“Give A Day For The Bay” is volunteer program sponsored by the Tampa Bay Estuary Program to directly involve citizens in restoring Tampa Bay.

Half-day workdays are held on Saturdays about six times a year, at various parks and preserves through the Tampa Bay watershed. TBEP relies on its local government partners to identify parks in need of work, and to assist with logistical support.

Volunteers perform a variety of “dirty work,” from picking up trash to removing invasive plants to installing native shoreline, wetland or upland plants. Occasionally volunteers get to assist in volunteer monitoring programs, such as at Camp Bayou in Ruskin in February 2008, when volunteers were taught to use handheld GPS units and put to work surveying a pine flatwoods area for gopher tortoise burrows.

Volunteers always receive lunch and a t-shirt for their hard work.

The “Give A Day For The Bay” volunteer team can count among its successes the first “Invasive-Free” park in Hillsborough County – Sun City Heritage Park. Volunteers worked in a series of workdays over a 3-year period to remove Brazilian pepper, lead tree and other invasives from this park along the Little Manatee River, clearing out the last of the harmful invaders in 2006!

Our most recent workday was at Tampa’s Rivercrest Park in March 2008, where more than 60 volunteers of all ages picked up trash and debris along the shoreline of the Hillsborough River.

Future workdays are scheduled for April 26 at Taylor Park in Largo, and May 31 at War Veterans Memorial Park in St. Petersburg.