WOONSOCKET – On a sunny day in mid-June, 21-year-old Xavier Green sped through Woonsocket on an electric scooter, cheerfully greeting homeless people in the city.
“Yo, you wanna make $5?” he asked.
He invited people to join him near Safe Haven, a drop-in support center operated by the Community Care Alliance. Behind the building, trash had piled up under the train tracks.
With $20 from his own pocket, Green promised to pay people $5 for every bag of litter they collected, an initiative he called Trash4Cash. Green said people were skeptical at first, but a few agreed to help.
For months, Green had been interviewing homeless people for a set of short documentaries, and he said he learned how much his community was struggling. Many people had fallen on hard times and were unable to keep up with rent hikes. Others had lived on Woonsocket’s streets for decades.
“I’ve been homeless for almost seven years,” said one man Green interviewed, sitting on a park gazebo with a long, white beard. “I’ve been through so much … just to find somewhere to stay dry, to keep my clothes fucking dry. It’s not fun.”
Last year, the Woonsocket City Council passed a law prohibiting camping on public property, part of a multi-pronged approach to addressing homeless encampments, including new shelter spaces. The city had previously dismantled a number of encampments, and the people who lived there lost their few belongings.
“Don’t tell me, ‘You can’t be here, you’re gonna go to jail.’ It’s not your world. It’s God’s world,” said another man Green interviewed.
When people evacuated, some garbage remained in the encampment areas. Green said he looked for a way to clean Woonsocket and help people get back on their feet. A local business owner gave him the idea for Trash4Cash.
The word spread fast. When he returned to River Island Park the next day, this time with $40 of his own, he found a larger group eager to participate. He distributed gloves and cold water bottles, and community members filled large trash bags with litter.
One participant told Green that he hadn’t been able to eat in days, and he used his payment to buy a meal.
Green posted videos on social media under the handle “Woonsocket Rockets.” He gained thousands of followers, and supporters from across the world pitched in nearly $5,000 in a month. Last week, Goodstuff Smokehouse donated a portion of its dinner sales to the effort.
Using the raised funds, Green has paid people to remove hundreds of bags of trash across the city.
“It’s really, really rough in some of the areas,” he said. “The caps for the needles are embedded into the ground.”
Green says he hopes Trash4Cash will create accountability, encouraging community members to take care of the environments where they live.
His rules reflect this goal. Green never reveals the location in advance, as he worries people may generate more litter to clean for money. And once he cleans a site, he never selects it again.
As a result, people come away with the sense, “Oh, I picked this up now. I don’t want to make it dirty again,” he said.
Green said he leads with compassion, putting himself in homeless people’s shoes.
“I’ve worked multiple jobs, so I know what it’s like to have a good boss,” he said. Knowing that he “wouldn’t want to walk 30 minutes in the heat,” he only selects sites within walking distance of areas where homeless people congregate.
Green was working nine-hour shifts at a hospital, but he quit last week to focus on Trash4Cash. He has big goals for the initiative. This week, his crew tackled the toughest area yet: a 90-foot pile of trash with furniture, mattresses, and propane tanks. Though Green said the city has been collecting the trash bags so far, this time he relied on a dumpster donation from a local trash company.
At the end of the month, he’s taking Trash4Cash to Kensington, Philadelphia. He said he eventually hopes to take the movement nationwide.
“I need to get a team or something,” he joked. “But I guess all that just comes with time.”
