Colorado Ambassador Sydney Hella
Sydney joined the We Clean Trails movement in 2023. Sydney is Miss Colorado Earth USA, and will be representing Colorado at the Miss Earth USA pageant December 31st, 2023!
Sydney is the founder of her social media management firm, starting the business at just 22 years old. Her company specializes in creating engaging social media content for small businesses.
Sydney is proud of her career change, starting her own business at 22 after being an elementary school teacher. Although no longer teaching, she passionately advocates for education reform and safer school environments.
Sydney serves as a Global Cleanup Ambassador for Clean Trails and EARTHDAY.ORG, organizing community clean-up events and managing social media accounts. She's passionate about the power of social media in rallying more individuals to clean-up efforts.
Sydney has hosted cleanups in Colorado, California, Florida, North Dakota, and Minnesota, and hopes to continue to grow that list!
Advocacy
Advocacy is the primary tool through which Clean Trails works to promote natural, pristine, and litter-free wild-places and the trails that lead to them. We encourage, enable, and empower our members and other individuals to raise awareness for the disparaging effects of litter on our local, regional, and national trail systems.
Our Clean Trails’ advocacy program promotes general awareness, responsibility, and educational activities for individuals, schools, businesses, and organizations. Through our Clean Trails advocates, we provide a local point of contact for city, county, state, and federal agencies to coordinate for a better outdoor experience.
Theory of Change
With reduced funding for park and wilderness maintenance, litter is becoming a growing problem on our nation’s trail systems.
Trail Trash
In the wake of budget cutbacks and the focus of our public systems on other activities, the role of maintaining our trails needs to fall upon us, the users. Our objective is to create a sense of pride and purpose for our trail systems; to keep them as pristine as the wild places to which they take us.
Studies show the highest indicator that someone will pick up litter is if they witness someone else picking up litter. Community Based Social Marketing (CBSM) studies are proving that peer group norms are more powerful than incentives, and when worked in concert with each other, they can provide impressive behavioral change impacts.
Clean Trails: The Science…
Our plans include development of a national network of trail stewards, as well as, educational and advocacy programs. Specific areas of service include: developing trail stewardship networks, awareness programming, Adopt-A-Trail, and Trail Box installation and maintenance. Our first course of action is to begin building our network by leveraging existing social media avenues through current channels and by encouraging responsibility through trailside events and activities.
Trail Box Project
Our trail boxes are a tool to promote personal responsibility and assist individuals and groups in maintaining a clean trail. The boxes are designed specifically to encourage casual participation in removal of litter from the outdoors. Box design has been field-tested and we have built pre-production prototypes.
Phase One: is an initial effort to set up pre-production and development. Funding is required for implementation: including design and development services; initial production run of 200 units; accessories, assembly, packaging and shipping.
Phase Two: consists of a pre-commercial production run of 500 units, which will include design and development; production of units and accessories, assembly, packaging, and shipping.
Phase Three: is projected as an initial commercial run of 10,000 units.
In preproduction testing, this project has proved to dramatically improve trail conditions. We’re looking for investors to help get this important project off the ground. Contact us to discuss our cobranding effort to make a difference on our nation’s trails.