A group attempting to follow through on a downtown revitalization consultant’s recommendations for Hopkinsville met Monday afternoon and walked several blocks along Main Street collecting trash.
A dozen or so adults and and two students started at Fifth and Main streets and walked south to 14th Street with trash bags. The trash they collected included mostly food wrappings, soft drink and liquor bottles, discarded snacks and cigarette butts.
“We picked up a lot of trash but — more importantly — we were highly visible making a difference and that was the best part,” Hopkinsville Brewing Co. founder Kate Russell wrote afterwards in a message to the group.
The idea to collect trash came from consultant Jeff Siegler’s recent address at city hall on his last day in Hopkinsville.
Siegler said community leaders can spend a lot of time “talking, planning and plotting perfection” but there is nothing more valuable than “time spent taking action.”
Improvement is a long, hard road, but “relentless, incremental improvement” works, Siegler said.
“There’s no need to wait to improve,” he said. “Improvement won’t feel any different tomorrow than it does today. So you might as well get started on pulling the weeds and picking up the trash.”
The group will next meet at 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 23, at the brewery on Fifth Street. The project for that day hasn’t been determined, but the gatherings are open to anyone interested in helping improve the downtown district.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
