Team Effort Ads Encourage a Call to Action

A Message from Shahram Kharaghani, City of Los Angeles Stormwater Program Manager

We’re hitting the streets! A spring time Team Effort advertising campaign will share the Stormwater Program’s vision of a socially-responsible Los Angeles. Our approach aims to inspire residents to become part of the solution and play a role in keeping their neighborhoods clean.

The Team Effort ads, which began running at the beginning of April, were created with a message of collaboration: asking city departments, non-profit organizations, businesses and residents to come together and make Los Angeles a more enjoyable and safer place to call home. The headline of the ad, “Clean Water: It’s a Team Effort,” expresses this rapport, and follows up with a call to action for pollution prevention.

Our program’s goal for the campaign is to be proactive in empowering communities and residents to improve their local environment. From downtown to surrounding neighborhoods to the beach, all areas are affected by daily behaviors of illegally disposing trash, chemicals and other toxins. These harmful pollutants threaten the safety and well-being of residents, tourists and wildlife.

Everyday trash is an important focus of the campaign, and we address this with a message from children asking all L.A. residents: “Please Don’t Litter, Thank You!.” The pictorial account shows that children are a major motivation of the team effort, because they are the most affected by current behaviors of littering and illegal dumping. Two additional campaign photos tell the story of City employees who have separate tasks but unified goals, as they monitor water quality both inland and on the coast to ensure public health and thriving marine habitats.

Taraneh Nik-Khah, a featured City employee, hops on a pontoon boat three times a week to sample the waters of Machado Lake at Ken Malloy Harbor Regional Park. The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board has identified the lake as a contaminated water body for such toxins as pesticides, DDT, trash and even odors. Taraneh takes these samples to a lab to monitor harmful materials and assess how they affect the surrounding habitat. In the near future, Taraneh and her sampling team will also be monitoring the benefits of the City’s Proposition O restoration project aimed at cleaning up Machado Lake and its adjacent park.

Northwest of Machado Lake, David Bond cruises the coast in the bright yellow Environmental Monitoring truck to sample ocean water at the Santa Monica Pier. Results of these samples, taken at 20 different coastal locations, are reported daily to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health who immediately uses the data to determine if it meets water quality standards. The data are also reported to the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board on a monthly basis and are used by the environmental group Heal the Bay to produce their annual beach report card.

There is no one single entity, organization or person who is going to be the solution to stormwater pollution. These increasingly difficult economic times remind us how important it is to work as a cohesive team for the common vision of clean rivers and beaches. Ultimately, our clean water team begins with you. I hope you will visit our website to learn more about the easy steps you can take to improve your community and also find out more about the stormwater projects we have been working on. Get involved in local clean-ups, share your voice on this blog and send us your stories at LAstormwater.org/teameffort