Q&A with Vered Kleinberger, Board President of Keep Pickens Beautiful
If you’re passionate about foodscaping and sustainable landscapes, you’re going to love the latest project this affiliate has to offer. Join us for a conversation about community gardens, recycling resources, and the power of a single fig tree.
You’ve recently taken more of a lead at Keep Pickens Beautiful. What led you to get involved with the organization in the first place?
I’ve been in various roles on the Keep Pickens Beautiful board for roughly 15 years, and this is my second consecutive term as president. I commuted to Marietta for work for about a decade, so I did what I could, but I always felt like this organization had so much potential. Our mission is relevant to everyone—businesses, homes, governmental organizations. We can all have that relationship with KPB! When COVID hit, the company I was working for went remote, and I eventually started my own graphics and design company. Building my own schedule has given me a lot more time and flexibility, and I’m trying to bring our organization into the next generation. I’ve been rebuilding our website and improving our social presence, and now we’re focusing on growth and community outreach. Our county has a lot of amazing organizations doing amazing things, and more of us need to talk to each other!
Have you always been passionate about improving the environment?
Oh yes! I grew up playing outside with all the neighborhood boys, climbing trees, and going to the Chattahoochee Nature Center for summer camp. Being outside has always been a part of my life, and living up here in the North Georgia mountains, I’m outside pretty much every day, weather permitting. I’m lucky to live on a small lake in the woods. My family actually bought this house as a vacation cabin originally, but I moved here temporarily in 2002 and never left. Years ago, after working in education for a while, I actually started a nonprofit offering educational excursions to youth, mostly related to the environment, so I learned a lot about what North Georgia has to offer and met a lot of local families and community members. That’s helped me with Keep Pickens Beautiful to this day!
Tell us about one of your favorite projects with Keep Pickens Beautiful so far.
My friends and I started the Edible Jasper program in 2011 as part of a group called Sustainable Pickens. We wanted to promote foodscaping and permaculture. At that time, I was working for the Mountain Conservation Trust of Georgia and was friends with the editor of the Pickens Progress. He let us start our first two gardens in the newspaper’s parking lot in some grassy areas—one had herbs and the other became a fruit plot with a fig tree and blueberries. Unfortunately, some city employees used to mowing those areas didn’t realize what we’d started, so they weed whacked much of it down. The fig tree survived though, and everybody knows about it. People come from all around to pick the figs and it’s just the happiest tree and so huge.
After several members of the group experienced career changes and started having families, our work took a back seat. Last year, my friend Jenna and I started talking about it again. We had our eye on a public space in downtown Jasper, and I became inspired by a TED Talk from a group in smalltown England, very similar to ours, that started planting food gardens. Like us, they didn’t have much industry (Jasper used to be known for it’s marble, which has been used to build structures at Emory University and even in Washington D.C.), and wanted to start something new for their community. They started small, but eventually made a walking map of their gardens. They drew tourism and foot traffic to local businesses, and it eventually grew into an entire network across Europe. Here in Jasper, we have vineyards, farmer’s markets, farm to table restaurants, and horse trails. We have a brewery, a distillery, and even our own meadery. All of these businesses fall under the umbrella we’re trying to build for Edible Jasper. We’ve redone the gardens at Pickens Progress, and planted some others across the street and outside of our office on Main Street. We’re working on filling some other spaces with rosemary and lavender, and have really taken the idea and run with it.
One planting of many by Edible Jasper
What does your affiliate look forward to in the future? What further impact do you hope to see?
Education is a big part of all of this. On our website, we’re already starting to include uses for our Edible Jasper plants, and we’ll eventually add recipes and other components. We’re also working on resources for teachers or homeschoolers, not just about gardening, but ways to test water quality, what happens to an aluminum can after you recycle it, and so on. We’re busy building our databases, especially for our Adopt-A-Road program, so that our volunteers can see the history of our work—they’ll be able to log on and see how long they’ve been cleaning a particular area, or the impressive volume of trash they’ve collected over time. In addition to helping us with our reporting, we think it will be extremely useful for them to see their effectiveness.
We’ve also made a huge push with recycling recently. Our county invested significant funds in a beautiful new facility. Our old one was literally a mud pit—you didn’t want to go there if it had rained, or even if it was too dry. You’d get covered in dust! Our new center is a drive through facility with huge bays, and it’s very clean and organized. The director is also on our board, and he has such a great vision for it all. People from all the surrounding counties bring their recycling to us because it’s cheaper and more convenient than hauling it all the way down to Atlanta. It’s a wonderful resource for the region, and Keep Pickens Beautiful has been involved from the start. People sometimes have a hard time understanding how to separate their items, so we created color-coded banners for each bay along with a matching guide, and we’ll eventually put Edible Jasper gardens there as well to tie everything together.
Any advice for people looking to make their communities cleaner, greener, or more beautiful?
Collaborate! That’s the only way that stuff is actually going to get done. Reach out to other people, and find out more about their needs and what interests them. If you work together, you’ll generate more interest and buy-in. It’s my biggest challenge, but also my biggest goal.