Working to Make
San Diego America's Finest City
Supporting homeless that want to help San Diego and themselves
Our Mission
I remember the first time I heard it in 2004: “America’s greatest ballpark in America’s finest city”. Frankly, I was embarrassed. Not only was it self-proclaimed, but it was not true. We had way too many problems. Too much dysfunction. We had a spanking new beautiful ballpark, but America’s finest city? No way.
But we get it. San Diego has some assets that no other city has. The country's best weather, some of the world’s best beaches, great surf, proximity to Mexico and the mountains and the deserts, great diversity, multiple ecosystems, a vibrant downtown, amazing civic assets like Balboa Park...the list goes on. We probably do have the best (finest) assets in America. But our liabilities? We just have too many.
(San Diego Union file photo, Nelvin C. Cepeda)
People sleeping in the streets, trash laying around and cans overflowing, pollution in our oceans and neighborhoods, cost of living sky high, city budget problems, bad traffic. All these things and more keep us from being fine. Make The Finest City has been organized as a 501(c)(3) non-profit to do our little part in attempting to reduce some of these liabilities. How? We are not exactly sure right now, but we do know that our first step in this long journey will be an attempt to move some of our homeless from the liability side of the San Diego balance sheet to the asset side.
The homeless population is always looked at as a liability. For a large percentage of them this should not be the case. Some of the homeless are amongst the hardest working people I’ve ever seen. Have you ever seen a homeless person on a worn-out bike hauling an aircraft carrier size load of cans? Think you could sleep on the street and do that? Make The Finest City wants to align these hard-working people with work that makes San Diego a better place to live. There are lots of things that can be done, you probably have your own ideas, but we will help the homeless that want to help themselves. Our mission is to make San Diego finer ... this will be our first step.
Food Truck Connector has agreed to sponsor us and will cover all of our start-up administrative and operating costs. Our staff are volunteers, so any donations you can provide will go directly to the hard-working homeless that are trying to make San Diego better. You may see our volunteers (homeless or otherwise) in their khaki pants, white shirts, and white hats cleaning our streets. If you do, thank them by giving a shout out. As far as we are concerned our streets should be cleaner than Disneyland.
Volunteer
All our staff are volunteers. This may have to change if our staffing needs become full-time or positions define themselves. If you would like to volunteer, you can start immediately by cleaning a city block near you. We ask that you wear khaki pants, a white shirt or top, and our MTFC baseball cap while cleaning to help promote our cause. Of course, you can always clean on your own, it does not have to be through MTFC, but doing it through MTFC does help spread the word.
If you would like to volunteer for a staffing position, let us know and we will reach out to you when we establish our systems, and the needs define themselves. This should be sometime during the Spring of 2025.
If you have a full or part-time job for one of our homeless workers, please let us know. We will put you in contact with them. We intend to work with the city or other private non-profit homeless groups to see if we can establish or find incentives for businesses to hire the homeless. The cleaning work that we may assign our homeless workers is currently only part-time and does not provide a living wage; they should have plenty of time for a full-time job.
Making San Diego Finer
We have our opinions on making San Diego finer, we would like to know yours. As you can tell from our mission statement, we think homelessness is the biggest issue, and that is the first one we intend to work on. But what is next, or maybe there is more than one issue we will try to help with? If you would like to provide your input and you live in San Diego or San Diego County, select up to 2 of the issues below (or add your own) that you feel are the most critical for San Diego. We thank you for your input and will publish results once we have enough data.
