Clean Cities for Clean Lifestyle
“Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
Keep our desks clean. Keep our rooms clean. Keep our house clean. This is advice we’ve all received since childhood. And we all know the reason why - keeping the environment around us clean promotes good mental and physical health. But, we see litter on roads, our yards, local parks or water streams, and almost everywhere we go. It creates agitation and affects everyone who comes across unclean areas.
Why is Keeping San Jose Clean Important?
San Jose ranks 6th position in the list of Top 10 Cleanest Cities in the USA in 2020, according to a survey conducted by InsureMyTrip.
It’s important to have cleanliness in a global city like San Jose. Cleanliness boosts the morale of the residents. If a citizen is ever in a place where there’s a lot of dust and dirt, they feel disgusted. Cleanliness makes a city look pretty and a great place to live in. Cleanliness should be something that is considered important if the residents of San Jose are to feel happy to go out and live their lives. By living a healthy lifestyle, they have the mindset that the city is clean and will always do their best to keep it that way.
How does the cleanliness of San Jose impact us?
As San Jose community members, you come across a lot of clean-up campaigns across the city. It may be as part of an employee activity program at the company you work in or something you do voluntarily on a weekend. How do you feel after a few hours of picking up trash from the community or public parks or streams in a local park? You feel as if a calm wave took over your mind and you go back home with a sense of pride.
Cleanliness is like a domino effect. Imagine you decide to go out for a stroll on a good weather day and you come across garbage lying here and there on your walk. To top it off, there are flies and insects hovering over the pile, and rodents moving around. You feel agitated or uncomfortable and go back home dissatisfied. Your purpose of going out for a stroll to enjoy some peace and quiet amidst nature is unfulfilled.
Let me present another scenario. You make the same decision, go out and all you see is green grass, clean roads, and uncluttered water streams. You feel good and go back home carrying that feeling and stay with it for the rest of the day.
While this is just one part of reality, there are more ways trash can affect us. It disrupts the ecosystem and poses a threat to children and animals. Food waste causes water bodies to pollute, cigarette butts and flammable materials pose threat to big fires, and so on.
How is UVI Contributing to keeping San Jose clean?
Cleanliness is one of UVI’s five initiatives. Through this initiative, we aim to make San Jose cleaner and health-friendly for all community members.
Our cleanliness projects that are in work:
Looking into ways to clean private properties and potentially procure our own equipment to help things look and stay clean.
To help keep the city of San Jose clean, we are partnering with Groundwerx to put more lights on the city streets.
We also aim to implement initiatives around a concept called Feet on the Street, which involves the collaboration of our community for volunteer clean-ups and block captains to assess the weekly cleanliness of neighborhoods
A healthy individual leads to a healthy family leads to a healthy neighborhood leads to a healthy community making it a healthy city.
Fewer people get sick when they’re around clean things, and shopping in a clean place can actually make you want to spend more money. That’s why it’s so important for cities to keep their public areas and places of business clean, and for the residents to take care of their own homes and businesses. Together, we can make San Jose a city where people are proud to live and proud to shop.
Join us in making San Jose cleaner and more beautiful - one activity at a time. For more information, visit (https://www.urbanvibrancy.institute/cleanliness) and sign up to participate in our cleanliness initiative.