Volunteers Take to the Streets to Make Hollywood Beautiful, Safe and Clean

Spring came early to Hollywood this year and a team of volunteers took advantage of the balmy weather to clean up the neighborhood.

With restrictions easing and Hollywood hoping to finally return to “normal,” volunteers from the Church of Scientology added muscle and enthusiasm into their neighborhood cleanup this month. 

For years before the pandemic began, Hollywood Village, a community coalition of people of all faiths, ideologies, political preferences and backgrounds, has worked to make Hollywood beautiful, safe and clean. A monthly tradition, volunteers team up to clean up the streets of Hollywood. But they also address the underlying factor in the urban blight that sprawls below the Hollywood sign.

As in so many other cities and neighborhoods, homelessness has changed the Hollywood landscape. And a basic purpose of Hollywood Village is to help the homeless get back on their feet again. This is why they hand out copies of The Way to Happiness as they clean up the neighborhood.

In 1981, noting a dramatic downturn in moral and cultural values, author, humanitarian and Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote The Way to Happiness, a common-sense moral code.  Its 21 precepts are values common to all people, no matter their religious, ethnic or cultural backgrounds.  

As they clean up the neighborhood, volunteers share this booklet with everyone they meet. And one section in particular has resonated with many of those living in homeless encampments.

“One can feel that things are such now that it is much too late to do anything,” wrote Mr. Hubbard in the booklet, “that one’s past road is so messed up that there is no chance of drawing a future one that will be any different. There is always a point on the road when one can map a new one. And try to follow it. There is no person alive who cannot make a new beginning.”

The Way to Happiness holds a Guinness World Record as the most translated nonreligious work of all time by a single author.

To learn more about the Hollywood Cleanup, visit Hollywood Village Facebook.