Keeping The Streets Clean

At Christian Brothers, one of the best ways to learn is serving the community.

Many people focus on what Christian Brothers High School does for the Oak Park community. However, the Oak Park community does a lot for Christian Brothers High School.

Mr. Paul Havey ’81 takes trips with some of his students every month to clean the streets of Oak Park. Cleaning up Oak Park is just as important for the students as it is for the residents on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

CB had been cleaning up the neighborhood streets for 12 years before Mr. Havey took over the program.

“It started out as a cooperative event between Sacramento High School and Christian Brothers High School,” states Mr. Havey. “Then I kinda just picked up and thought, we need to help out the neighborhood”.

When Sacramento High School decided to stopped cleaning Oak Park, Mr. Havey decided to take matters into his own hands.

Oak Park Clean-Up gives some insight to students at CBHS about people in the Oak Park community.

“Kids need to get out of their social bubbles and experience other people from different backgrounds and realize that our neighborhood’s just a bunch of good people,” says Mr. Havey.

People have their own prejudices about people in Oak Park, but Mr. Havey says “people have been nothing but kind”.

Mr. Havey went on to talk about how there is a homeless person that lives on MLK Boulevard who the Oak Park Clean-Up crew tends to see monthly. He talks to the students and Mr. Havey while they also clean up his living space.

Oak Park Clean-Up constantly picks up tires and trash from sidewalks on their trips down MLK Boulevard.

Mr. Havey believes that the reason there is so much litter on MLK is partially because of the illegal dumping from there not being enough public trash cans.

“Ideally if we could have garbage cans at different locations” says Mr. Havey.

Out of the goodness of his heart, Mr. Havey continues to keep running Oak Park Clean-Up knowing he will get nothing out of it. He plans to keep running Oak Park Clean-Up until he can’t possibly run it anymore and also hopes that eventually it will expand past MLK Boulevard.