Klean Kensington

Klean Kensington‘s mission is to empower local youth by employing them to clean and beautify Kensington. While Kensington is known for poverty, drugs, and crime, our local projects enable grassroots change magnifying our community’s voice. Many existing local efforts focus on public health/harm-reduction for transient residents. Meanwhile, neighbors feel besieged in our own neighborhood by powerful forces of a nationwide crisis. Loneliness exacerbates mental health challenges. By together targeting trash-alleviation, beautification, and greening projects, we’re galvanizing a groundswell of hope for a healthier, cooperative, connected future. In coming alongside this project, you will help us empower everyday neighbor activists to cultivate holistic health emerging from within the community, from the block!

After George Floyd (2020), our neighborhood’s sidewalks were piled up with trash; rats were roaming the sidewalks. A collective of neighbors gathered together to clean the trash. In the process, wenoticed how this inspired neighbors, gave us deeper connection to our community members, and motivated us to see local change. This process also connected us with other community activists and organizations. Since then, we have turned this initiative into a way of employing teens, preventing their attraction to the drug trade (or, providing alternatives for getting out of it) while providing inspiration to their neighbors about the possibility of taking pride in the cleanliness and beauty of their own neighborhood and about contributing to positive change locally. Besides cleaning a broader area of sidewalks, we have cleaned up and are now maintaining 19+ parcels of land.