WATERFORD, CT - On Sunday, October 22, members of the Waterford Green Party (WGP) and the community-at-large took to the fields at Leary Park to remove litter from the area. Over a dozen individuals came out for the event, according to a release.

Those in attendance included candidates Joshua Steele Kelly, Baird Welch-Collins, Deb Roselli Kelly, Billy G. Collins, Carl D'Amato and Mark Olynciw. Together, they helped clear several 20-gallon trash bags worth of litter from the park. The Waterford Green Party has long championed community service. Their first public event, held a mere month after the party's founding, was a benefit concert for UNICEF's Syrian Refugee Fund, which helped raise hundreds of dollars for children affected by the violence of that civil war.

Since then, the party has raised hundreds more for charities around the world and held numerous clean-ups around town, in places like Waterford Beach, the Civic Triangle, Gardiners Wood Road, Stenger Farm and more. Their clean-ups have helped remove hundreds of pounds of garbage from local ecosystems, and in turn have presumably helped to preserve natural systems, the lives of local wildlife, and the beauty of the town.

Additionally, the WGP has officially confirmed, thanks to the help of a database kept-up by the national Green Party, that the Waterford Green campaign in 2017 is the largest Green municipal campaign ever run in a Connecticut town. The WGP is represented by nine candidates on the ballot this year; seven of them are running as registered Greens, and two as cross-endorsed candidates. The only larger Green municipal campaign to run in the state was in the city of Stamford in 2011.

"The many, wonderful responses I have gotten from Quaker Hill voters shows that the people of Waterford are ready for new, honest, effective leadership," party founder and Co-Chair Baird Welch-Collins said in a release.

"We're proud to have garnered so much community support for our ideas and our movement, and that support is clearly demonstrated by the number of candidates and endorsements we've managed to attract," Josh Kelly, the WGP's other founder and Co-Chair, said in a release.

The WGP's candidates have attracted every single one of the official endorsements given out by local and state organizations in Waterford's elections this year. Four candidates were endorsed by NARAL CT, Deb Roselli Kelly (Board of Ed) and Josh Kelly (RTM D3) were the only two in town to be endorsed by AFT Connecticut and Josh Kelly also received the endorsement of the United Auto Workers Region 9A Cap Council.