“Someone’s living here,” Kelsea Hector, executive director of Punks with Lunch in Lansing announced as she directed her crew of 20 unhoused individuals to clean around personal belongings stowed behind a bridge at Rotary Park in the heart of Lansing’s Downtown.
Expertly navigating the boulders behind the bridge, hidden by a canopy of trees, two individuals in the cleanup crew gathered food wrappers and other waste into large black garbage bags, leaving items they believed belonged to someone seeking shelter under the bridge during a river cleanup event on June 26.
Over the last several months, Punks with Lunch, or PWL, a nonprofit organization in Lansing focused on providing resources for individuals experiencing homelessness, has teamed up with Michigan Waterways Stewards, a nonprofit working towards keeping the Greater Lansing waterways clean, to include unhoused residents in river cleanup efforts…