Keep Marin Marin Project Launches

Marin's quality of life is legendary — it's what attracts businesses, tourists, and those of us who are lucky enough to live and raise a family here. We, like the rest of the country, are facing significant challenges, but because a wise citizenry chose to invest in our communities, Marin has great schools, beautiful beaches, mountains and trails, great libraries, roads, open space, and clean air and water.

Too often we take this for granted, but maintaining our quality of life doesn’t just happen. There are countless people — citizens, volunteers and county workers — who get up every day and do their part to keep Marin beautiful, clean, educated, safe and healthy. To the average Marinite they may be invisible. And the results of their work, whether it is safe drinking water, tested by a county employee, or a clean sidewalk, tended to by a small business owner, are assumed to be the norm, not something anyone had to work for or invest in.

The Keep Marin Marin project, which launched this week, focuses on lifting up the work that each of us does to keep Marin clean, to keep Marin safe, to keep Marin healthy, or in other words, to keep Marin Marin.

So much of that work often flies under the radar. Did you know, for example, that Marin has a Behavioral Health team dedicated to serving domestic violence victims — people, mostly women and children, who are in desperate situations with nowhere else to turn? And while we don’t often contemplate how county health employees spend their days, during disease outbreaks they are on the front lines. During the H1N1 contagious illness crisis in 2009, Linda Ferguson, a county nurse, administered vaccines and stood ready with a containment plan.

Most people aren’t aware that many Marin children learn to read in the Marin Free Library, where the children’s librarian, Miss Kitty, has been reading to small children and doing everything necessary to keep the doors open for the past 14 years.

We are stronger when we work together as evidenced by the repeated rankings of Marin in the top 10 when it comes to everything from quality of life to education to longevity. In difficult times, Keep Marin Marin is dedicated to highlighting the people — and the places and events — that are at the heart of Marin.

This project is something that every Marinite is a part of. Do you own a small business? Work to keep our environment clean? Volunteer at an animal shelter? You are part of the culture of service that defines Marin, and makes us one of the best — or perhaps the best — place in the world to live, work and raise a family.

— Judy Williams, Novato

You can check us out, tell us what you do to keep Marin Marin, and meet some of the individuals who do great work at www.KeepMarinMarin.org or on Facebook. Keep Marin Marin is a joint project of the Marin Association of Public Employees and the Marin County Management Employees Association.