The callous act of illegally dumping trash for unhoused residents to pick through at a former U.S. Army Reserve Center in Vallejo has turned it into an eyesore and public health concern. As the city collects bids on a contractor to clean up the site, an East Bay grassroots organization plans to clean it up.

The Urban Compassion Project, a nonprofit that recruits and trains volunteers for one-day cleanups without displacing unhoused residents, is planning to do the job the weekend before Thanksgiving without the city’s support. The organization has worked on several sites in Oakland, including an April cleanup of mountains of garbage that had collected around an encampment on East 12th Street.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.