Big Muddy Speaker Series presents:

Missouri River Relief’s very own Alyssa Thomas shared the story of the Big Muddy Clean Sweep for March 2022’s presentation.

Missouri River Relief's very own Alyssa Thomas will speak on her experiences preparing for and participating in a momentous cleanup. In honor of Missouri River Relief’s 20^th Anniversary, a 2-month-long rolling cleanup project was launched. The "Big Muddy Clean Sweep" took place from mid-August to mid-October of 2021. This type of cleanup has been done a couple times in Missouri River Relief’s past; but this time Operations Manager Kevin Tosie envisioned that the most efficient and best overall statement to get a core crew together would be to STAY on the river. To wake up, eat, clean, eat, clean, eat, sleep, then do it all again the next day (never in that order).

For this presentation, Alyssa will cover all aspects of the Clean Sweep–how the project came to life, introduce us to the core crew, the day-to-day, the hardships, and as well as share some fun stories! This project was tracked through various means, from marking all their stops on a map, to recording some of their day-by-day activities in a blog. All in all, the impact totals came out to 343 volunteers, 11 cleanups, 847 bags of trash, 382 tires, and 23.6 TONS of trash!