It was Jane Polson’s job to keep Nebraska beautiful.
And boy, did she.
Polson kept office chairs (and desks and computers and printers) out of the landfill and oil out of groundwater and dangerous chemicals out of schools — occasionally with the help of a bomb squad.
The president of Keep Nebraska Beautiful did other beautiful things, too, like promoting recycling and planting flowers and trees and frowning upon littering.
She did it with kindness and more.
“Jane is probably the most dedicated individual I’ve ever seen,†said Mike Mostek, former Keep Nebraska Beautiful board chair. “She made the organization what it is today.â€
When the director’s job opened in 1991, Polson was working in the water quality division of the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality.
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A colleague told her she’d be a good fit for the nonprofit’s mission to keep the state clean, green and beautiful.
Polson had the science background the board of directors sought, but she also had a decade in the business end of her husband’s advertising company.
“I thought this must be meant to be, because I had experience in areas they didn’t know they needed,†Polson said Monday, two days into retirement.
She knew how to keep and balance a budget, file federal and state reports, write a grant application.
She knew the importance of environmental stewardship and conservation.
She dove in.
She settled into an office across from the Capitol before moving into Pioneer Plaza, near 33rd Street and Nebraska 2.
Her staff was small but her reach was wide.
Sue Smith was a newly hired regional director when Polson started her Nebraska gig with a broken chair and two dusty boxes of files.
Polson would go on to write the training manual used by affiliates across the country and take on national leadership roles.
Focused and committed to the mission, said Smith.
“You know those bracelets, ‘What would Jesus do?’ Here, it’s no, no, ‘What would Jane do?’â€
Keep Nebraska Beautiful (an affiliate of Keep America Beautiful) began by executive order of Gov. Frank Morrison in 1964 with funding from the Legislature. It became grant-based in 1979, when the state’s litter reduction and recycling act passed.
Those early years focused on beautification, said Trixie Schmidt, who was on the board that hired Polson.
“Jane really took it to another level and she’s done it with a smile on her face and joy in her heart for what she knows Nebraska can accomplish.â€
One of those accomplishments began with a phone call.
It was 1994. An employee at a business being bought out by a larger business called Polson, wondering if she knew how it could dispose of office supplies.
A few days later, Polson went to a meeting with other heads of nonprofits and asked if anyone had a need.
“We got rid of them right away,†Polson says. “And I started thinking, ‘I bet there are a lot of businesses that could benefit from that.’â€
She researched similar “waste-exchange†programs around the country and started marketing the idea in Nebraska.
It caught on.
“We still generate a million pounds a month with just that program.â€
(In all, the Nebraska Materials Exchange Program has diverted more than 326 million pounds from landfills.)
The buzz around that program led to another phone call, Polson said. This one about disposing of used motor oil. (The state had just banned it from landfills.)
Polson recruited FFA students to call every rural resident of Gage County to find out what they were doing with their used oil. (The answer: everything from dumping it on dirt roads to dumping it on hogs with dry skin.)
In a few years, Keep Nebraska Beautiful had 67 oil-disposal sites across the state. (Polson wrote all the funding grants, trained all of the operators.)
She helped start household hazardous waste programs in places such as North Platte and Kearney and Holdrege. She wrote a training manual for affiliates for the national office. She put on summer conferences and joined boards, sometimes as a founding member.
In 2005, her phone rang again, this time a small-town school with vials of what turned out to be radioactive material in a cardboard box.
Polson wrote a grant to the EPA and received $150,000 seed money for the state.
She brought the highway patrol bomb squad onto Keep Nebraska Beautiful’s leadership management teams.
And they used them more than once. (The Nebraska School Chemical Cleanout Campaign has cleared 28,900 hazardous items from 235 schools across the state in its ongoing education effort.)
Up next: food waste.
“That’s the next big thing we need to get out of our landfills,” Polson said. (Go to to learn more.)
Polson credits her staff and her funders and collaborators.
“I leave feeling like some good was being done and still being done,†says the modest leader who is moving to Kansas to be closer to her granddaughters.
Some good?
The chief operating officer for Keep America Beautiful flew in from Connecticut for Polson’s retirement party Friday.
Smith calls her a top-five director of the 650-some affiliates in the country.
“That waste-exchange program alone is absolutely astonishing,†she said. “What she has diverted from the landfill.â€
Schmidt agreed.
“If anyone deserves accolades from the community it’s Jane. She is, she really is, Keep Nebraska Beautiful.â€