On a Thursday morning in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, two dozen people mill around a warehouse, waiting for the results of a lottery. At 7:45 sharp, a woman sitting in an interior office calls out three numbers in quick succession. She repeats the last one a few times before someone finally comes forward: “234?” she says into the crowd. “Who’s 234?”

Chris Parker is 234. He is tall and thin and wears Garneau cycling gloves and a baseball cap from the power tools company DeWalt. “Are you kidding me?” he says, happy and shocked. Across the room, one of the other selectees—number 237—does a kind of end-zone victory dance, shimmying with arms above his head.

The lottery determines who will participate in that day’s waste collection program from Ground Score Association, a Portland-based collective for people who “create and fill low-barrier waste materials management jobs.” Through this particular program, called GLITTER (short for Ground Score Leading Inclusively Together Through Environmental Recovery), Parker will join a group of Ground Score employees on a four-hour walk around Portland, clearing sidewalks of plastic and other trash. At the end of the shift, he’ll get $80 in cash—$4.55 more per hour than the Portland metro area minimum wage.