Homeless to help beautify Santa Cruz with new program’s launch
SANTA CRUZ >> Change is coming for Santa Cruz’s downtown homeless population, who will be given an alternative to panhandling on Pacific Avenue: beautifying the city in exchange for food and other vouchers.
By the end of the month, the new Santa Cruz Downtown Streets Team will give homeless people both a uniform — a yellow t-shirt — and an opportunity: job training and development.
The Silicon Valley-based nonprofit will begin recruiting the city’s neediest as volunteers for projects such as trash removal or even doing homeless outreach, all the while offering larger work experience opportunities. Though organizers are still working out the details, early areas of focus may include areas such as the Riverwalk, and downtown core.
The effort is not the “be-all-end-all of solutions to homelessness,” said Downtown Streets Team Chief Program Officer Chris Richardson, but it begins to bridge the gap. The community beautifying work, however, though perhaps highly valued in the community, will be secondary to the organization’s primary goals, he said.
The program will begin with offering participants a “meaningful daily activity” of joining the team on its daily outings, Richardson said. Through such efforts and community interactions, they can plug in to society, without the spectre of micromanagement or hard labor, he said. At the same time, team members are connected with case management and employment services.
The Downtown Streets Team quietly kicked off this month, a $360,000 program in its first year primarily funded by the city of Santa Cruz, with a large donation raised by the Downtown Association’s Executive Director Chip. The 12-year-old organization has teams established in Palo Alto, San Jose, Sunnyvale, San Rafael, San Francisco, Hayward and Novato. In those communities, an average 75 percent of graduated Downtown Streets Team members who move on to jobs remain employed after the first 90 days, officials said.
“You can say, ‘I’m a volunteer with DST.’ And people say that with pride, all the time, every single day, and it gives them that place in community,” said the Downtown Streets Team’s Santa Cruz project manager, Greg Pensinger. “I think that’s a huge aspect that’s hard to quantify — that feeling of connectedness or reconnectedness with a community, that really comes as a benefit of our program. Having someone thank them on the street is a huge aspect of our program, because it really builds confidence in our folks.”