TRAVERSE CITY — Within a couple of hours and with some tireless physical labor, a local homeless encampment, “The Pines,” looked completely different.
In an effort to clean the area before the summer, members from a Traverse City area grassroots organization devoted to serving Pines residents spent their Saturday cleaning up abandoned campsites and miscellaneous junk.
Homeless in Traverse City
At the helm was Robin Grubbs who acts as one of the administrators for a local Facebook page, “Serving Up Love.”
In preparation for the city-organized clean-up scheduled for Monday morning, volunteers piled discarded materials near a paved path next to Silver Lake Road so city machines can easily grab them.
Before Saturday, Grubbs, Traverse City Police Department social worker Jennifer Holm, and North Boardman officer Krista Fryczynski, handed out trash bags to Pines residents so they could begin to tidy their own campsites if they wanted to.
Starting a few minutes before 10 a.m. approximately 35 volunteers emerged from their parked cars in the lot behind Traverse City Church of the Nazarene.
The chatter was lighthearted and friendly, with many having already known each other.
Everyone gathered in the parking lot was there for the same mission — to help clean the Pines in preparation for the closure of Safe Harbor, a seasonal shelter, on April 30.
The majority of the volunteers said they learned about the clean-up from the Facebook page, or from Grubbs herself.
After a quick rundown of how the day would go, everyone split up into three teams to cover different areas within the Pines. Grubbs said some of the areas volunteers were headed never been cleaned before.
“We’ve been working with residents to figure out what we can take and what we can’t take,” she said.
Her group of 13 volunteers went to the north side of Kids Creek.
“The people over there are lovely, and honestly I adore them all,” Grubbs said. “They’ve been very excited that someone is finally going to clean their side of the river.”
Two volunteers, Eleanor Borgerson and Bryce Hundley, said they were inspired to come to Saturday’s clean-up by Grubbs’s efforts.
“It just really struck me that it was something I could do,” Borgerson said. “I mean I drive by the Pines all the time, and to be able to come and clean it up I just thought ‘Why not?’”
Hundley is Grubbs’s coworker and said he first found out about the clean-up from their daily morning chats.
“She is a force of nature when she’s passionate about something,” he said. “I think what they’re doing is great and so I just couldn’t not [come].”
Grubbs said the intent for the clean-up was to get the ready area for when Safe Harbor residents move-in after the shelter closes.
“At that point it would be so crowded it would be harder to run teams through there and also know which is garbage and which is not,” she said. “We had planned it over the winter, but we kind of needed to wait for the weather to break.”
Serving Up Love has just started to work with the Basic Needs Coalition alongside Safe Harbor, Do a Little Good, Jubilee House and the City of Traverse City.
“I really want to press upon because the stigma is so bad out here that this really is welcomed and appreciated by our Pines friends,” Grubbs said. “They don’t want to live out here in this filth either, and a lot of this is people who are coming in from the outside — it’s not always them.”
Saturday’s grassroots efforts left a big impact on volunteers Shari Hintz and Jessica Weaver, who said this shows what can happen when the whole community works together from the ground up.
“I think they had a wonderful turnout. I think everybody did a great job, worked together to get things picked up, listened to the community out there to make sure that we were not moving things that shouldn’t be moved, and just tried to be really respectful of their space,” Hintz said.
Weaver agreed, noting that anyone could be just one big life event from becoming homeless themselves and oftentimes, that big event is outside of an individual’s control.
“It definitely felt like a blend of people with a lot of openness and caring,” she said. “Working alongside someone who might be residing out there at this time in their life, there wasn’t a whole lot of boundary between us, conversation just flowed easily.”
The spring cleaning efforts in the Pines will continue today with city employees and equipment starting up at approximately 9 a.m. near the intersection of South Division and 11th streets.