Street Stewards started in 2018 as a grassroots effort to clean up streets in Ocean Beach and has grown to cover much of Pacific Beach, North Park, Encinitas and Escondido.
Now, Executive Directors Aaron Null and Scott Horst are looking to further expand their scope, including a greater presence in La Jolla.
The organization, formalized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2022, works with residents to “adopt” streets in their communities and conduct semi-regular trash cleanups either individually or in a group.
“Street Stewards is an effort … to clean up our streets, but it’s an effort to bring the community together and raise the level of respect we have for the community from the grassroots level,” said Null, a graphic designer who lives in Ocean Beach.
At first, Null thought Street Stewards would be “a neighborhood thing,” but the concept proved to be strong and scalable, he said. As more people became involved, it became “unsustainable” to keep track of streets covered with a Photoshop map on Facebook, he said.
The group found a solution last year when it received $35,000 in three Neighborhood Reinvestment Program grants from San Diego County Districts 3, 4 and 5. The funds enabled Street Stewards to launch an interactive, in-depth website where can easily adopt streets and indicate when the latest cleanup took place.
Cleanups in the past 30 days are categorized in green, while areas that haven’t been touched in more than a month are marked yellow. A live map is available through the website app.streetstewards.com and accessible by starting an .
“It’s meant to be a very low barrier of entry,” Null said. “We’d love for you to clean it up every couple of weeks, but there’s not really any pressure. It’s meant to be a patchwork of people overlapping and doing the work.”
Currently, La Jolla has two streets covered: just over a mile of La Jolla Hermosa Avenue and half a mile of La Jolla Boulevard. Both spots were most recently cleaned by seven Stewards on March 21.
No La Jolla roads above Lower Hermosa are ed for thus far.
The Street Stewards team is now “shaking every tree” in its ambition to branch out and is turning to communities where it has yet to establish a significant presence. One of them is La Jolla Shores.
Horst attended the Shores Association’s May 21 meeting via Zoom to briefly describe the group’s mission.
“Every community needs it to a certain point,” said Horst, who lives in Escondido and co-operates his family business, Margaret’s Cleaners. “What I can see in La Jolla is … the tourist trash, and that’s going to be mostly down by the beach.”
As Street Stewards looks to broaden its reach, it also is seeking area captains — residents who can organize group pickups through social media, network at Rotary clubs, manage an email list and talk to people in the community.
Three captains have volunteered so far in Escondido, Encinitas and downtown San Diego.
“If we can find a La Jolla captain that was willing to lead group pickups, that’s where I’d try to start,” Horst said. “Some of the wealthier communities don’t really need it. But there’s always areas you can find, especially beach communities.”
“My main goal over the next year or two is to find captains in every community I can in San Diego County,” Horst added. “If I can do that, I can start to work with them.”
An ideal future, Null and Horst say, includes captains delivering quarterly or twice-yearly updates at community meetings and ing roughly 10,000 s across the county in the next one to two years. Currently, about 1,000 volunteers are ed.
The group also will update the color coding system on the website “fairly soon,” Horst said.
“The big picture of this is we have a dream,” he said. “Aaron and I are making a difference in the communities we’re in, and we’re going to make a big difference in San Diego County. If we can spread this across the country, we can make a huge impact.”
Horst said Street Stewards currently requires a yearly budget of $10,000 to cover website maintenance, lawyers, ants and insurance.
“There are a lot of people in La Jolla with deep pockets,” he said. “So we are looking for …partners. If somebody’s contributing that kind of money, we want them very involved.”
To become a Street Steward or donate to the effort, visit streetstewards.com. ♦
