Support for Community · 2024

The crews who keep the streets clean

The year went to the frontline workers of the City Environment and Natural Resources Office — street sweepers, garbage collectors and tree trimmers — together with the youth volunteers who work the streets beside them. They keep the city running and are rarely thanked for it.

A volunteer in a black shirt hands goods to a woman in a blue shirt inside the hall, with families and young children seated on chairs behind them. — The handover, one recipient at a time, with the rest of the hall waiting behind.

What happened

CENRO is the City Environment and Natural Resources Office, a department of the Science City of Muñoz government. Its crews are the ones out before the city wakes: sweeping the streets, collecting the garbage, cutting back the trees along the roads.

Sacks of rice stacked beside rows of red grocery pails on a hall floor; a woman speaks into a microphone while officials sit at a table beneath the office's organisational chart. — Rice and pails massed on the hall floor, the programme already under way.

Two volunteers lift red pails by their handles; the floor around them is covered with pails packed with instant noodles, coffee and canned goods. — Each pail packed and lidded before the doors opened.

A volunteer in a black shirt passes a bag of produce and a sack of rice to a woman in a red shirt, with recipients seated along the wall behind. — Produce and rice going out with the pail.

Working the same streets beside them are the city's youth volunteers. MUSA's 2024 project went to both groups together — the people the whole city depends on and almost nobody sets out to thank, which is precisely why the board chose them.