An Update on the Clean & Safe Campaign

This week, I spoke with Katie Simmons of the Chico Chamber of Commerce and Jovanni Tricerri of the Chico Stewardship Network, to get their perspectives on how the Clean & Safe Chico campaign is going.

I asked them things such as: When was the campaign launched? Which programs are working and which ones are not? When did things really start getting worse? And what they thought the draw was that was attracting so many homeless people to Chico?

Katie started off by saying that late last year certain groups began to get together, such as the Chico Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Chico Business Association, to informally discuss concerns that were bubbling up among businesses and citizens.

The discussions centered on how they and other organizations could steer the community through these issues, while working through their own conflicts of interest, with the same common goal of a healthy community.

Jovanni began by stating that Clean & Safe is not a campaign targeting homelessness. “It’s one of the issues,” he said, “but not the only issue.”

The core issue, according to Jovanni, is community engagement. “As citizens,” he said, “We’re losing our mutual respect for each other.”

He then went on to say, “We’ve lost this idea of community stewardship. We’ve lost the idea of, ‘This is my responsibility.’ It used to be, ‘This is our community.’ Now it’s, ‘We want the City to do it.’ We want the benefits of what other people are doing without having to work for it ourselves.”

Some of the programs that seem to be having a positive effect are the Downtown Ambassadors program and the Street Pastors. But their greatest success so far, they said, is getting all of the different organizations working together, even when they disagree, to set the tone on how to talk about this.

When I asked them what they thought the draw was that was attracting so many homeless people to Chico, they said, "The same things that brought us here."