Chico gets a makeover

Susan Rauen was feeling the love.

It was Sunday morning, Oct. 18, a time when the Chico branch of the Butte County Library ordinarily would have been closed up tight. Instead it was full of people—more than 60 altogether, volunteers in that day’s city-wide LoveChico event—dusting shelves, cleaning windows, tables and chairs, even air-blowing the computers, and generally giving the place the kind of deep cleaning it never gets because the small custodial crew doesn’t have time to do much more than vacuum the floor and take out the trash.

Rauen, the branch’s head librarian, was thrilled. “This is so great. We’re overwhelmed,” she said.

Most people don’t realize that more than 1,200 people use the library every day, she continued. “This is a community effort to support a community resource.”

One volunteer at the library was Larry Lane, pastor at Neighborhood Church. His daughter Cassie, a Chico State student, was there too. Instead of going to church that morning, they were helping give the library a fall cleaning.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story behind LoveChico. It began last year, when four local churches decided that, instead of going to church and hearing an uplifting sermon on a certain Sunday morning, they would go out into the community and do good work instead—“walk the talk,” as Steve Schibsted, senior pastor at Bidwell Presbyterian, has put it.

This year the number of churches involved exploded to 19, and by the time the event got under way, more than 3,000 volunteers had signed up to work at one of more than 100 sites, making it the largest volunteer effort in Chico history.

As Pastor Lane explained it, the event’s Web site (www.lovechico.org) was set up in such a way that, when a work location had as many volunteers as it needed, new registrants would be bumped to other sites, ensuring an even distribution of effort.

This was a remarkably well-organized effort. LoveChico coordinators worked with representatives of each location—schools, parks, the Boys and Girls Club, the Jesus Center, the Dorothy Johnson Center, you name it—to make sure that everything they needed, from garden tools to Dumpsters, was there at 9 a.m., when work began.

At the Chapman-Mulberry Neighborhood Building, which is actually a little house across the street from Chapman Elementary School, local nutrition counselor Karen Goodwin was overseeing a major yard cleanup. A force of about 20 people, many of them teenagers, was trimming back hedges, pulling weeds, pruning trees, and generally making the place look good.

Goodwin offers cooking classes at the building, which Richard Roth also uses as an office for the Friday-afternoon farmers’ market he’s created nearby. There’s a small garden out front cared for by some Hmong families, and a newly planted fruit tree orchard on the side.

In the distance, across the school parking lot, a group of about a dozen teens could be seen cleaning up the school garden. Three projects in the neighborhood—these two and another at the Dorothy Johnson Center—had been designated for youths who preferred to work with their peers.

Otherwise, family seemed to be the prevailing social unit among the LoveChico participants. At Bidwell Junior High School, where 40 or 50 people volunteered, there were as many or more children as adults, and they seemed to be working in family units.

Some were inserting slats in a Cyclone fence on the school’s north side. A few months ago someone had shot BBs from that side into a classroom, and though the perpetrator had been caught, the school wanted to increase the level of safety.

Others were fixing the long jump, repairing playground turf, clearing out weeds and spreading redwood mulch, and planting flowers.

Alfreda Troudy, who was wearing a Bidwell Presbyterian T-shirt, her daughter Ellie and two other high-school-age girls, Brittany Rigg and Melanie McBroom, spent their morning building a new planter and filling it with flowers. That’s a pleasant activity under any circumstances, and they clearly were enjoying themselves.

But then so was everybody. There was a sense that, instead of sitting in a church talking about Christ, they were representing him, being what he embodied. There was a genuine joyfulness to the work: It was a beautiful day, folks were happy to be engaged in projects together, and they were taking delight in giving back to their community.