Chatsworth Councilmember Picks Up Trash For Hours Every Day

CHATSWORTH, CA — Don’t like the mounting piles of cigarette butts and disposable face masks on your street? Community activist and Chatsworth Neighborhood Council member Jill Mather may have a solution.

This week, Mather is launching an Adopt-1-Street volunteer program, similar to Adopt-a-Highway. Volunteers will be provided with a kit of the same bags and grabbers Mather uses every day to clean the streets of Northridge and Chatsworth, and information about how to use the city’s 311 hotline and app to report bulk items and graffiti. Then, they will clean an adopted street or block regularly for at least a year. Volunteers are asked to report their activity online to be entered into a drawing to win a free dinner for two.

“I think that that’s gonna clean the streets - I think it’s the only way,” said Mather, who founded Volunteers Cleaning Communities after her retirement. “People have got to start taking responsibility for the streets, especially the major streets.”

Mather, a former management consultant who has lived in Chatsworth for many years, has "adopted" dozens of streets and even freeway stretches in a tireless campaign to clean up the neighborhood. She spends a few hours each day by herself filling up about three trash bags a day worth of garbage collected at the area’s major intersections.

A few times a week, she enlists other volunteers. About 200 people have joined Volunteers Cleaning Communities. A few times a week, about 10 or so residents put on gloves, masks, fluorescent yellow jackets, and occasionally helmets, and clean different areas around the northwest Valley.

Mather says part of her inspiration came from her many years in the restaurant business, where employees are trained to always monitor the ground and pick things up.

“When you look at the ground and see how bad it’s gotten in the world, I decided a long time ago, I decided when I wasn’t in my career, my new career would be to change the culture in peoples’ mind about littering,” she said.

Mather initially applied to adopt both sides of the 3.5-mile stretch of the 118 from the Tampa to Balboa Avenue exits (not many individual people elect to adopt highways, Mather says), and put out a call on Nextdoor for volunteers to clean either the highway or the streets.

“I was shocked how many people responded,” she said.

One group cleans the highway stretch once a week, and a larger group cleans the streets a few times a week. With Mather’s new citywide Adopt-1-Street program, she hopes that residents all over the city will begin to follow her lead.

“It’s fun, you get great exercise, you get out in the world, you do it with like-minded people,” Mather said. Mather has also started “Bash Some Trash” weekends that encourage people to pick up litter and send her photos of their bags.

The group has made an astonishing amount of headway: they’ve cleaned Devonshire from Owensmouth to DeSoto, the Canoga Bike Path, the area around the Lassen Street Olive Trees the area around the Chatsworth Train Depot, and much more. Once a month, the group also cleans the LA River Bed and bike path near Winnetka and Owensmouth avenues.

Mather called the situation around the river “horrible”, and noted that the group had to pull out many shopping carts from the river. A big reason for that is its location near a homeless encampment under a nearby overpass.

Mather said that encampments are one of the major causes of litter all over the city, but she does not shy away from cleaning up encampments and trying to enlist some of the unhoused people to help contain the litter problem.

“I introduce myself and tell them I’m going to clean the area of trash, and that I’ll take any trash you have while I’m here,” she said. “Then I say, can we talk about this in the future?”

In March, Mather was elected to the Chatsworth Neighborhood Council, where she ran on a platform of trying to make the area cleaner and more livable (she has since been appointed to the Keep LA Beautiful board, a division of the Keep America Beautiful nonprofit.) She sits on the council’s beautification, safety, and homeless awareness subcommittees, and says that the group is considering initiatives to place trash bins near encampments, and to find ways to enlist the help of some of the unhoused in cleaning up the surrounding area.

As soon as her group finished cleaning the LA River Bed in April, a wave full of new trash rushed in, canceling out most of what everyone had just spent hours trying to achieve. This could be read as a metaphor for what Mather says can sometimes feel like a Sisyphean task. That’s why she’s working with schools and working on projects like trash scavenger hunts to try to help young people change the culture around littering.

“Throwing trash is acceptable in some cultures, therefore you’re fighting an uphill battle,” Mather said. “That’s why I say we need to go to the youth and make sure that they understand that we need to keep our neighborhoods nice.”

For more information or to get involved, visit adopt1street.org, and volunteerscleaningcommunities.com.

Related coverage:

Chatsworth Coach Puts Homeless Residents To Work | Northridge, CA Patch