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Dear Lucile and Charles Patterson

Co-Presidents of the Rolling Hills Neighborhood Association,
7400 Secret Valley Ct. NW Albuquerque, NM 87121

I am sure you as well have noted the litter problem that the Rolling Hills
Neighborhood has been facing the last couple of months. I am part of a group of three
families (the Castro, Barelas, and Payne households); that as you are well aware are
very involved in community activities and all devote time out of our personal lives to
clean a large perimeter around our three houses and the entry of the neighborhood.
The Castro, Barelas, and Payne families have had a lot of success cleaning the perimeter
of their homes by organizing clean-up events once every two weeks. At least three
members of each family will gather and clean the entry of the neighborhood and the
perimeter while the other members of the families stay back and prepare a meal to
celebrate the success of our chores for the week. We urge you to create a means of
communication that will allow the implementation a similarly structured program
where families gather in certain parts of the neighborhood and clean a perimeter. This
would not only help us achieve our common goal of having a more esthetically
pleasing, clean neighborhood but would also help give more families a sense of being a
part of our tight knit community.
Sincerely,
Daniel A. Castro-Prieto
Oldest Son and Heir to the Throne of House Castro
1328 Secret Valley Dr. SW Albuquerque, NM 87121

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Project: Keeping the Rolling Hills Beautiful

As involved members of the Rolling Hills Neighborhood all of our families have actively tried for
years now to reduce the litter problem in our neighborhood, however these past few months there has
been less involvement from other families which has caused the amount of litter to grow out of control;
this is mainly due to a lack of involvement on their part, but there is also a lack of providing information
for them from our part.

Our Plan
The Castro, Barelas, and Payne families have thought of a plan to help increase the involvement
of these estranged families and hopefully have them feel more a part of our community. These three
families have, for years now, gathered once every two weeks to clean up a large perimeter around all
three houses and after everyone bring an item of food and we have a pot luck dinner celebrating the
success of our clean-up day. This has become a tradition and has brought our families incredibly close to
one another! We hope that on a larger scale we could bring more families together and instead of cleaning
up the area surrounding a few houses we could all be evenly distributed to clean up the whole
neighborhood. Afterwards the same concept would apply where there is a pot luck dinner in which
people all bring an item and it is shared with their neighbors, the dynamics of the meal would not change
very much; if a family brings enough for themselves and a few more people everyone should have plenty
to choose from. The point was brought up that it would be difficult for one home to house all these
people, however we do have our park almost dead in the center of our neighborhood which could
function as a meeting point before the cleaning (to assign different families their locations and give them
whatever supplies they may need) and after (to gather the waste and get it ready to be disposed of, and to
celebrate!)

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The Real Problem

We realize that this would only solve the litter problem if the previous lack of communication can be
eradicated, so we begun to do some research on different ways to help make information more available,
almost immediately we ran into an organization that has had this same goal in mind since 1953; Keep
America Beautiful has been implementing clean up programs, providing resources and helping provide
expertise to communities across the United States for almost haft a century! And in 1982 an affiliate of
this organization was founded for Albuquerque specifically, Keep Albuquerque Beautiful has the same
objective in mind as their large-scale counter part except their activity is restricted to our city. An excerpt
from their website reads Keep Albuquerque Beautiful is part of a national network, the Keep America
Beautiful System. They are respected for their success in litter prevention and recognized by the Wirthlin
Public Opinion Survey as the most credible source for environmental information. We were really
excited to see the litter control portion of their information page; however we were more interested in the
fact that they are proof that by building a website you are giving many more people access to the
information you want to share.

Our Solution
Building a website may seem over whelming, it probably seems like a lot of work to keep a beautiful site
running and up to date. This is a huge misconception, not only are there an abundant number of services
that design and run a website for a fixed membership price (like Squarespace, Light CMS, and Voog)
along with a plethora of websites that provide a domain name and let one design and edit their own site
(like Weebly, Wix, and Webflow).
By creating a website that allows all the neighbors (even those that are not particularly active within the
community) to access information about events being planned across the neighborhood we would not
only already be creating a more stable web of communicating between all the households, we would be
taking a step towards our goal of having a more interactive community and create a sense of safety for
our children.

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Prospect Results
The whole point of our efforts and the organization that we have formed is to keep our neighborhood
beautiful, there are several other means of spreading information across the neighborhood however these
are less accessible than a simple, public domain website, not to mention that some of these also produce
solid waste. One of todays most used forms of communication is e-mail, knowing someone that does not
have an e-mail is almost impossible, however knowing someone that actually checks and keeps their
personal email up to date is just as rare. This means that this would not be a viable way of
communicating with each other, individuals habits may hinder the whole family accessing the
information we made the effort of putting out there.
A more reliable means of making sure the whole household receives the information we are trying to
spread would be pamphlets, they are easy to mass produce and you do not need internet accessibility to
read the document. However these would only add to the solid waste we are trying to get rid of,
unfortunately we cannot guarantee that everyone that receives a pamphlet will read it then dispose of it
properly; there is after all a reason there is a littler problem in our neighborhood. Not to mention that
there are extra costs that we would have to take under consideration, the production of the paper used
the printing of the ink to the paper, and finally the distribution. Having accounted for these flaws in the
different means of communication it is the best course of action to design and operate the website
ourselves. As I have stated before there are many available programs, websites, and soft wares that are
made specifically for one to design and run their personal website at no charge.

In Conclusion
We know that regardless of how many efforts we make to try and get more of our fellow
neighbors to join us, we might never get the whole population of the Rolling Hills Neighborhood to
become involved. However that is not the end goal for either of us, what we are striving for is a cleaner,
safer, and more community rich neighborhood. We from the Castro, Barelas, and Payne families would

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very much appreciate if you could bring this point up on the next Neighborhood Association meeting so
we may put it up to a vote and decide some of the details, for example;

Who will design the website, and if they should run it as well?

There should be someone that periodically checks the page for errors or editing purposes

What should the name of the domain be?

After we have discussed these topics and devised a schedule for the clean-up events solving the more
visible problem, which is getting the Rolling Hills Neighborhood to the level of cleanliness that we all
desire, is only a matter of time. By letting our fellow neighbors know about the clean-up events and the
neighborhood website (by word of mouth) we will be hopefully making new additions to our clean-up
crew weekly, and have enough members to send to every area of our neighborhood before the
temperatures fall enough to prevent us from having our clean-up events.
As a group of involved families, we know how busy your schedule can be. However it would be greatly
appreciated if during the next Rolling Hills Neighborhood Association you, as President and CoPresident could bring up this topic so we may discuss it further with the other members of the
Association.