Kathleen Gibi’s rich and accomplished life has brought her back home, to work on cleaning up the Tennessee River.
Courtesy Kathleen Gibi
Kathleen Gibi gives a test run to Keep Tennessee River Beautiful’s new motor, donated by Yamaha Rightwaters and Anderson Marine last summer.
Kathleen Gibi had always been an over-the-top fan of Jenny Berggren, lead singer of Ace of Base, the Swedish band known for the 1998 hit “Cruel Summer.” And she continued to resonate with the artist’s faith-filled music when Berggren went solo. So when Berggren released a particularly inspiring song soon after Gibi and her husband discovered extreme foundation damage in their new house, she felt compelled to contact the entertainer through social media. After they met at a book fair in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2009, Gibi, an energetic tech wiz with a public relations background, started handling marketing projects for Berggren, from organizing online scavenger hunts to coordinating media interviews and even translating the star’s biography into English.
Of her unlikely client, says Gibi, 38, now executive director of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful, “She’s definitely one of those people who’s here to do good in the world.”
The same could be said for Gibi, who works to conserve the Knoxville-based organization’s 652-mile namesake. (KTNRB is the first Keep America Beautiful affiliate to focus solely on a river.) She tirelessly organizes volunteer cleanups, encourages the public to practice conservation at home, and draws from the same “dream big” mindset that landed her a sweet gig with a pop star into a mission to protect the region’s natural waterways.
A Knoxville native who started playing competitive softball at age 8 and won a state website design competition in high school, Gibi spent summer vacations hiking in national parks, from Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons to, of course, the Smokies. At age 16 and every summer and Christmas break after that, she interned at Knoxville’s Parks and Recreation Department, where she funneled her passion for technology into a public relations campaign for the city.
Courtesy Kathleen Gibi
Kathleen Gibi and a young volunteer roll a semi tire to the boat at a Keep the Tennessee River Watershed Beautiful Month cleanup on Nickajack Lake of the Tennessee River near Chattanooga.
When she graduated from college in 2004, Gibi took her mentor’s place. For the next 15 years, she spearheaded a number of projects, including the city’s first-ever greenway race, a series of laminated flashcards attached to the life vests of creek paddlers to help them identify wildlife, and a fishing event to highlight the pond in Knoxville’s new park. She chose to host it on Father’s Day, she says, because of happy childhood memories made while fishing with her dad and granddad.
“My grandfather would say, ‘I think you are the best fisherman I’ve ever seen,’” she recalls. “And I would correct him by saying, ‘Fisher girl.’”
During her last three years with the city, she worked in the communications department of Mayor Madeline Rogero, who appointed Gibi to serve as the city’s liaison for Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move! Cities, Towns and Counties,” part of the former First Lady’s fight against childhood obesity. When Knoxville and Knox County were ranked No. 1 in the “Let’s Move!” effort, Gibi accompanied Rogero to a White House ceremony recognizing the leaders. In 2015, the National League of Cities named Gibi its Most Dedicated Staff Award winner for her role in the effort.
That was also the year her future with KTNRB began to take shape. At a Keep Tennessee Beautiful conference, she was “blown away” by Chad Pregracke, who talked about his group’s barge-based river cleanups immediately before her own presentation on greenways. Gibi wasted no time pitching the idea for a similar event to the mayor and COO of Knoxville, who used their connections to reach out to other mayors along the Tennessee River watershed. Pregracke’s group, Living Lands & Waters, launched a cleanup tour from Knoxville with sponsorship from Keep Tennessee Beautiful and the Tennessee Valley Authority, and volunteers removed 22,000 pounds of trash in six cities en route to Paducah, Kentucky.
Afterward, Pregracke challenged the Knoxville organizers to keep the momentum going, and KTNRB was born. The original director stepped down in late 2018, just as Mayor Rogero was wrapping up her second term in office. An hour after telling a friend she had a hunch it was time to make a career move, Gibi was asked to apply for the vacant post.
“An extra nudge toward taking the step for this job,” she says, “was the idea that I could do my part to help ensure that my daughter’s generation could grow up enjoying our beautiful natural resources.” Another was Gibi’s lifelong love of the waterway she’d be working to protect.
Courtesy Kathleen Gibi
These are some of the results of a partners’ cleanup on Norris Lake, part of the Clinch River, which is a tributary of the Tennessee River.
“I grew up in a part of Knoxville where almost every day I was passing the river,” she recalls. “And when my husband and I moved back here [in 2006], we moved to a part where we didn’t drive past the river and I started to notice a difference in my mood. So it’s always kind of been there. I just didn’t really know there was a way to make a living at it.”
Since taking the helm of KTNRB, Gibi has immersed herself in a number of projects, including Adopt a River Mile, Adopt a Storm Drain (“adopters” pledge to clean a storm drain monthly), and a push to place art-wrapped cigarette butt receptacles at marinas, campgrounds and waterfront tourism sites in seven states to keep waste off the ground and out of the rivers.
And then there are the annual river cleanups, typically four in spring and four in the fall. Before each event, Gibi scouts out piles of plastic, Styrofoam and other debris that gathers in uninhabited areas after flooding, then commandeers the 25-foot aluminum boat that transports volunteers to the shorelines.
Due to COVID-19, all eight socially-distanced events in 2020 were squeezed into October. Despite five months of “sitting still” during the early part of the pandemic, participants pulled nearly 60,000 pounds of trash from the Tennessee River—up from 48,000 the year before—including 120 bags at Nickajack Lake in Chattanooga.
Her goal is to remove 100,000 pounds in 2021.
Despite her enthusiasm for what she does, Gibi remains humble, preferring to stay out of the spotlight and credit her volunteers instead. “The hardest thing with this job was that I had to be the front person,” she admits.
But the best part, she notes, is observing cleanup participants and “seeing their eyes completely open when we take them to a shoreline where they can’t even walk on the ground because there’s so much plastic their feet are crunching. … Even though it’s really important to pull this litter out of our waterways, we feel like the most important thing we can do is help to change the culture that creates that litter in the first place.”
3 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO PROTECT OUR RIVERS
1. Eliminate one single-use item from your daily habits.
“It’s very important to only try and give up one,” says Kathleen Gibi, executive director of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful. “It’s like dieting. You’ll overwhelm yourself if you try to give up plastic.”
2. Recycle and properly dispose of your trash.
Tighten garbage can lids and secure truck beds when hauling refuse. “If we have a storm, the wind will blow that trash out and that’s how all that stuff gets into our river,” says Gibi. “Eighty percent of what’s in our river was originally littered on land.”
3. Do your part to clean up.
If you see trash, pick it up. Says Gibi, “You are helping our waterways even if you’re in an inland downtown market square. There are storm drains that go straight to the waterways, so any trash you pick up is saving our waterways.”
The story above first appeared in our March/April 2021 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!