3 Jul 2023Congratulations to Karen Lee, our Tidy Kiwi Volunteer of the Month for June. Karen Lee is an extraordinarily passionate person who is heavily involved in volunteer work. She’s one of the main coordinators of For Our Real Clean Environment (F.O.R.C.E.), a Whangārei-based environmental and waste minimisation group. According to her nominator Nicholas, Karen is the backbone of the group who organises and manages events, runs meetings, collates waste data, sorts recycling, and even washes the gear other volunteers use. She started the Love Whangarei Monthly Clean Up in 2018, which has since removed nearly 52 tons of waste from the region, recycling and upcycling 3,450kg of it. She’s coordinated over 3,800 volunteer hours from nearly 700 individual volunteers — a truly impressive effort! Karen’s latest endeavor through F.O.R.C.E. is starting and coordinating the Whangarei Repair Cafe, a free community gathering in which people with repair skills share their time and talents to fix their community’s belongings. She does all of the above while juggling a full-time job and a toddler too! The vision of F.O.R.C.E. is to support more solutions to waste which view it as a resource, and Karen lives and breathes that vision! Karen has a passion for reducing waste in the environment, and that passion inspires others to do better too! Whakamihi – congratulations! As this month’s Tidy Kiwi Volunteer of the Month, Karen will receive a Keep New Zealand Beautiful merchandise pack and a Resene paint voucher to help her continue her beautification efforts, as well as being entered into this year’s Beautiful Awards. Know someone keeping New Zealand beautiful? Simply nominate them on our website to become a Tidy Kiwi Volunteer of the Month. Share this page
