“Keep Crockett Beautiful” Looking to Involve Local Youth
By Greg Ritchie
Messenger Reporter
CROCKETT – At the recent Crockett city council meeting, a new phase of the “Keep Crockett Beautiful” (KCB) project was presented in a lengthy presentation, along with some of the newest members of the board representing local youth, whose involvement is one of the main goals of the group.
KCB President Scott Sheley has been involved with Keep Texas Beautiful at its Baytown chapter for many years before relocating to Crockett. He presented the project to city council, which happily embraced the idea and has been working the past few months organizing a board and getting the group’s documents together to join the statewide organization, Sheley has lost no time in capitalizing on his enthusiasm for the project to inspire others to get involved and propose different projects to make Crockett more beautiful, yes, but also more interesting with community-inspired projects.
The complete board consists of Sheley, President, Samantha Wiley Vice-President, James Henry, Director of Community Projects, Corey Simon. Director of School Projects and Volunteerism, Victoria Medel, Director of Media and Communications, Joseph Tuggle, Director of Community Relations and Voluntarism and Joni Clonts, Precinct Five Representative.
“I challenged the board when we first started meeting informally. We’ve had our third board meeting since we’ve been established, and each board member brought a project or two. Each board member has a precinct where they live and I’ve asked them to tour their precinct, because we are thinking about doing something precinct by precinct and assessing the particular needs of each one,” Sheley said.
The group is especially proud of their work to get local youth involved, presenting their three board members from Crockett High School and their talents and ideas to an enthusiastic crowd at the council meeting.
Sheley himself has done his due diligence within Crockett, noting areas to be renovated, meeting with school officials and trying to attract active board members and younger members with their unique perspective.
“They are enthusiastic and are incredible leaders of the future. And that’s one of the goals of this particular organization. If we don’t involve our youth, we don’t give them an immediate gratification about being involved with their community and making plans that affect their community,” Sheley said. “Crockett is full of great community-minded people. But age is a factor. If our young people aren’t making decisions for themselves, we are losing out tremendously in the future.”
Some of the programs in the works? Getting Crockett athletes and students involved such as promoting beauty in the community, a competition to come up with the group’s logo, along with art projects to decorate local parks.
Greg Ritchie can be reached at [email protected]
