Craig Faunce's Clean Up Mission

Jeff Smith

Apr 22, 2021

Like most of us, 2020 was an eventful year for Faunce. He lost his mother suddenly in January, and his father passed away in May six days after a positive Covid test. Several weeks later, Faunce, his brother, and his daughter all tested positive for the disease.

After Faunce recovered, he and his brother sold their family home in Tyson’s Corners and moved into a condo in Canal Woods. To explore Salisbury, and get some exercise, Faunce decided to take a walk. What he found surprised him.

Everywhere he walked he saw trash: on the roads, in the parking lots, along the railroad tracks, and clogging the storm drains. “Doesn’t anyone use a trash can?” Faunce remembers thinking.

He filled up several trash bags with litter and posted the haul to Facebook. The next day, he picked up more trash, and posted more pictures. After about ten days some of his former colleagues sent him hundreds of trash bags. That’s when the idea struck him.

“I’m going to do this for 80 days,” he committed. He began to number the days and posted pictures every day as a way to hold himself accountable. “It grew from there,” Faunce says.

People noticed him on the streets and stopped to help. He amassed followers on Facebook and donations of gloves and more trash bags came in. For Christmas, his daughter created a website and The Faunce Foundation was born.

The next Faunce Foundation group cleanup will take place Saturday April 24th from 11am to 2pm, meeting at Kellyn’s Kafe on Main Street in Salisbury. For more information, visit www.thefauncefoundation.com.

“It’s named in honor of my parents,” Faunce says. Currently, Faunce focuses his efforts on the Route 13 corridor from Fruitland to downtown. “I have a different area that I go to every day, five or six days a week,” he says. In early January, with the help of some local friends he has met along the way, Faunce organized a group trash pickup along Route 50. “We grabbed hundreds of pounds of waste material off the ground... next to the canals and waterways of Salisbury,” Faunce remarks. To date, Faunce and his volunteers have picked up over 400 bags of trash, and every week they pick up more. In Faunce’s view, the problem isn’t just carelessness. 

“I saw the trash because I had just moved here,” he says. “But people who’ve lived here their whole lives, they are just used to seeing it. It becomes part of the landscape.” It’s that apathy that Faunce seeks to ultimately overcome. “All the people that have been here for 20 years, they need to open their eyes, look down, and then I think they’ll see the trash the way I did when I first came here.”

The support he’s gotten gives Faunce hope that people will be inspired to take action in their own neighborhoods and their own communities. “I’m only one person,” he says. “But if thousands of people all over the area started doing this, we could really make a huge difference. We will have done Delmarva a great service.”

In addition to being named a World Kindness City, Faunce believes Salisbury could also be the Cleanest City in the USA. Each of us has to do our small part, he says. “Stop littering. Don’t put it on the ground. Put it in a trash can.”

“Whether you own it or you rent it, this is where you live,” he adds.