How do you go about enhancing your quality of life?  For 20-year-old Clay Stevens and 19-year-old Dylan Hill it’s simple: post signs up around the County with one question: “If you were given one year to live, how would you live it?” On the sign is the website: How Would You Live It, directing the public to an event on a documentary that is being shown at Crest Theatre on April 30.  They are trying to get people to “really just kind of take life and live it,” without sweating the small stuff. As well as enhancing people’s quality of life, Chris’s friends are trying to increase awareness about the importance of bone marrow donations which they did on another website by getting a further 10,000 individuals to join the bone marrow donor list.

On a smaller – but still important – level for making Sacramento a better place, a project is currently underway to clean up trash on the streets.  Given that the area has a large number of homeless, this is a continuing issue but this does not excuse the necessity to clean up our sidewalks.  Especially when one considers the consequences of not cleaning up and how that negatively impacts tourism, quality of life and even business.

Earlier this year a 6-month program called Better Way Anaheim was implemented in order to kill two birds with one stone as it were.  $60 gift cards (to be exchanged at grocery/department stores) were given to participating workers for every 5 hours they spent cleaning up city parks and painting trash cans.  Likewise, Downtown Streets Team provided funding for 25 homeless individuals to work four hours five days a week collecting trash around North Sacramento in return for gift cards for food/living expenses as well as housing assistance. This program was so popular that within less than 2 months there was already a waiting list of more than 12 people.

Both these cases are examples of taking bad and turning it into something good and having a positive impact on people’s quality of life.