Amy Hampton
Amy Hampton said she can’t get her eight-year-old daughter Emma to clean her room. What she can clean, however, is a half-mile stretch of road from Cambridge Place Pond all the way down to Continental Road. Amy estimates her daughter packed eight bags worth of trash.
“We just kept going and going,” she expresses. “We couldn’t stop. We just kept going. We had no idea it would go all the way down Continental and back.”
Amy and her family have lived in Southlake for more than four years. With Emma just recently being released from school at Old Union Elementary for the summer, Amy remarked she and Emma frequently like to visit the Cambridge Place Pond and see the turtles and ducks.
On Father’s Day weekend, severe rain and winds in excess of 60-70 miles per hour struck the Metroplex, and the next day Emma witnessed all sorts of trash and garbage polluting the pond.
Concerned for the turtles’ safety, Amy said Emma put on her boots, strapped on her gloves and went out there with her mother and two trash bags to see how best they could clean up the pond.
“We thought we were just going to be right here at the culvert,” Amy recalls. “We went to clean that out with two bags, and then there was more, and then there was even more. The list just kept on going and Emma kept going back for more bags.”
By the time they were finished, Emma and Amy filled eight bags with water and liquor bottles, cans and several broken up styrofoam boxes. Amy said they even collected three baseballs, four golf balls and five footballs from the spontaneous spring cleaning.
“We kept laughing about how many bottles we found,” she chuckles.
After they got back to the house and threw away their trash, Amy sent Emma’s story into Southlake Mayor Laura Hill’s inbox, not at all expecting it to reach the mayor’s radar. It was to her surprise when Hill posted it to her social media feed on June 26, with Emma’s adventure getting 482 reactions, over 60 comments and 10 shares, as of June 26.
Amy said Emma was beaming whenever she was told that the mayor publicly recognized her community service.
“She just kept running off, giggling and hiding her face,” Amy recalls fondly. “I read all the comments to her, and kept saying ‘Emma, do you see the impact you had?' She’s grasping that.”
Amy said she hopes other parents and children will hear about Emma’s story and will feel inspired to get involved in their community, either through volunteering or simply picking up a few pieces of trash just like Emma did.
“It was really cute to see her want to do something like that,” Amy beamed proudly. “I can’t tell you how many times I told her how proud I was of her for what she wanted to do.”