We were lucky to catch up with Maria Jose Algarra recently and have shared our conversation below.

Maria Jose, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I founded Clean This Beach Up in April 2019, I found my inspiration and love for mother nature through yoga & meditation, and one day I decided to share that light with others and began inviting friends and residents to enjoy a yoga class followed by a beach cleanup.

Seeing our local beaches and waterways covered in trash motivated me to create this movement and started a wave of change, focused on educating and inspiring others to make a difference in their community and live a more sustainable life.

Clean This Beach Up has a different approach, our goal is to build connections, provide education and inspire everyone beyond race and gender in an inclusive and intersectional environmental movement. We love to give back to our volunteers, whether it is with a free wellness class, giveaways or a beach party, we want to change the idea that beach cleanups are boring, we want to make cleaning up trash fun and cool, where no matter the age everyone gets to leave feeling good after doing good.

It’s exciting and rewarding to look back and see the change I have created in my community in only 3 years. It started with me cleaning up alone and soon 5 volunteers turned into hundreds. I am proof that one person can make a difference, but when we come together, collective effort can change the world.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Clean This Beach Up Corp, is a registered nonprofit organization based in Miami, dedicated to creating awareness and educating the public about the negative effects of plastic pollution through weekly cleanups, educational programs and wellness activities.

Our events take place once a week in different locations throughout Miami Dade and Broward County, where hundreds of volunteers help clean our beaches, waterways, islands, causeways and streets. We have led over 130 beach cleanups all and have inspired over 4600 volunteers to join our mission and create small changes in their everyday lives that will go a long way, this collective effort has helped us remove over 47,000 lbs of debris from our shorelines and waterways.

I was born in Bogota, Colombia and have been living in Miami for 10 years. Miami is my home and I want to inspire everyone to love where they live and protect what they love, whether they are tourists or locals, our goal is to teach people to leave the places they visit better than they found them.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

During the pandemic we were forced to stay indoors and avoid other people, which made it extremely hard for Clean This Beach Up since our main focus is educating others by engaging with them. Covid restrictions made it almost impossible to organize community cleanups but that didn’t stop us. We did two things: 1. Started a vital campaign that inspired people to properly dispose of their PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) it was simple, If see a glove/mask and snap a shot and tag us. This was a way for us to track down how much PPE was being littered across the globe and educate everyone through social media. By the end of the campaign we were able to track over 18,000 littered gloves across the globe and over 7,000 masks.

2. We had so much free time and drive that we were able to removed over 21,000 lbs of debris from Miami’s shorelines. Following all the restrictions 1769 volunteers helped us reach our 2020 to pick up 20K lbs by the end of 2020! and we still had to turn down so many of them because every single cleanup had a cap of 20 volunteers, we even had to do multiple cleanups throughout the day! We don’t know how we did it but we are so proud of it.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

All of our funding comes from sponsors. We purchase all of our supplies with donations from corporations and businesses that want to support our efforts. At the beginning everything came out of pocket and it was honestly the best investment of my life! Because I created a movement that will inspire many generations to come, to protect our environment. I never knew running a non profit would be so expensive, think about it, gloves, pickers, trash bags, buckets, storage, scales, insurance, permits, marketing, website, transportation, merchandise… etc wow.. its a lot! But it’s worth it! and we could have never done it without our sponsors!!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cleanthisbeachup.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cleanthisbeachup/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cleanthisbeachup/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/cleanthisb_up
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgenHKu-nz11hqitbU0cM3w

Image Credits
@instalesspeter @aliah.in.waterland