Gateway to Discovery is a faith-based residential recovery program for women struggling with addiction. Staff and residents spent this week in the Pleasant Valley area cleaning up trash and debris that has accumulated over recent months and years.

“I feel like Pleasant Valley kind of gets the rough end of the stick because they’re downstream so a lot of the trash accumulates down here,” said Josi Pahl, studio coordinator for Gateway’s Hope Sweet Hope Studio. “Really, Pleasant Valley and Mason Drive are some of the most beautiful parts of Fort Dodge and we want to help beautify it because we love our community.”

Purple is the color of Gateway to Discovery’s logo and it is the color of ribbons for people in recovery, Pahl said, so they decided to call their cleanup initiative Paint the Town Purple.

“Hopefully we’ll make a difference and open some eyes to this beautiful part of town,” said Lyndsey Rholl, program coordinator for Gateway to Discovery.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Josi Pahl, studio coordinator for Hope Sweet Hope Studios, cleans up part of Deer Creek along Mason Memorial Park Drive on Thursday morning. Gateway to Discovery has spent the last week cleaning up areas around the Pleasant Valley neighborhood as part of their "Paint the Town Purple" initiative to beautify Fort Dodge.

The group started its cleanup efforts at the beginning of the week under the Karl King Viaduct, all along Meriwether Drive and under the Kenyon Road Bridge. From under the Kenyon Road Bridge alone, they collected four 30-gallon trash bags of litter.

“I can’t tell you how many Starbucks cups we picked up,” Pahl said.

Much of the trash the volunteers collected over the week were things like plastic bottle wrappers, beer cans and food wrappers. They also found several used needles.

“It just kind of shows that this place has been neglected quite a bit,” Pahl said.

There were some strange items the group collected in the cleanup, like an old TV, a computer from the 1990s, mattresses, an armchair and a garden hose.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert Josi Pahl, studio coordinator for Hope Sweet Hope Studios, hands up a bucket of trash to Gateway to Discovery program coordinator Lyndsey Rholl during the organization's clean up of Mason Memorial Park Drive on Thursday morning.

“People are using this place as a dumping area,” Pahl said.

They also found an abandoned campsite in the woods that had women’s and children’s clothes around it, Pahl said.

On Thursday, volunteers from the YWCA of Fort Dodge joined to help clean up Mason Memorial Park Drive and Deer Creek. They collected more than 20 30-gallon trash bags on Thursday afternoon.

“It has been nice that people have stopped to thank us for what we’re doing, but we’re just doing this to give back to our community,” Pahl said. “There’s so much that they’ve given to us.”

The Gateway to Discovery program values volunteering in the community as part of the recovery process.

“If it wasn’t for the community donating, we wouldn’t have this halfway house today, so it’s very important for us to give back,” Rholl said. “We do a lot of volunteering. Once a week we volunteer somewhere. I just feel like it’s important to give back to the community in any way we can.”

Thursday was also a major milestone for Pahl — the ninth anniversary of the day she got clean from drugs. Though it seems like a lifetime ago, June 16, 2013, was one of the worst mornings of her life, and helping Gateway to Discovery with the cleanup has reminded her of just how far she’s come since that day.

“I woke up and I cried because I begged God the night before to let me die,” Pahl said. “I didn’t know that nine years later, I’d be helping the very program that saved me. I’m picking up trash and I’m having a fun time.”

Pahl helped organize the first Paint the Town Purple cleanup event in 2015 and she and Rholl decided to bring it back this year.

“The first year was a huge success,” Pahl said. “This year, with the amount of trash we’ve picked up while focusing on one area, we’ve made more progress. I can’t wait to do it for many more years to come.”

The group will be out all day today continuing its cleanup of the Mason Memorial Park Drive area and they welcome community volunteers to join.