Before the cleanups

Bill's work with Clean Trails and National CleanUp didn't start with cleanups. It followed decades in international business — multi-million-dollar deals in satellites, communications, and manufacturing, closed across much of the world. The instincts that built those deals are the same ones built into how this organization runs today.

“I doubted him once. We were talking about a product I was trying to invent, and Bill walked me through costs, injection molding, markups — all of it exactly right. He'd mentioned, off-hand, how much he'd traveled. I couldn't picture it. Then in 2019, booking flights to a conference in Estonia, I asked for his passport number. He came back with a box of expired passports stacked eight inches high — every single one of them fully stamped. I haven't doubted him since.”

“If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong.”Bill's line. The one every reporter asks him to repeat.

Common ground, literally

A roadside or a riverbank brings out the best in people. Every cleanup I've worked — across states, across countries — has drawn together people from every walk of life, all working toward the exact same goal. That's not a coincidence. It's one of the most genuinely unifying things people can do together, and it's worth celebrating as exactly that.

What CBSM taught me

Community-Based Social Marketing isn't a slogan — it's a discipline for understanding why people actually act, not just what we wish they'd do. Years in the field taught us the same lesson CBSM teaches in theory: removing a barrier works better than adding a lecture. That's as true for turning out volunteers as it is for anything else we're asking people to change.

Open to everyone

Cleanup work is for anyone who wants to show up — no test to pass, no side to pick, nothing to prove. The parks, trails, and waterways benefit from every single person who turns out, and that's exactly how it should stay: wide open, for everybody, always.