By Eleanor Whitfield
Wednesday morning on the Scenic Pathway, the fog is still deciding whether to stay. Below the cypress, the Pacific works at the sand in long, unhurried strokes, and along the path that traces Carmel Beach from Ocean Avenue south, a small crew in work gloves is already bent to its labor — trimming, raking, coaxing the village’s most beloved walk back into order before most of the town has finished its coffee. A sign propped nearby reads “Carmel Cares Volunteer.” Stop and say hello; they consider being interrupted part of the job.
This is the weekly rhythm of Carmel Cares, the all-volunteer nonprofit that has quietly become the village’s caretaking corps — the people who restore the benches, tend the medians, and pick up what the rest of us drop. Their premise is disarmingly simple: Carmel-by-the-Sea is our town. If we want it to remain a pristine sanctuary, someone has to do the tending.
Born of a hard season
Carmel Cares began in 2018 as an idea in the mind of Dale Byrne, a retired software executive who had discovered Carmel more than two decades earlier and, like so many before him, never quite recovered. By June 2020 it had become a full-time volunteer organization — at precisely the moment the village needed one. The pandemic had emptied the streets and strained the city budget, but as the founders liked to observe, weeds and deferred maintenance don’t take time off when budgets are cut.
A handful of passionate residents started pulling weeds together. A Carmel Pine Cone article connected a few more. Then the group did something that distinguishes it from most well-meaning civic efforts: it got organized. Carmel Cares made its case to the city’s Public Works Department with a short video, then began working hand in hand with city staff to define projects, acquire equipment, and finish what it started — documenting everything with a transparency bordering on the devotional. Since June 2020, volunteers have presented nearly 2,000 slides across more than eighty status meetings with Public Works.
Byrne, who served as the organization’s president and self-titled Chief Caring Officer, stepped away from those roles as his attention turned to public service — he now serves as Carmel’s mayor. But he remains what he has been from the start: an unpaid volunteer, still leading the restoration of the Forest Theater, the century-old outdoor stage in the pines whose weathered benches Carmel Cares volunteers have been bringing back to life. His wife Margaret serves as executive director and, every Wednesday morning, leads the crew on the Scenic Pathway.
A job for everyone
What makes Carmel Cares remarkable is not any single project but the sheer domestic thoroughness of its portfolio — a division of labor that reads like a village fable.
There is Shirley Moon, who arrived in Carmel in 1973, bought a cottage two years later, and now uses it to store the landscaping tools of the Scenic Pathway restoration she has led since 2020. There is Kelly Burke, who grew up on the Peninsula, returned home in 2018, and founded the Downtown Detail team, whose weekly clean-ups have visibly transformed the commercial blocks. There is the Pick Up Posse, organized litter walks across five regions of town — downtown, the pathway, the beach — with leaders like Jen Thompson, a seventh-generation Californian and retired San Francisco police officer who came home to Carmel and now organizes clean-ups after the farmers market, and Cari White, who first saw Carmel on her honeymoon and spent decades dreaming her way back.
There are the Median Minders, residents who adopt a median island or easement and make it their own — Nance Hoeft, a farm-raised great-grandmother known around town as “Tango Nance,” was among the city’s first. She and her husband Denny, married sixty years, went on to transform the once-overgrown sculpture garden at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts into a sanctuary of meandering paths, fruit trees, and cymbidium orchids.
There is Carol Crandall, who leads the effort — she cheerfully calls it the Butt Brigade — that has placed fifty-five cigarette receptacles around the village and sends every collected butt off for recycling. “Once you see the problems around town clearly, you cannot unsee it,” she says, “and it is important for all of us to take steps to become part of the solution.”
And there is Paul Falworth, first brought to Carmel at six weeks old, who patrols Ocean Avenue on his morning walks removing stickers, flyers, and graffiti according to a personal doctrine of four clauses: “No stickers. No flyers. No graffiti. No exceptions.”
Tree Tenders raise oak and pine seedlings in pots for two years until they’re ready to join Carmel’s urban forest. Water Wizards keep new plantings alive with a donated utility vehicle that draws on the city’s free, spring-fed non-potable water supply. A woodworking team, the Carmel Crafters, builds display cases and legacy pieces in a Carmel Valley workshop. Andrea and Noel Carr, who began cleaning up Vista Lobos Park on their own simply because they lived across the street, now steward what has become a downtown oasis of native plants and wildflowers.
The economics of caring
Carmel Cares runs on an unusual arithmetic. All administration and project management is done by volunteers; donations go toward professional gardeners and contractors for the heavy work, plus tools, materials, and equipment. The organization holds a Platinum rating from Candid, and its partnerships multiply every dollar — most notably with Carmel Gives, the donor-advised fund founded by Tim Allen, a founding Carmel Cares board member, which has distributed more than $2.5 million in grants to over 140 nonprofit organizations. When Allen recruited Byrne as his project manager, his instruction was two words long: think big.
But spend a morning with the volunteers and the economics feel almost beside the point. What Carmel Cares has really built is a way for people to belong to a place — for retirees and returnees, for couples fulfilling thirty-year dreams, for neighbors who saw something that needed doing. Terry Alvey, an Army veteran who retired here with her wife Jen after decades of visits, used to watch Shirley Moon working the pathway on her daily walks and think: I’m going to be like Shirley one day. Now she is.
The organization insists it has a job for everyone, and it means everyone — its promotional materials proudly feature its smallest recruit, a volunteer barely out of toddlerhood. And on Downtown Detail mornings, keeping pace with the work gloves and rakes, you’ll find the team’s most faithful member: a miniature poodle named Emma, trotting the clean sidewalks her people made.
