Meet Our Community: Fred Yi-Neumann
- Paige Combs - KCCB
- 11 hours ago
- 4 min read
As part of our seasonal spotlight series, we’re celebrating our incredible employees, partners, and volunteers who help make Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful (KCCB) possible. In our Earth Day Blog, we talk about the ‘Ripple Effect’ and how it only takes one person to inspire many to make a change in their community. Today, we’re excited to introduce Fred, a volunteer and researcher who cares deeply about disentangling environmental and social issues, improving accessibility, and passing stewardship skills on to future generations.
Role: Cleanup, BioBlitz, and Restoration Volunteer
With KCCB: Almost 1 year!
Fun Facts 🌟
Happy place: Sequoia Redwoods 🏞️
Unusual creek sightings: Complex waterways and a car! 🌊 🚗
Favorite hobbies: Running 🏃
Favorite place to eat: Madras Cafe & Taco Trucks 😋
Favorite color: Contrast of Orange and Green 🌈
When Fred was asked about his favorite color, he said, “Something I was struck by was the contrast between this orange soil and the green trees in the creek. I found it very interesting. So to have that kind of contrast, I like that a lot. ”
How it All Started 🌱
Fred was a researcher who went to school at the University of Helsinki in Finland, as well as a guest researcher at UC Irvine in Orange County, California. He moved to the Bay and grew curious about opportunities outdoors. He started volunteering with cleanups, BioBlitzes, and other events at KCCB, and before he knew it, he was a regular volunteer up through March 2025. What Fred noticed and enjoyed the most was his realization that KCCB offered this amazing opportunity to learn about nature and connect with others in his community. Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful, he described, is “an amazing hub of networks, friendships, and everything else.”
He said, “For me, KCCB was this amazing opportunity not only to learn about nature, but to connect with people…build friendships, everything emerged from these activities. It was just mind-blowing to me. ”
Impact on the Community 🌎
Fred kept volunteering because of the meaning it created for him, the commitment he found amongst peers, and the ease of building a community. He described his experience while out at a cleanup, how a local politician was joining in and helping everyone together. For Fred, he noticed something essential, which was that political engagement in the environment felt deeply humanizing.
Fred discovered that by offering opportunities like this for the community, it allows people to see problems in different ways. It also permits others to take charge of their own environments and communities in which they live.
“A specific memory I had was on my first day of volunteering when I met the mayor…and we had a normal conversation, and he was asking what I was doing, and we were just pulling out the car wreck from the creek...It reflects this very open approach to volunteering that I found not only with KCCB, but all over the creek and local commitment of communities.”
Working on issues in the environment, like cleaning around Coyote Creek, Fred believes, has the potential to solve issues and connect parts of the world that need to be connected in order to make people's lives and our creeks better. He suggested that more research and finding practical solutions to problems, threats, and issues are important.
Fred described that “I’ve been thinking a lot about trees...seeing all the trash basically growing in these trees, and it’s so hard to disentangle everything. Thinking about how to improve the quality, but also allowing people to access these super important spaces and develop different approaches: practical, scientific, political, and so on, to pass on to the next generation.”
Looking Ahead: The Future of KCCB ☀️🌳
Major takeaways from Fred’s volunteering experience included the process of disentangling environmental and social issues with the practical experience of volunteering and being engaged in nature. He is strongly aligned with the importance of research in major realms of policy and finding solutions to problems and threats to better educate future generations. Additionally, he discovered the importance of political representation in these spaces.
Lastly, a major point for the development of KCCB would be increasing accessibility for individuals with different kinds of bodies to share the environment. Organizations, especially those involved in the environment, need to find ways to share and include different kinds of people in the healing process and learning about our planet.
Fred said, "Maybe you can have cleanups in terrains that are different…maybe then there’s an issue of how do people get to these places when they don’t have a car…it’s something to consider.”
What Fred has noticed is that there are a variety of unknown variables and gaps for people to access something even when it’s free, like volunteering for KCCB. So finding ways to engage the community and offer more solutions for people with these barriers will be important steps to overcome for our future.
Final Thoughts ✨
Fred mentioned that for individuals who are interested in volunteering, there are truly no limits to the kinds of people you will meet or the opportunities you could have. The number of individuals with a variety of motivations and backgrounds, all working on these issues, is empowering. Everyone may have different reasons to volunteer, but all come together in these spaces, which is a valuable experience for anyone. This, Fred said, is “one of the greatest strengths of KCCB.”
Fred said, “If you want to make your life and the life of your community better. If you want to enjoy nature, learn about everything that happens around you, volunteer with KCCB.”
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