City of Grand Prairie Receives Two Arlo Ambassador Awards

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lady holding awards
Photo courtesy Grand Prairie

Grand Prairie Emphasizes Clean Air

GRAND PRAIRIE – The City of Grand Prairie was recognized recently for its clean air efforts around town.

The City was honored for not only its exemplary advertising efforts for environmental goodness, but also given two Arlo Ambassador Awards.

Grand Prairie’s Air North Texas campaign was promoted during 2021 on the city’s social media accounts tagged with the #AirNTX hashtag.

A press release stated the campaign touched on clean air tips, high ozone level alerts and clean air action day participation.

The additional Arlo Ambassador Award given to the city was for its “efforts to advance the Air North Texas message” through campaign mascot Arlo the Airmadillo. The recognition was also accomplished due to the Environmental Quality staff purchasing a 2020 Chevrolet Bolt to reduce emissions. The Bolt was wrapped with a “Plugged into the Prairie” graphic design that featured Arlo.

Grand Prairie is one of several organizations involved with Air North Texas, a regional air quality partnership and general public outreach effort that includes 38 partnerships pursuing environmental awareness in North Texas.

Grand Prairie Receives Green Bag Grant from Keep Texas Beautiful

The City’s Keep Grand Prairie Beautiful initiative was also recognized by Keep Texas Beautiful as a recipient of a 2021 Green Bag Grant. The funding from H-E-B and Central Market overall allowed for Keep Texas Beautiful to provide 11 affiliate communities with a share of $25,000 to support educational and programmatic opportunities relating to sustainability, recycling, litter prevention, beautification and water conservation.

Grand Prairie was awarded $3,000 to begin in support of its proposed community project, which is in conjunction with the International Leadership of Texas (ILT) K-8 Grand Prairie campus to install an outdoor classroom on their campus to fulfill three goals.

The goal highlights are to provide habitat spaces for endangered wildlife in order to teach students compassion and the importance of the natural world; to provide hands-on experiences that support the classroom curriculum; and to enhance student well-being by providing natural spaces on campus.

A weather station and 120-square feet of raised bed space will be a Certified Wildlife Habitat through the National Wildlife Foundation and a Certified Monarch Waystation through Monarch Watch.

A press release stated “Students in kindergarten through grade eight will create connections through hands-on learning with the classroom curriculum in many different subjects, including: Art, Chinese, English Language Arts, Math, Science, and Spanish. ILT is a Title 1 campus with 74.84% of the students reported as economically disadvantaged. This is important because economically disadvantaged students may not necessarily have the same access to natural spaces as their more affluent counterparts. The installation of the outdoor classroom provides a safe space for students to enjoy the benefits of nature, which has been shown to increase student well-being by reducing symptoms of depression and stress.”

Other cities receiving the funding included Blanco, Coppell, Cuero, Ennis, Lewisville, Nolanville, Plano, San Juan, Victoria, and White Settlement.

“We are thankful for sponsors like H-E-B who support our efforts to clean and beautify communities around Texas,” says Suzanne Kho, Executive Director of Keep Texas Beautiful. “We cannot wait to see the projects our affiliates are able to complete with help from our Green Bag Grants.”