Organization of the Year 2024-2025
Green Team 94803 is ES Chamber of Commerce Organization of the Year, 2024-25.
El Sobrante Valley Green Teams was started by Maurice Abraham in October 2015 with a focus on the Downtown area, to improve the businesses curb appeal. He was a visionary with big plans to cleanup and beautify the area. The teams were sponsored by El Sobrante Chamber of Commerce and its Beautification Committee, which provided gear like vests, grabbers, buckets and bags to get it started. It set up 4 teams to cleanup on the first and third Saturdays of each month, so every 2 months one team picked up litter, pulled weeds or sowed poppy seeds.
Maurice became ill in 2017 and Holly Anne Trejo stepped up to take over. Ken Chainey, with Citizens for Greener El Sobrante, offered to manage equipment and lead kayak cleanups in the San Pablo Reservoir. Maurice sadly passed away in 2019.
When the pandemic started, litter and illegal dumps got much worse around the area, so Green Team decided to expand its reach beyond main street to San Pablo Dam Road, Valley View, Appian Way, Castro Ranch Road, and some offshoots. When Mikki Norris joined the El Sobrante MAC and started its Cleanup and Beautification subcommittee, she and husband, Chris Conrad, began recruiting volunteers for this effort among their friends and via the El Sobrante Neighborhood Cleanup Group, started by Adrian Lembert on NextDoor. Group-cleanups were consolidated to the Third Saturday of each month and its meeting place moved to the library, 10 AM to Noon. Work spread out across the 94803 Zip code to include parts of Richmond and on any given day, you may see a few of them cleaning the roadways.
Renamed Green Team 94803, it has a dedicated core-group of volunteers who regularly report dumps, clean up the town, organize events and welcome the whole community to participate. Aside from Third Saturdays, the group co-sponsors two major cleanup events a year – Earth Day and Coastal Cleanup Day — along with SPAWNERS, SOS Richmond, the Library, Sup. Gioia’s office and the Chamber. It is a fun and passionate group and its lively contingent in the parade has been recognized for Outstanding Spirit at the ES Stroll. Chris made the KeepElSobranteBeautiful.info website (to announce events, connect with other groups and build community), signage for its events and a postcard to give people info they need to dispose of stuff in a responsible manner and mitigate the dumping and litter problems. Its volunteers help maintain the Downtown planters, started by Dorcas Moulton and the Chamber, by adding new plants, pruning and watering to help beautify our town. Ramon also removes graffiti as it pops up.
Green Team 94803 is an inspiring member of our community that shows how much good a small group of volunteers can achieve when they set out to make El Sobrante cleaner and more beautiful. For all these reasons, it was voted to name it our Organization of the Year.