Hundreds of Volunteers Plant Trees, Pick Up Litter and Pack Up Donations on Good Neighbor Day

Volunteers mobilized across College Park and surrounding communities on Saturday to clean up community parks, sort donations for local food pantries, teach local residents about tech and more for the 15th annual Good Neighbor Day.

The event, a partnership between University of Maryland, the city of College Park and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Department of Parks and Recreation, Prince George’s County, brought together hundreds of Terps and local residents across 27 sites to Do Good.

At Acredale Community Park, 50 volunteers gathered, picking up trash grabbers and garbage bags, on their way to tidy up the grounds. The cleanup, led by student service organization Hearts in Action, filled dozens of trash bags.

Over in the university’s Nyumburu Cultural Center, the student organization Terps Against Hunger set up six stations where volunteers packed 21,000 nutritious meals for the Capital Area Food Bank, far exceeding its goal of 15,000.

In the parking lot of Herbert W. Wells Ice Rink, a team of 60 unloaded, sorted and packed more than 3,000 nonperishable food donations. The College Park City-University Partnership spearheaded the effort, collaborating with Maryland Athletics and local community organizations throughout October to collect donations. 

“I was excited to see so many people around our community giving their time and labor to make a difference,” said Tania D. Mitchell, associate provost for community engagement at the University of Maryland, “Showing up and working together to make our community cleaner, safer and more connected is what it means to be good neighbors and ultimately what Good Neighbor Day is all about.”

Read on to see how Terps and local community members worked together.