When COVID-19 shut everything down, Jill Mather, a Chatsworth retiree from the restaurant and hospitality business, was looking for something to do, and the walks she started taking turned into a volunteer group that Woman’s World now credits with nearly 750,000 pounds of trash picked up across the San Fernando Valley. “I needed exercise,” she told Spectrum News 1. “So I went out in my neighborhood and started picking up trash.”
She didn’t like walking without a purpose, she told LAist, “so I started taking a bag along with me to pick up the trash that I found along the way.”
People passing by began thanking her and asking how they could get involved, so one day she posted an open invitation on the Nextdoor app, and “12 people showed up that I didn’t know,” she told Spectrum News 1. In 2020 she named the group Volunteers Cleaning Communities, or VCC, according to a 2022 Patch “Local Hero” nomination.
From 650,000 to 750,000 pounds of trash
Mather told LAist in November 2025 that the volunteers had “picked over 650,000 pounds of trash,” which LAist put at more than 45,000 bags, and by March 2026 Woman’s World put the total at nearly three-quarters of a million pounds, about 375 tons. “And that doesn’t include the larger items we set out for the city,” Mather told the magazine.
The bags fill up with fast food containers, discarded clothing and cigarette butts that never seem to run out. “You think that the world has stopped smoking,” Mather told Spectrum News 1 as she used her grabber to lift a crushed filter off the sidewalk. “But I don’t think so.” She kept picking up as she talked. “We always say if we weren’t doing this, what would the Valley look like?” she said. “And we have no idea because that’s a lot of trash.”
By late 2025 as many as 200 people a week were heading out across the Valley in the group’s vests, Spectrum News 1 reported, some of them looking after their own block for six months through VCC’s Adopt 1 Street program and others joining bigger jobs such as a 6.5-mile stretch of State Route 118 and Haskell Creek in the Sepulveda Basin, both on the group’s list of cleanup areas.
What keeps them coming back
Danny Sinclair had just moved from Florida and was living with his son when he saw a post about the group online, and four and a half years later he fills in as the leader when Mather is away. “So I started doing this. Now I’ve got all new family, friends, everything,” he told LAist. “The best thing is the friendships.”
“I just feel like I’m getting something done, making a difference,” said Christine Kesilis, who came across VCC about two years before she spoke to LAist, while it was cleaning up Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park, where she was volunteering. “I met them during the cleanup and then I joined them afterwards. I do them more than I go to the park now,” she told LAist.
Linda Llanes, known in the group as the recycling queen, turns the cans she collects into money for VCC, and at the Christmas party in December 2024 that came to “a donation of just over $1,100 just from recycling,” which she gave to Mather, she told Spectrum News 1. She once went to Ventura with a few other volunteers for what she called a “girls’ trash weekend.”
Jeff Diamond, who worked in an office for years, is the group’s MyLA311 expert and photographs dumped mattresses, appliances and graffiti so he can report them to the city. “There’s a good chance because of how they handle graffiti that that’ll be removed today,” he told Spectrum News 1 after spotting a tagged utility box, and he figures he gets in “somewhere between 5 and 6,000 steps during this two-hour period.”
The coffee goes back to the very first outing. “We went to coffee afterwards just out of a fluke,” Mather told LAist, and the habit stuck, often at a Starbucks on Nordhoff Street where, according to Spectrum News 1, the baristas cheer when the group walks in.
Emilie Koster was volunteering at UCLA until the pandemic sent her home, and after that she found VCC. “They are my new family,” she told Woman’s World. Mather hosts game nights at her home now and then, and she told the Los Angeles Times how she sees her side of the deal: “You have to treat volunteers better than employees.”
Sixteen miles in two hours
On Saturday, May 16, 2026, more than 165 volunteers took over 16 miles of Vanowen Street, from Fallbrook to Clybourn, and by the time their two hours were up they had filled more than 500 bags, according to VCC’s own report.
“My councilman calls it his beloved VCC,” Mather told LAist. That is John Lee, who represents the 12th District on the Los Angeles City Council and whose office gave the group $10,000 for cleanup supplies in June 2025. “I’m very proud of what they’ve grown into,” Lee said. “Not only are they cleaning up our communities, they are an example to the rest of the people who live here about how a little effort can make such a big, big difference.”
From the curb to the beach
A morning on Valley sidewalks will never feel as glamorous as a day cleaning up the beach, and Mather knows it, but she told Spectrum News 1 that it is just as necessary “because everything on the land is going to make it to the beach,” adding, “And by the way, there’s a whole lot more trash on land than there ever is on our beaches.”
That trip from street to shore is the one the Environmental Protection Agency describes, with rain and wind pushing litter into storm drains, creeks and rivers, and the agency says the surest fix is making less waste in the first place.
It saddens Mather how little thought people give to what they throw away. “I swear, people think this is probably clean,” she said, pointing down a stretch of Lassen Street, and unless you walk it, she said, “you’re not really seeing the trash.”
Photo: Volunteers Cleaning Communities
