High School Teacher Khristen Phillips brings Chad Pregrake to Greencastle
Khristen Phillips is leading the One Book project at Greencastle Highschool in which she is engaging as many students and teachers as she can to read Chad Pregrake’s book “From the Bottom Up” and has invited the author to speak at the High school and at DePauw on February 4, 2009. The event will coincide with this February’s Focus the Nation “Teach-In” event when the nation’s schools stop and devote their attention to climate change issues. Part of Mrs. Phillips project includes facilitating River clean-ups in the area and the first clean-up was a great success. Students pulled over 40 tires and other items out of Walnut creek on October 18th. Read more about Chad Pregrake and his book below. Visit his website at http://www.livinglandsandwaters.org/
Chad Pregracke
Taking care to let others know how much he appreciates their hard work, volunteer efforts, in-kind contributions and monetary donations is just a natural part of Chad Pregracke’s engaging personality. Chad raises the bar on leadership, motivating others through his infectious, positive outlook and incomparable sense of humor. Founder & President of Living Lands & Waters, Chad Pregracke is living, breathing proof that one person can make a difference.
The Mississippi River was literally Chad’s back yard while he was growing up, spending the majority of his time on, in, and around the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers.
While attending high school and college, Chad worked as a commercial shell diver, commercial fisherman, and barge hand during the summers, and sometimes lived on the islands in the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. During that time he noticed that the condition of the rivers was getting worse due to the accumulation of trash on the shorelines. Based on his concern, Chad set out in the spring of 1997 to make a difference… one river at a time…one piece of garbage at a time.
In 1998 he founded Living Lands & Waters, the not-for-profit environmental organization based in East Moline, Illinois. Today there are 10 employees and a fleet of barges, and workboats. Tens of thousands of volunteers have been involved with the Community-based River Cleanups, Riverbottom Restoration Projects, Adopt-a-River Mile Program, and Big River Educational Workshops.
Chad continues to be deserving of the more than 40 awards bestowed him, including the Jefferson Award for Public Service presented to him in June of 2002 in the United States Supreme Court in Washington, DC. Chad accepted that award along with Rudolph Giuliani, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Lilly Tartikoff. In August of 2002, Chad was invited by the Coca-Cola Company to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Environments in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he met and shared information about his river cleanup projects with people from all over the world. Since then, Chad’s projects have been filmed by many of the major networks such as CNN, Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning Show, NBC Nightly News, MTV, PBS, and the list goes on and on. Time, People Magazine, Readers’ Digest, Life, Outside, Smithsonian, and National Geographic are among the numerous publications in which Chad has been featured.
Released in April of 2007, From the Bottom Up: One Man’s Crusade to Clean America’s Rivers (National Geographic Books), chronicles Chad’s incredible journey cleaning up America’s rivers one tire at a time. The book shares Chad’s personal story and the beginning of his grassroots organization, Living Lands & Waters, which has captured America’s imagination and motivated thousands of people across the country to clean up our country’s rivers and waterways. What started as one man’s crusade has become an ever-evolving worldwide movement to educate people and connect them with their environment.