Carmel Cares

Beautification - the organization works to create and maintain a beautiful landscape aesthetic for those enjoying the city of carmel-by-the-sea. This year our volunteers completed significant improvemnt infrastructure on scenic pathway and reduced erosion on stone beach access stairways. The organization helped maintain the historic forest theater grounds with weekly cleaning, planting of native plants and donated rollup cover for sound booth. The median minder program enabled residents to adopt median islands and easements in their neighborhood and assisted them in making landscape improvements. Carmel Cares also designs and builds various hand-made, high quality structures that are placed around town. This includes library shrines (take-a-book, leave-a-book), cute covers for backflow preventers and other pump systems that are unslightly, visitor information and newspaper racks, and displays for showbills at theaters. Finally, the Carmel Cares pick up posse kept the city litter-free and acted as ambassadors for visitors and locals.

Inviting - the organization forms collaborative relationships with other local exempt organizations whose missions are aligned with improving the city of Carmel. Through these efforts the organization looks to find ways that they can support one another and work closely to best utilize resources provided for the benefit of the city. The organization also, through their volunteer program, provides training and on-site activities so that volunteers can learn more about the ongoing needs of the city as well as tangible ways they can help continue to keep the city a warm and inviting place to visit and live. Organization leaders attend almost all city government meetings, are active in many civic organizations, and play a very active role in encouraging, participating in, and supporting activities that protect the historical and artistic nature and natural resources of our village in the forest.

Safety - in order to ensure the Carmel community continues to be a place that is welcoming for visitors and residents alike and to protect the city from legal issues, the organization has put a focus on improving safety within our community. As part of this program we identify projects that are in need of repair or assets that are in need of replacement by the city. We work closely with the city of Carmel and the public works department to identify needs and step in where we can. This past year the organization made significant safety improvements around the city and helped the city purchase a new fire truck.