Twenty blocks, twenty paychecks

The pilot became real: 20 blocks cleaned, $2,000 paid out.

In Issue #4, the first cleanups had just run and we were calling them alpha tests. July turned them into a program. Twenty blocks in North Lawndale were cleaned by North Lawndale residents, each one paid $100 per block — $2,000 total, every dollar going directly to the person who did the work on their own street.

The work was powered by a $2,000 community-collaboration sponsorship from the University of Illinois Chicago — the gift we reported in Issue #3, now converted into clean curbs and paid neighbors. And every block was verified the way we said it would be: photos, GPS, and timestamps, logged before the payout went out.

Twenty blocks cleaned. Twenty residents paid. Eighty to go — and every one of them will be verified the same way.

This is what $100 a block actually looks like.

We promised photos when the work was done. Here it is — the mornings, the rakes, and the bag counts, straight from the Roosevelt corridor.

Participants review and approve how we share their work — names stay private unless they ask otherwise.

The app hit real bugs in the field. We fixed fast — and v1.0.9 is the result.

Here’s the part a polished newsletter would leave out. When participants used the live app unsupervised, on real blocks, it stumbled: upload failures on spotty connections, and a scan flow that confused first-time users at exactly the wrong moment. So the team did the simple, correct thing — we photographed completions directly and paid out manually. The work never waited on the software, and nobody’s paycheck did either.

Then we shipped the fix. iOS v1.0.9 carries a rebuilt first-run experience — a welcome carousel, a first-block tutorial, and a cinematic splash that explains the mission before it asks for anything — plus a smoother scan flow and on-device litter identification improvements. Every change traces back to something a participant tripped over in July.

We build in public and we fix fast. The loop between the street and the build stays short on purpose.

Every green segment is a funded, cleaned block along Roosevelt Road.

Twenty of the pilot’s 100 blocks are done — 80 to go. And the pilot is only the corridor: beyond Roosevelt Road, roughly 1,600 side-street blocks are next.

Roosevelt Rd corridor · GCC mobile app

20 of 100 pilot blocks cleaned and verified. The side streets come next.

Eighty blocks to go. One of them can have your name on it.

$100 funds one block and one resident paycheck — the same $100 that cleaned every block in this issue. The work is verified with photos, GPS, and timestamps, and the before-and-after photo set lands in your inbox.

$100 = one cleanup, one paid resident, one before-and-after photo set in your inbox.
$2,000 = your name on our public wall alongside UIC, a digital certificate, a 501(c)(3) tax receipt, a feature in this newsletter, and social-media recognition.

And for the neighbors who’ve been asking: Android is in development. A large share of North Lawndale carries Android, and closing that gap is one of our top priorities.

Dr. King’s apartment is six blocks away. The work continues.

— The team at Global Community Cleaners NFP