 effort will be one of several scheduled during 2016.
 
In addition to a clean-up effort there also will be a new emphasis on recycling. The city of Memphis will provide free recycling containers for any interested residents. Also at the clean-up event will be a number of vendors representing the neighborhood’s service providers that will share information as well as free food, face painting and other activities.
 
Neighborhood churches as well as the wider Shalom Zone churches will open their doors for rest breaks as well as provide transportation to clean-up areas farther from Chandler Park.