The Motherline is a women's community organization with the mission of making a better world for our kids to live in.

So we do a lot of youth programming.

We do some dance theater classes all through the school year and sustainable agriculture classes for kids during the summer.

Plus we have our environmental programs like this trash cleanup, which ties in with the rest of it because we have to leave our kids a habitable planet.

So the Clean Sweep is our biggest environmental program.

We had the idea a couple of years ago of picking up all of the trash in all of the public woods in the Illinois River Watershed.

We're a little bit infamous for having let great big accumulations of trash build up over decades to the point where it felt hopeless and nobody thought we could do anything about it.

We're just gonna live in this trash valley forever.

And we started inviting volunteers to come out with us on a regular basis and pick away at picking up the trash.

We started out at the worst part of the valley, which was out on the way to the transfer station.

There's a lot of seasonal creeks that run right into the river from there, and we got all that stuff cleaned out.

Now we're coming out into other areas.

The volunteers are fantastic for this group and this event.

We have had so many people come and they come from all different parts of the valley and they too just want to make it a more beautiful place to live.

It's become so much more than just pick up some trash.

It's been this enormous community building project, different ages, different political backgrounds, working side by side on this really tangible project where you can see the trash and pick it up together and have this feeling of empowerment that as a community working together, you can really accomplish something that no one could do by themselves.

So we treat our volunteers well, people keep coming back.

We've probably had up to 3,000 volunteer hours to to pick up the 225 tons of trash that we've picked up altogether.