Making the World a Greener Place, One Neighborhood at a Time

Last week, I volunteered to help at the City of Redmond’s last of three Natural Yard Care workshops.

King County’s Natural Yard Care Neighborhoods program has been a client of Frause for eleven years. The Natural Yard Care program is a regional, community-based social marketing outreach program that promotes behavior changes in home yard care.

Community-based social marketing is a communications tactic that demonstrates that behavior change is most effectively achieved through direct initiatives delivered at the community level. Frause has been regarded as leader in community-based social marketing in the greater Seattle area.

The program provides people with five steps they can do to become more eco-friendly while building beautiful, healthy yards and gardens. The five steps are: build healthy soil, plant right for your site, practice smart watering, think twice before using pesticides and practice natural lawn care. The Natural Yard Care program is implemented twice a year, in fall and spring, in different neighborhoods around the King County area. This past spring, Auburn, Burien, Kirkland, Bellevue and four different neighborhoods in Seattle all hosted the three-workshop series. Federal Way, Kent and Redmond just finished up with their fall sessions a couple weeks ago.

For each neighborhood, the Natural Yard Care team at Frause works to package the educational materials for all sessions, create and distribute home mailings for recruitment of workshop participants, and coordinate door-to-door workshop promotion and recruitment efforts. To date, Frause and King County have managed over 200 Natural Yard Care workshops and more than 5,000 participants.

The workshop in Redmond was held at Norman Rockwell Elementary School from 7 to 9 p.m. last Tuesday night. At the event I worked with representatives from the City of Redmond, to set up for the event by providing the written materials, bringing snacks and refreshments, setting up the venue and signing people in. It was an awesome opportunity to meet some of the Redmond residents and experience their enthusiasm for the workshops and witness their appreciation for knowledge they received during the sessions. Numerous workshop participants praised the content and speakers and were encouraged to start making the necessary behavior changes needed for a greener neighborhood.

Redmond averaged over 100 people in attendance at all three events and now holds the record among all other participating neighborhoods for the most people at a single workshop, 117!

The Redmond event was a huge success and I gained tons of valuable information on how to build and maintain a green and beautiful lawn and garden. Now if only I had a yard…

-Amy Graham