Downtown Reno residents and visitors will start seeing “ambassadors” in bright blue shirts on bikes starting in the Veterans Day parade. The ambassadors are part of the Downtown Reno Partnership, a private nonprofit business improvement district charged with enhancing the city’s urban core.

Leading the team of 14 is operations manager Grant Denton was previously a peer recovery specialist and program developer at The Life Change Center, a local nonprofit that offers recovery services for heroin and prescription drug abuse.

Denton also started the Karma Box community initiative, a give-and-take box that helps people who need toiletries, non-perishable food and water. He also founded Rise and Grind, a fitness program for women in recovery. He most recently worked for the Volunteers of America as an outreach supervisor.

Denton and the ambassadors have been hired through StreetPlus, a company with more than 25 years of experience supplying cleaning, safety and hospitality services to downtowns and improvement districts across the country.

“StreetPlus has helped us assemble a really stellar team of individuals who will interface with locals, visitors, businesses and the transient population in Downtown Reno,” said Alex Stettinski, Downtown Reno Partnership executive director. “Our ambassadors have been training for the last several weeks and will be in uniform on the streets starting Veterans Day.”

Ambassadors will work to improve, promote and enhance the overall attractiveness and appeal of Downtown Reno’s business improvement district. Duties including litter control, weed abatement, graffiti removal, visibility and presence patrols, personal safety escorts, homeless outreach and providing general hospitality services for all visitors, workers, business owners and residents of Downtown Reno.

The Downtown Reno Partnership also welcomes Marketing Manager Mike Higdon and Office Manager Tanya Polli.

Higdon comes to the Downtown Reno Partnership after serving as the city life reporter at the Reno Gazette Journal for more than three years, where he covered Midtown and downtown urban life.

Polli worked for decades as a human resources manager and later as an executive assistance in the tech and medical industries. She most recently worked as the executive assistance for the former COO of Renown Health and CEO of Northern Nevada Medical Center before that.