Volunteers gathered to tackle the kind of unglamorous work that makes a neighborhood actually livable: clearing trash, tidying public spaces, and generally doing the maintenance that your tax dollars are theoretically supposed to cover. Groups like the Urban Compassion Project helped organize the effort, partnering with local organizations to get boots on the ground.

One Bay Area organizer summed up the ethos nicely: "The goal has never been to exist forever but to render ourselves obsolete. We're going to be doing a lot of beautification work, tree planting, urban farming — and of course we're not going to stop our advocacy work to hold the city and all the grifters accountable."