Submitted by Claudia Ellsworth.
Rotary Clubs of Pierce County will celebrate Earth Day with a variety of environmentally oriented projects. UP-Fircrest Rotary members will gather at 1 p.m. Sunday, April 24, at the University Place Post Office on 27th Street to continue last Fall’s cleanup of Post Office grounds. Volunteers will bring wheelbarrows, pruners, rakes and other tools to tackle the grounds.
On Labor Day, 2021, the club tackled 20 years of deferred landscape maintenance, removing debris, trimming hedges along the street front, pruning landscape plants, cleaning the pavement and gutters. The Post Office helped out by providing a large waste container, an a big “thank you” to the club.
On Earth Day 2022, the UP-Fircrest Club will return at 9 a.m. to perform spring cleanup, much less extensive than the challenge the club faced in the fall. Much of the focus will be on areas less obvious to patrons, such as the employee parking lot at the rear of the building, which has become home to overgrown blackberry vines.
Among its other activities, the club has held recent multiple food drives with help from Safeway and Fred Meyer stores, and honored Curtis Junior High School Students of the Month for many years. The club has also provided baseball scoreboards at Cirque Park, and computers and printers at the University Place Library Teen Center. A listing of international projects can be found at the Club’s webpage, https://www.tacomanarrowsrotary.org/
Until 2021, the club was known as Tacoma Narrows Rotary, but clubs need to have a name that indicates their service area. As the number of clubs in Pierce County grew, it became important to change the club’s name to more closely mirror its service area. The club is still meeting via Zoom, and a meeting invitation can be found at the webpage.
