Kitsap County, looking to take on abandoned shopping carts, turns to nonprofit with a fix

Shopping carts pile up quickly in Sponsor-A-Can’s trailer as founder Matthew Boisson and his board members pile them in. After the team rescues the carts from places in Silverdale where unhoused people have either discarded or collected them, they sort the carts by retailer and press them together to maximize the trailer’s potential storage – about 30 carts.

Soon, the trailer will have a custom decal bearing the fledgling nonprofit’s name.

Boisson’s original idea for Sponsor-A-Can came from his first international trip to the Philippines when he came face-to-face with large-scale poverty that came with a mounting homelessness crisis and refuse problem. In his rumination on rolling out a commerce platform to help track areas where garbage was piling up in the Philippines, he thought about his hometown of Silverdale where he had seen friends lose their businesses in the COVID-19 pandemic and the unincorporated town’s cleanliness decline while its homeless problem increased.

He returned and filed for a nonprofit in May. Now, less than a year later, Sponsor-A-Can is one week into a six-month pilot program sponsored by the Kitsap County Commissioners. Their task? Clean up one of the more symbolic symptoms of homelessness – discarded shopping carts.

The problem with shopping carts

Shopping carts were the number one issue for public commenters at Kitsap County Commissioner policy analyst Anne Presson’s first Central Kitsap community council meeting in April 2023. Commissioner Katie Walters has seen the community voice their concern over the carts for over a year, so much so that she conducted a community cleanup later in November.

Presson and Walters looked toward other municipalities that had dealt with the same issue and eventually had to pass ordinances to enforce cart collection from retailers. But, they didn’t want to go down that path. Hiring enforcement would be expensive and retailers would be burdened with labeling their carts for documentation purposes, among other hurdles.

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Contracted sanitation crews had only been clearing the contents of the carts, not the carts themselves, as they are legally considered property instead of solid waste. The commissioners tried organizing cart corrals and volunteer cleanups, but were confronted with liability issues considering the refuse inside discarded shopping carts which can include feces, drugs and needles.

Retailers themselves would occasionally respond to reports of wayward shopping carts using the SeeClickFix app in connection with Kitsap1, if they had enough staff to spare for the trip in the first place, only to find that the carts were gone by the time they go there, Walters said.

“It seems like an easier problem to solve than it is,” Presson said.

It was just as soon as Presson was exploring options to deal with Central Kitsap’s number one issue that Boisson entered the picture, mentioned to her by solid waste staff.

“Matthew came across my radar wanting to do some other community good related to homeless encampments on private property,” Presson said. “I met with him and started talking with him about shopping carts.”

The pilot program

Boisson took Sponsor-A-Can for three test drives before the pilot program started on March 15, and the group is working to integrate itself into the community. Using a borrowed trailer, the five-person team collected about 30 carts around Silverdale one day, gathered 54 from the back of All Star Lanes & Casino, and amassed 90 carts from the Hospital Hill encampment upon its clearing on Feb. 28.

Sponsor-A-Can had been operating out of pocket with the exception of a few community donations until the nonprofit landed the pilot program. Walters and Commissioner Christine Rolfes allotted $12,000 from their one-time-funding pool to supplement operations and compensate the working members. The commissioners also gave the group an additional $4,700 for the new trailer.

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During the six-month pilot, Sponsor-A-Can will be operating three days a week, responding within 48 hours to shopping cart reports on SeeClickFix, their own reporting software on their website and those they see while patrolling.

Unless there are items that look like someone's belongings in the carts, the team will dispose of the garbage, load the carts into the trailer and take them to Klean Freaks car wash where they can soap down and pressure wash for free. From there, they’ll return the carts to their corresponding stores and restart the process.

“There's plenty of vendors who provide garbage hauling services in the actual remediation of a homeless encampment,” Boisson said. “My goal was to be supplemental, but to prevent it from ever getting so bad that it was needed to have a sweep gone through it… It's about hygiene.”

Over time, even before the pilot, Boisson has been visiting homeless encampments like that on Hospital Hill to develop relationships with the campers there so that they would eventually feel comfortable asking Sponsor-A-Can to come collect carts and garbage.

Sponsoring Sponsor-A-Can

Boisson named his business Sponsor-A-Can because he wasn’t counting on getting support from his local government and municipalities, but anticipated that the nonprofit would subsist on crowdfunding from the community who wanted to invest in their proactive sanitation services.

The commissioners’ one-time-funding will help incubate Sponsor-A-Can as Boisson and the board develop their model, but the business’ future financing isn’t certain after the six months.

“It just feels good to be supporting a local business, a small entrepreneur who grew up in Silverdale,” Presson said. “We're hopeful that at the end of the six months, this project can continue by virtue of the retailers wanting to support it and continue it.”

So far, she notes that Boisson has built trust with the businesses he’s returning carts to. Presson will be sending out a satisfaction survey to retailers about their time with Sponsor-A-Can toward the end of the pilot.

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The nonprofit’s success will also be measured by watching the number of cart reports around Silverdale, Walters said. Hopefully, the reports will decrease and shopping carts will be seen less and less around town.

In the meantime, Presson is already thinking about the future of Sponsor-A-Can and how it could expand its impact, such as extending its services further into the county, private property and even garbage collection. For now though, Boisson says the business is confined to Silverdale due to cost restrictions.

Sponsor-A-Can is in what Boisson calls phase one during the pilot program, but he hopes phase two will see the business secure a general contractor license and a portable pressure washer attached to the trailer. Then, the team would be able to scrub down and wash carts at the retail stores they collect carts from and gain more visibility for their services.

Boisson hopes Sponsor-A-Can’s work can become a career for him and his team members to make the exposure to health risk and danger worthwhile. He also hopes the business will be able to incorporate participation from unhoused individuals who could collect carts for money.

“We were trying to think of avenues for the homeless people to generate income so that they could get off the street,” Boisson said. “If we did it like a 1099, we could then compensate them for their time because we want to get the homeless people to clean up after themselves.”

In the future, Boisson wants to take the concept of Sponsor-A-Can back to the Philippines where his dream first started.

Boisson will join the Kitsap County Commissioners and HEART team coordinator Jarrod Moran in presenting on the County’s progress addressing homelessness issues during a Central Kitsap community meeting on April 3. Residents will also be able to ask questions.

“The cards really coincide with the increase of the homeless encampments in the urban areas of Kitsap that have open spaces that are adjacent to the retail establishment and social services,” Walters said. “Ultimately, I guess the success would be that we have homes for all and there isn't a need for (Sponsor-A-Can).”

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: New Kitsap County nonprofit clears shopping carts left by homeless