News & Media

UC 160 Students Earn Service Award

Ohio Wesleyan Freshmen Honored by Keep Delaware County Beautiful Coalition

It’s a clean sweep for Ohio Wesleyan University’s UC 160 program and the first-year students who have helped to remove more than a ton of trash from Delaware’s Scioto River over the past several years.

For their work with the annual Scioto River Sweep, the student-volunteers and OWU’s UC 160 program are being honored with the 2017 Litter Prevention Award from the Keep Delaware County Beautiful Coalition. (UC 160 is a semester-long course taken each fall by incoming freshmen to help them make the most of their four years at Ohio Wesleyan and their OWU Connection opportunities.)

In announcing the award, Jenifer Way-Young, coordinator of the Keep Delaware County Beautiful program, thanked the University community for its work, noting, “Over the last several years, your class service project has been responsible for the removal of more than 100 tires and one and a half tons of trash from the Scioto River!”

The Litter Prevention Award will be presented Dec. 5 during a ceremony sponsored by the Keep Delaware County Beautiful Coalition, the Delaware General Health District, and the Delaware, Knox, Marion, Morrow (DKMM) Joint Solid Waste District.

This year’s Scioto River Sweep was held Sept. 9, with UC 160 students volunteering there and simultaneously at the 11th annual Community Unity Festival hosted by the Second Ward Community Center and at the LSS Delaware County Food Pantry operated by Lutheran Social Services of Central Ohio.

“Saturday, September 9th, was a banner day for UC 160 service projects this fall,” said Sally Leber, Ohio Wesleyan’s director of community service learning. “(Professors) Ellen Arnold, Paul Kostyu, and Scott Kelly did an amazing job of motivating their students and building community around this event. The student reviews were great, and now this work has been recognized in the Delaware community.”

The efforts of Ohio Wesleyan students also were recognized in 2015, when OWU’s “May Move Out” program was honored with the Keep Delaware County Beautiful Coalition’s Recycling Award. OWU earned the award for helping students to recycle unwanted goods when they left campus for the summer.

The 2015 “May Move Out” program recycled about 9.5 tons (19,000 pounds) of materials, benefiting Goodwill Industries and keeping reusable items out of area landfills. The program continues to make an impact, with the 2017 “May Move Out” recycling more than 13,000 pounds of reusable materials.
Congratulations to everyone involved in the ongoing efforts to Keep Delaware County Beautiful!