Housing stability is inextricably linked with other systems of care – health care, criminal justice, child welfare and education, to name a few. We were intrigued to see a proposal in 2017 from a collaborative working at the intersection of affordable housing and workforce development. Worksystems, Inc. was leading a collaborative effort to link employment and housing services for formerly homeless families in Portland, giving low-income residents community-based career coaching and supports to achieve family-supporting employment.
We saw the project as an opportunity for systems to coordinate in intentional, equity-informed ways that could produce better outcomes for both employment and housing stability. Now, over a year into the work, we are following up with Stacey Triplett, community programs manager at Worksystems, to hear more about the collaborative’s progress.
Theresa: How is Worksystems’ project aligning with the homeless services system?
Stacey: The Worksystems’ Aligned Partners Network (APN) is a flexible set of community-based employment service providers who are experienced in a customer-centered approach. This network approach creates success in making relevant services available in our community for folks experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity.
Today, APN career coaches are a vital part of homeless services, working one on one with customers getting jobs, getting scholarships for occupational training and getting better jobs, all of which serves to stabilize their housing. High-demand, family-wage careers are open to those with a need for housing support if, and only if, they are able to set career goals and layer supports that are needed. Supports are timed to make progress possible; customers both gain skills and access employment opportunities.
The model for systems alignment is a “housing hub” approach where dedicated rent assistance coordinators bring housing market knowledge to customers in need of rapid rehousing or eviction prevention services alongside the work of the employment service providers of the APN. The same customers are shared across systems. The new normal is for career coaches to engage with their customers before, during and after they receive rent assistance in a manner that demonstrates that both housing AND employment stability are goals around which they engage their customers. This was a result of career coaches coordinating closely with and experiencing great support from the housing hub and its specialty knowledge to address short-term rent assistance needs.
Theresa: Can you share an example of a household that has benefitted from your work?
Stacey: Sure. Khalid had a master’s degree in electrical engineering and eight years of experience before he arrived in Portland as a refugee. To be recognized as a professional engineer in this country, his career coach helped with his resume and requesting the recommendations he needed in order to get approval to take the engineer licensing exam. He also had to take an English exam to qualify for the test.
At first, Khalid stayed with friends, and it was very crowded and noisy. He had difficulty studying for the English exam, but with only $300 a month in refugee assistance, landlords would not approve him for a unit. His career coach referred Khalid for rent assistance, and he was able to secure a unit quickly. His new home provides a safe and quiet space to study in order to pass the English exams and the professional engineering exam that he will be required to take in order to regain his certifications.
Once he had his own place, Khalid said, “I was able to focus on getting a job.” He found work as an electrical engineer at a construction firm and is working full time. Khalid has been approved to take the professional engineering exam in October and continues to study for it. His career coach will use support service funds to pay the costs and fees associated with taking the exam. At the same time, Khalid is already giving back to the community by helping others learn English and translating for them.
Theresa: Impressive work by Khalid and the team! How long have you been doing this collaborative work?
Stacey: This has been a journey of over five years. Meyer Memorial Trust supported work that brought all the relevant organizations together in these efforts. Human Solutions, as the housing hub, learned to share customers with IRCO, SE Works, Oregon Tradeswomen, Constructing Hope, Central City Concern and Human Solution’s own employment department. In more recent years, the network has grown to include Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center, Latino Network, the Urban League of Portland and Black Parent Initiative. Our project also prioritized production of data on how efforts that career coaches and rent assistance coordinators make on behalf of their shared customers increase their success by orders of magnitude compared to prior disconnected approaches. Specifically, in 2017 we measured greater income increases (almost double the rate of increase) for customers in the shared approach compared to those who were not. And they were also 53% more likely to leave the program employed.
Theresa: What special role do the collaborative partners play in the project?
Stacey: They are the absolute champions of this effort. All the day-to-day changes to accommodate this new model have been made in a very consensus-oriented manner with good participation and communication amongst and between career coaches and rent assistance coordinators.
Theresa: What kind of challenges have you faced, and how have you overcome them?
Stacey: We’ve found that systems alignment challenges can best be overcome with frequent and clear communications. With our system alignment work with the housing system, understanding each other’s performance metrics can be difficult, but the deeper we dig the more that we understand the intricacies of each other’s work with participants and how our decisions impact participant lives and performance outcomes for both systems.
Theresa: What do you hope happens going forward?
Stacey: I hope how career coaches and rent assistance coordinators work together will be sustained by the benefits that both colleagues create for customers’ outcomes. It took time for each area to learn one another’s strengths, procedures and how to best stabilize customers experiencing housing instability while pursuing employment goals. Now there’s a natural alliance where housing and employment are “everyone’s business.”
There are many ways the network has embraced the customer-centered teaming that happens when career coaches appreciate the intricacies of operating the housing hub and rent assistance coordinators take cues from training timeframes and employment activities to make sure customers can achieve their goals.
Theresa: Are you able to share the results of your work to a broader audience?
Stacey: There has been interest in this work by many national bodies. Currently, Portland is featured in the 2018 Systems Work Better Together: Strengthening Public Workforce & Homeless Service Systems Collaboration report by the Heartland Alliance. Also, this work has been featured to inspire states outside Oregon to consider utilizing public resources such as are utilized here to fund “SNAP to Skills” efforts that the USDA supports nationwide. An Oregon Housing and Community Services webinar was held with participation from housing professionals, workforce development staff and local funders around the country.
Theresa: Congratulations! Anything else you would like us to know?
Stacey: This goal of systems aligning for customer benefit is that everyone comes to see the connections as the most logical, natural and smooth way of working and doubts that it was ever any other way.
Theresa: That’s a great ending thought. Thank you so much, Stacey, for sharing the progress on this collaborative work to align systems.
Economic Opportunity Rent Assistance Program participants share experiences of using the EOP program at the A Home for Everyone coordinating board meeting in April 2019.
Lane Community College’s Rights of Passage program — a multicultural curriculum focused on serving students from African American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Latinx and Indigenous communities — increases participation and graduation rates for underserved middle and high school students of color in Lane County, encouraging them to learn more about their own cultural history, traditions, folklore, literature and heritage.
“What’s the importance of having an instructor, educational leader or other role model who looks like, talks like and comes from a similar background as their students?” asks journalist Alisha Roemeling in a Register-Guard article covering the Rights of Passage program based in south Eugene, Oregon:
“We provide [students] with the role models they need, like educators and other professionals in our community, to help them see that they can achieve great things too,” said Greg Evans, founder of Lane Community College’s Rites of Passage program. “They don’t see teachers and other support staff who look like them all day, every day at school, but they’re in this program and they come from the communities that they represent.”
Meyer's Equitable Education portfolio awarded a $185,000 three-year grant to support expansion of the Rites of Passage program. You can learn more about LCC’s Rites of Passage program here.
Jim Garcia, coordinator of Lane Community College’s Chicano/Latino Student Program, listens to a student while teaching. Photo credit: Andy Nelson at The Register-Guard
Central City Concern is building a six-story, $52 million development, the Blackburn Center, to increase stock and access to health care integrated housing in Portland.
Affordable Housing Finance recently published an article about the new building that will include a 40,000-square-foot integrated health care clinic and 165 units of respite care, transitional and permanent housing units:
“This is our 40th anniversary as an organization, but this is the first time where everything we do and offer will be available under one roof. That’s really the exciting part here,” says Central City Concern chief housing and strategy officer Sean Hubert. “For us as an organization, it gives us the opportunity to pilot a new way of doing business, and I think it gives us an opportunity to put the client at the center of our work and to align and build the services around the client.”
Click here to learn more about CCC's new campus of integrated housing.
A partnership between Tribes of the Pacific Northwest and Meyer seeks to integrate and honor Native wisdom within the environmental movement.
Inside Philanthropy examines a recent batch of grants awarded through Meyer's Healthy Environment portfolio and the unique role its grantmaking plays in supporting Tribal communities:
"[We] are excited to learn more about how traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous communities and Western science can work together to support healthy natural systems and communities," portfolio director Jill Fuglister wrote in a blog at the end of 2018. She tells IP this integration "opens the door to addressing the disparate impacts of environmental problems that indigenous communities experience by creating space for indigenous leaders to bring their concerns, priorities and solutions to environmental protection efforts."
By turning to local Native American communities to help steer its environmental grantmaking practices, Meyer may create a rich example of how environmental and social movements can come together. We see more, but arguably not enough, environmental, social justice and human rights-focused groups acknowledging and exploring how their causes overlap. At the crux of this intersection is the fact that minority groups are often the most affected by environmental degradation and calamity, and the recognition that these same communities can be a source of experience-based, authentic responses to these problems.
The Chinook Indian Nation recently bought about 10 acres of heavily forested land in Warrenton around Tansy Creek, one of many locations where Chinookan tribes — Clatsop, Cathlamet, Lower Chinook Wahkiakum and Willapa — were pushed off by European settlers. The plan: to purchase, protect and revitalize the Tribes’ historically important 1851 Tansy Point treaty grounds.
The Daily Astorian documents the purchase, made possible by grants from organizations such as the Oregon Community Foundation, Meyer Memorial Trust, Collins Foundation and others:
“'The Clatsop folks covered this whole south shore of the Columbia, really, from around Astoria itself heading west, and then of course down the adjacent seashore all the way down to Tillamook Head, that country,” (Tony Johnson, chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation) said. “But all the main country people think about here in terms of Hammond, Gearhart, Seaside — that’s all Clatsop territory.'
The property near Tansy Point is near where, in the summer of 1851, members of all five Chinookan tribes gathered to negotiate with Anson Dart, the first superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Oregon Territory, to avoid relocation east of the Cascade Mountains. It is the only known instance when all tribal ancestors were gathered in one place, Johnson said."
If you are apartment hunting, an already daunting task can feel impossible if you are low-income and have a spotty rental history, especially in a neighborhood of your choice.
When low-income tenants find housing that they can afford, they are often subjected to stringent screening criteria and considered "high risk" tenants, in addition they are rejected for reasons such as relatively minor nonviolent criminal records, prior evictions, poor credit histories, limited or no rental histories and outstanding debt. Families with children, people of color, non-English speakers, people who have experienced homelessness and people who were formerly incarcerated also face increased challenges to finding affordable housing. These renters are at increased risk of homelessness, unstable or unsafe housing situations, extreme rent burden and being asked to pay exorbitantly high security deposits.
Five years ago, case managers tasked with helping clients find housing had a group of landlords they could call regularly and access to tools for renters who were considered "higher risk." Today, that is no longer the case. In a nutshell: The housing market has changed dramatically over this time and the cost of housing has drastically increased, and incomes have not kept up. Market rate housing on the lower end of the pricing spectrum is limited and very competitive. Housing placement agencies and case managers are finding that strategies that used to work just a few years ago are no longer as effective. Even if a renter has a rental assistance voucher, if they can't pay for multiple applications or the security deposit, it may be several months before they can secure housing. This all contributes to lost individual savings, longer shelter stays, housing instability, increased trauma and lower utilization of public support systems like rental vouchers if families can't find a home.
Last summer, Meyer released a Request for Proposals for pilot and demonstration projects with potential for future scaling or replication that would increase low-income people's access to rental homes with private market landlords. Projects that proposed replicating an existing strategy to a new population or geographical community or significantly scaling an existing project were also encouraged. Meyer received 18 proposals from across the state requesting a total of $2,060,754. With a strong field of proposals, six projects were funded totaling $809,600 over two years.
These six grants wrap around Oregon, from the coast and southern regions to the central most parts of the state. Most of the proposals recommended for funding are aimed at supporting households exiting homelessness or families that are at high risk of homelessness. Each project actively leverages other resources, especially public funds like rental assistance vouchers. These projects are designed as proof of concepts of a missing element in current available housing support that is needed to effectively utilize public resources. We are confident that the selected proposals will complement efforts to address the housing crisis across Oregon.
Meyer's hope is that with more flexible and risk-tolerant funding, organizations can develop new or modified housing placement strategies to support low-income people to overcome housing barriers, enabling a family to lease a long-term rental home faster and reducing time spent in shelters or homeless.
Meyer awarded the following organizations through the 2018 Private Market Request for Proposals. These grantees will document the impact of their work and hope to demonstrate the effectiveness of these strategies for broader learning:
Hacienda CDC (For work in Multnomah County) $125,000 - To plan an equitable and inclusive community-based accessory dwelling unit (ADU) development and rental program structured to serve tenants at or below 60 percent Median Family Income (MFI) in the displacement-risk neighborhoods of Cully, Lents and Inner North/Northeast Portland.
Homes for Good (For work in Lane County) $150,000 - To expand the Move Up Initiative, Homes for Goods permanent supportive housing program, by adding a housing navigator and piloting a leasing bonus strategy for landlords housing 50 high-risk and high-barrier households.
NeighborImpact (For work in Crook, Deschutes and Jefferson counties) $150,000 - For piloting a debt-relief strategy for 60 high-barrier tenant households exiting homelessness.
Northwest Credit Union Foundation (For work in Clackamas, Multnomah, Washington and Yamhill counties) $149,600 - To develop a demonstration project of a low-cost security deposit loan program led by credit unions that can rapidly be scaled to meet the needs of 120-150 low-income households a year, in Clackamas, Multnomah, Washington and Yamhill counties.
Oregon Coast Community Action (For work in Coos, Curry and Douglas counties) $115,000 - For replication of Yamhill Community Action Partnership's (YCAP) landlord engagement and retention program to support 30 families receiving case management services who are exiting homelessness or unstably housed.
Yamhill Community Action Partnership (For work in Yamhill County) $120,000 - To scale YCAP's landlord engagement and retention program and add a debt relief strategy for households exiting homelessness, serving 123 high-barrier and extremely low-income tenant households.
We know that these grants will only address a fraction of the statewide need, if proven successful, but have potential to create game changing strategies for the entire housing industry.
Multnomah County Library has launched a new initiative to eliminate barriers to access and opportunity to better serve African and African American families living in Multnomah County.
A news release highlights Multnomah County Library’s initiative to strengthen connections with Black families:
This initiative aims to build momentum and capacity for the library to enact systemic changes that better serve Black families through community action research, a methodology that helps researchers work in partnership with community stakeholders to develop solutions to local problems.
Community action research will engage with African and African-American families to understand and address barriers and inequities related to kindergarten readiness and transition. Research has shown that Black children often face disparities in school readiness, which signal disparate educational, economic and social outcomes later in life.
Data and research collection are primary tools in ensuring equitable participation in education systems and improving alignment between communities and education institutions. Meyer's Equitable Education portfolio awarded a $148,000 two-year grant to support Multnomah County Library's efforts to transform its work and strengthen connections with African and African American communities.
Theresa Deibele, director of Meyer's Housing Opportunities portfolio and Kimberly A.C. Wilson, director of communications at Meyer, interviewed Louie Pitt Jr., director of government affairs for The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.
As the director of governmental affairs for The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Mr. Pitt is responsible for maintaining relationships with off-reservation governmental entities regarding the tribe and its interests and ensuring open communications.
Theresa Deibele:
Sovereignty is going to be a major theme of the Treaty Conference. What does it mean when we say that The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs is a sovereign nation?
Louie Pitt:
Of the three tribes, Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute, the Warm Springs and Wasco negotiated a treaty in 1855, and that negotiation has recognized the inherent sovereignty of the Warm Springs and Wasco tribes. Those two tribes have been their own entities, what lawyers call distinct political entities, not a minority but a distinct political entity, for thousands of years. The Creator put those two tribes on the river and all of the places that they've been. That's before the United States; that's before Oregon. That's what's called inherent sovereignty. We're not a creature of the U.S. Constitution either. It predates the Constitution but is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution under Commerce, and treaties are actually in the Constitution, too.
There's a lot of ignorance that exists in the United States about Indian Country, Indians, Native Americans, and what is a distinct political entity versus a minority. Who are these people and how does it work with the laws of the United States, federal, state, local, county and such. Anything that helps educate ourselves, No. 1, then, of course, our neighbors surrounding us, is really important and helps us do what the treaty, I think, was meant to do — which was to help protect and preserve our tribal way of life.
Theresa Deibele:
You mentioned the negotiations that led up to the Treaty of 1855. Could you tell us some more about those negotiations? What was given up in that process? What was gained from the tribe's perspective?
Louie Pitt:
The Warm Springs and Wasco tribes on the big river and the Paiute tribes up on the high desert plateau were living their own tribal way of life — a people with inherent sovereignty. Then the Warm Springs, Wasco and the Paiute people heard about the push westward by a new people. We definitely knew that times were changing and that there were prophets that talked about this new people coming over, that they were going to be different and that they were going to be wanting our land.
We had our own communication system about what happened on the Plains. Really aggressive military action against a really powerful people of the Plains and, also, I think we knew there were numbers [of folks] coming, too. We were wondering how this was going to happen because the Creator had given us these lands and had successfully provided for us — the lands, for thousands of years. When we saw people coming in, pre-treaty, they weren't as respectful as we had hoped they would be. There were trespassers and people setting up land here and there within our — what's called the ceded area. Treaty negotiations started upriver with (Washington Territorial Gov. Isaac) Stevens negotiating for the United States with Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce and the Walla Walla tribes. We heard what happened up there, so we were preparing downriver for negotiations. There were a number of pre-meetings to the treaty conference to figure out, "How is this going to work?"
We had a few English speakers who could understand, but very few of them were prepped for the tremendous communications challenge. Three days of negotiations, Gen. (Joel) Palmer, like Stevens in earlier treaties, representing the United States, showed up in the mid-Columbia area. His whole goal was to clear title to the land. Way back when early contact on the East Coast started, lawyers declared that Indians were subhuman, they only occupied the land, they didn't own the land. We differ with that today.
The Creator gave us those lands, and we've been on those lands. Whatever ownership is, if it is that anybody owns land, it was us for thousands of years. That gives an example of the difference in language, that the challenge was to negotiate a clear title to 10 million acres of land that they said, "We occupied and had sole exclusive authority over." It went back and forth. You had a lot of bands, different bands within tribes, that had different types of leadership. It all had to be discussed, and some tribal people had what they call wild oratory or wild eloquence. It must have been pretty wonderful to hear them talk about mixing who we were for thousands of years, with the challenges we were having at that time, that day, and looking to the future. "How are we going to preserve our Indian way of life?" There was a lot of back and forth and trying to figure that out. "How do you give up land?" "How do you own land?"
The negotiations went on, and probably some of the less desirable lands were decided for the Warm Springs and Wasco Tribes. That's the current land of those tribes now, 640,000 acres. One of the amazing things that happened was the tribes must have been in a pretty strong position. We reserved rights, we didn't have them given to us by the United States, but we reserved them. We brought these rights to the table, and that is the nature of inherent sovereignty. The United States didn't give us those rights. We had those rights previous to the United States and the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
We held on to those, we reserved the rights to fish, hunt, gather roots and berries, and all the other off-reservation rights we had at the time of the treaty. That's the major thing that is different than a lot of other treaties. There are just a couple of tribes that have clear treaty language for off-reservation rights. Warm Springs is one of the four Columbia River treaty tribes. There are just a couple of other tribes with off-reservation rights. That was something that was kept. We didn't give that up; we kept it. We did give up authority to manage the lands the way that we think they should be managed. Fifty percent of that 10 million acres right now is managed and owned by the United States in our ceded area. We ceded to the United States 10 million acres. What about that other 50 percent? What about that other 5 million acres? How do we go about that?
I asked that question to myself. How do we protect our way of life? Is our way of life important as Indian people to the roots? To gather berries, to gather medicine, to gather materials, and fish and hunt? Well, yes it is. We need to figure out a way to work with the private or claimed lands. It's in the Treaty of 1855. If you read the treaty, we have these rights clearly on unclaimed land.
That's the federal lands, but what about the arguably claimed lands? The county, the state, the private property? What do we do about those? One of the things we do is go to Salem, talk to the Legislature about how to better protect certain things that are related to our treaty, like the fish. Fish need water, they need it in quantity, they need cold water and they need it at the right time of year. We work and use our treaty to get us to the table, number 1; that's what the treaty does, it brings us to the table. We are then able to negotiate.
We gave up a lot of management authority, and we have to sit at the table for the planning process of federal agencies. It's pretty long, complex and onerous. But if you hang in there, you do get more protection for your way of life. We can count so many partnerings with council, to use that to help protect elements of our treaty rights, everything from huckleberries, to roots, to deer, elk, habitat and fish, too.
We're able to partner all that. Before we had sole authority to take care of everything; now we have to partner with our folks that manage the resources off the reservation. We have to figure out what their process is, and we can go about suing them for treaty rights and such if it would help bring us to the table. Anytime you go to a court you take your chances, and in Oregon and Washington, the federal courts saw that the answer wasn't in beating your heads against each other and fighting all the time. We needed to figure out a better way of doing business so the federal court ordered the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho to work with the treaty tribes to figure out a better way of doing business.
Before we were the exclusive authority. To control the quality of the environment, too, is something we gave up. We're very dependent upon tribal internal discipline and local respect of taking care of the earth, the waters and the air. Today, there are people everywhere, every inch of our ceded land is being utilized, or so-called not being wasted. They viewed our way of life as one that wastes resources. John Locke, way back when, said, "These people aren't civilized. They let the land be wasted." But that "wasted" approach, we utilized that for thousands of years. You can't say it didn't work. It worked very well for us.
The gains and the losses create a lot of social and legal friction with the state. Here we have the state of Oregon that fought against us and Washington, too, fought against Puget Sound-area fishing rights. If you believe you have these rights, you're going to have to fight for them. We did, and we won. It took a while, and still today we have folks who have no idea about who we are and what rights we have. They think we got everything from the federal government. No, it's the other way around. We gave the federal government 10 million acres. We gave the authority to own the land. We gave the air and the water.
Theresa Deibele:
Yeah, you certainly did, and it's probably a misnomer to say what you gained here because as you pointed out it's really what you reserved of the rights you already had. Well said.
Louie Pitt:
If you look at, I think it's (chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Oregon Robert C.) Belloni's case, the court case that I have taped up to my wall here. "I did not grant the Indians anything. They possessed the right to fish for thousands of years. The Treaty of 1855 simply reserves to the Indians the rights which they already possessed. They traded title to most of the lands in the Northwest in return for their fishing rights. The tribes negotiated long and hard not to be dispossessed of those rights." That's from the 1969 court case, Judge Robert Belloni, not very recent, but very important.
Theresa Deibele:
You spoke about how treaty rights get you to the table. More generally, could you talk about how treaty rights and obligations compare with other rights that might be granted from city, state or federal governments? How did treaty rights differ?
Louie Pitt:
It's a really complicated thing. I was reading court cases, and it didn't get any clearer; if anything, it got more cloudy. Of all people, Supreme Court Justice (Clarence) Thomas was the one who brought some things out. The ending phrase was, "The Federal Indian Policy is, to say the least, schizophrenic." I kind of got a kick out of that. No wonder I've been having trouble with that all these years.
In discussions with some of my Canadian tribal friends, they said (they were) impressed with what we were doing off reservation, and what we were doing with the gorge, working with six counties, 13 urban areas and the U.S. Forest Service. Because they have to pretty much sue or go to the Legislature to get a special bill to do anything that protects their way. In the United States, we can use the treaty to get us to the table, and it does require us having an all-point pressure, or a full court press as they call it in basketball.
We let the senators and representatives know that we are going to be focusing in on a certain area of who we are and we ask them help us do that. Then we start focusing in on the land and water managers, leading with our treaty. We have to use contemporary organizational laws of our tribe. Tribes now are corporate entities, too. A confederacy of three tribes, Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute, and we get Tribal Council to sign a letter to a federal person, a manager, that we believe we have rights per our treaty.
For Warm Springs and Wasco, there's also a treaty of 1865 — the Huntington Treaty — which told tribes,"You gave up your right to leave the reservation, you gave up your right to hunt and fish." What the heck is that all about? The tribes had vehemently stood up and said, "Heck no," to that, and I'll be darned if that 1865 Treaty isn't still on the books.
During the Treaty Conference, we're going to have a portion dedicated to educating people about the 1865 Treaty. That it is our duty as American citizens and it is our duty as tribal members of Warm Springs to correct a major wrong in this nation: that's the Treaty of 1865. It needs to be nullified because the treaty that is in effect is the Treaty of 1855, The Middle Oregon Treaty of 1855.
There are three sovereigns in America: There's the feds, there's the state and there's the tribes. It's always pushing back and forth between those three entities. The feds push the states, the states push back, and the tribes, well, the tribes kind of came late because we didn't have a war chest to fight for our way of life until after we were able to build up our economy on reservations during the '50s, '60s and '70s. We pretty much had to take what we were given, and then through 1968-69, we sued the United States and the state of Oregon to clarify the rights in the treaty, not gain rights.
The treaty is a major part of helping us protect our way of life, and it's the law.
Theresa Deibele:
With a name like the Treaty of 1855, the general public may perceive the treaty to be an outdated document. But the way you're describing it is that it continues to be a living document. It continues to guide the lives of the people today. Could you describe more how that feels like a living document for the tribe?
Louie Pitt:
Every Sunday when we thank the Creator for being Indian, and the water, fish, deer, roots, berries and water again, it's very much a living part of us to be Indian. We know that when we turn around to see who our friends are, one of our biggest friends is a written piece of paper. That's the treaty. It puts in writing, it challenges the good name of the United States of America and the middle Oregon tribes of Wasco and Warm Springs. If it's an out-of-date, old document, there's another one we could maybe throw out, too: It's called the U.S. Constitution, that's an old document. Let's throw that out and see how it works. That is also a living document.
The experiment known as the United States, all the people who were trying to get to their own land, to have religious freedom, and not have to fight for their way of life every single day against the king, or czar, or the queen, or whoever is the chief of the people. It's really powerful. The United States is still a wonderful experiment. I call it an experiment because it's not over with yet. It's a young country. Again, we're proud of being here for thousands of years, as Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute. The United States isn't even in its teenage years, as far as I'm concerned.
When I went to Salem one time on a Tribal Council meeting with Barbara Roberts, Gov. Roberts at that time, Tribal Council said, "Okay Louie, do your thing." I was the new government affairs guy. Like my dad told me, "I don't know where these state people get off because they're the junior government. Our government's been here thousands of years, and theirs has just been here since Valentine's Day 1859." We have a lot of pride in where we are. We declared ourselves to be one of the senior governments in Oregon.
An important subject for Indian people is this dynamic of the old; how do we keep values that got us here and moving into the future? Richard Trudell, who is one of our great attorneys and a great teacher, says, "Proud yesterdays are a valued possession, but progressive todays and tomorrows are the focus of modern tribal leaders." For us, how do we do this? How do we as Indian people do this? It was these tribal values that we were close to the land, and the waters, and their rhythms, and all of the gifts that we had. We also have what's called a Declaration of Sovereignty you need to look at. Our way of life is an important part of that.
We understood that we were here as a major gift from the Creator, and we appreciate that. We've been in the same place for thousands of years. Compare that to the average American. Think of yourself, are you from where you are now? Where did you go to school? Where were you born? Where do you spend your winters? Americans don't have a place. We can go back thousands of years, and it's still just right over there, right up the river.
So, yes, the old document, the U.S. Constitution, there were a lot of treaties made as old documents. All along the East Coast, there were treaties between tribes until a lot of disease took over, some brutality by non-Indians, wars happened between the colonial people and the territorial people, then finally the state people versus the tribes, and such. Treaties were a written document to, so called, peaceably acquire lands.
I think in Oregon, too. Territorial Oregonians tried to move the tribes from the Willamette Valley over to the Warm Springs reservation. No, no, that won't work. How did we stay strong here? Well, we didn't trust anybody. We grouped up and let them know that we were a serious force to be dealt with one way or the other, and pretty much all of those tribes in the Willamette Valley were pretty much torn apart every which way you can. It's pretty sad, they got terminated, and we didn't. I think it was mainly because of our working together, and our tribalism, and being out of the way.
In the Middle Oregon Treaty of 1855 a negotiated legal right was the product. We need to educate people on the legal place that we stand and their understanding of who we are. It's not only the good hearts of fellow American citizens but treaty law that we are here today.
Theresa Deibele:
We understand that six pages of the original Treaty of 1855 are on loan from the National Archives and will be on display at the Museum at Warm Springs in October. What significance does this hold for the people to have those original documents there?
Louie Pitt:
To make the Middle Oregon Treaty of 1855 more real. We've heard nothing but stories, there's no pictures. I'm looking for a map with an X signed on it, and a Joe Palmer signature on the map and thumbprints from some of the tribal Indians, Wasco and Warm Springs signers. The treaty is for real. Tribal members can pick up a copy of the treaty, and see that, yes, it is a real thing that really happened. Thank goodness it did, and it just makes it more real for us.
It is a tool to help us and help protect our way of life.
Here's a right that was written down on paper, and we're living it. It's really neat that I'm living the dreams of those treaty signers. I hope to be able to pass on the same dream to my sons and daughters. To me, they got a chance to grow up tribal and share the home education they received about the treaty. It's just part of our family. Then the Indian way of life, which is just living it, taking it easy, trying to be forgiving of our ignoramus neighbors and the American dream. We have our dream, too, that's a part of that.
Kimberly Wilson:
I wanted to follow up on your last answer about the display of the documents there through October. Are your children going to be coming at some point?
Louie Pitt:
I sure hope so. I took a chance, the museum had a life achievement award and I had two of my children introduce me. They were amazed at how many diverse people I am in contact with. I used to drag them around to meetings when they were little guys. They were known as the best behaved kids in the meeting room. It wasn't until maybe about 10 years ago that they both started integrating the lessons they learned. I didn't tell them what to learn, I just did it the Indian way, whether you like it or not, you're going to see, you're going to learn by seeing and hearing, and occasionally feeling, too.
It was a nice occurrence that, they're good people and they know a lot about Indian Country, and they're very respectful of the lands and waters. They'll do very well wherever they are. They'll be in the minority, working on the tribal viewpoint of things, but that's okay. That's what we need because America is still pushing really hard everywhere it can, and it's like any city that's jam-packed, how are we going to do this? Before it gets too much worse, we need to figure out that there are some places that really do need to be protected for their function to our whole way of life. We set aside wildernesses because of their beauty, but they also have a function to the circle of life. They also got to listen to a lot of my friends here, ecologists and wildlife biologists and co-workers, too. Anyway, they were pretty well advanced into their own tribal environmentalism and ecologism. Everything has a function, everything has its place. I'm very proud of them.
I've got two other kids. My oldest is in Baker City and my youngest is working at Skamania Lodge and he's not quite sure what he wants to do. He reminds me of somebody … I think about the same age. It's a different world when you're responsible for somebody; "My gosh, what do I teach these guys? What do I know?"
In Warm Springs there's a saying, Tiichám, that means the earth or land. But you have to be a part of the Indian way of life for about 30 years before you figure out what it's all about. Tiichám, is not just about the earth. It's a whole process of accepting Tiichám as a gift, then turning around and gifting it to your children. "This is yours. This is the gift of Tiichám. I give to you." It's a gift. It's taken me 30 years to figure that out. It was just a word at one time. Now I know that it is also a big responsibility.
The front entrance to The Museum At Warm Springs, located in the homeland of the Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute Native American Tribes, which stretches from the top of the Cascade Mountains to the banks of the Deschutes River.
Systems change. If you work in the social sector, you probably hear this term all the time — including from Meyer. Indeed, you'll see it mentioned throughout information about our Annual Funding Opportunity. In the Building Community portfolio, we are often asked some version of this question: "With all this focus on systems change, will you still fund direct services?" The short answer is "Yes, some." But that doesn't make for much of a blog, so let's dive deeper.
Yes, the Building Community portfolio does fund some direct services that help priority populations meet their social, nutritional, legal, health, employment and other basic needs. We don't see direct services as opposite of systems change; they can absolutely contribute! On the other hand, well-intended services that are designed in isolation could end up perpetuating the very conditions they're meant to address. Context is key. Systemic context. And that's why you'll hear us say that we're interested in direct services that are grounded by a systems analysis and tied to systems change.
We've seen this take shape in many ways among grantees that we work with, from small organizations to large ones. Rest assured, it doesn't always mean policy advocacy in Salem. (But that's great, too.)
Before getting into examples, let me pause to note that the "systems" we're referring to here, in the broadest sense, are complex networks of social, economic, legal and institutional forces that reinforce each other to sustain the concentration of power and resources for some groups over others. Upending these systems is multi-layered, long-game, collective work; no one organization has the full solution. But many organizations have part of the solution, and that's what we're looking for when we review applications.
For direct service providers, our first question is: How do you understand the problem or need that you seek to address? Why does the need exist and why is it unaddressed (or insufficiently so) for a particular population? If you're treating urgent symptoms, what conditions are creating them? What are the root causes? How are racism, classism or other types of oppression operating through policies or practices that result in inequitable outcomes? Importantly, how has the service population been directly involved in shaping your understanding? All of this understanding — the organization's analysis — should be evident in its approach.
Here are just a few examples of how we've seen this show up.
North by Northeast Community Health Center is a culturally specific organization that focuses exclusively on improving health outcomes for Portland's African American community by providing care and services that address chronic conditions disproportionately impacting this population.
Red Lodge Transition Services is a Native-led organization that provides housing in Clackamas County for Native women (from around the state) who are releasing from jail, prison or treatment — the only culturally specific service of this kind in Oregon. By securing public funding (to complement grassroots fundraising), Red Lodge has influenced the allocation of resources to Native communities that are disproportionately negatively impacted by the criminal justice system.
The Next Door provides a range of social services to families living on low incomes in the mid Columbia River Gorge, and it offers culturally specific services through Nuestra Comunidad Sana to support the Latino community. NCS programming evolves in response to community and includes support for civic engagement so that Latino/Latina community members can strengthen their ability to navigate and influence local systems that impact their lives (e.g., transportation board).
The Farmworker Service Center in Woodburn is part of the CAPACES network of organizations that share a unified theory of change and each work on different aspects of building a collaborative movement for change. For example, clients who come to the service center for help with immigration paperwork may also be referred to CAPACES Leadership Institute to build civic engagement skills.
Volunteers in Medicine Clinic of the Cascades provides care for the medically uninsured in and around Bend, Oregon, with an approach that includes differentiated, culturally responsive techniques. The clinic's executive director serves on the Central Oregon Health Council, where some regional resource allocation decisions are made.
In addition to providing food and other services, the Oregon Food Bank works on addressing underlying causes of food insecurity by engaging in policy advocacy related to housing and living wages.
The Northwest Workers' Justice Project provides direct legal services to immigrant, temporary and low-wage workers. Through its work with the Oregon Coalition to Stop Wage Theft, NWJP also engages in statewide policy advocacy related to worker rights and protections.
What all these groups share, in addition to understanding systems driving the need for their work, is that they are connected with other organizations and institutions around them. None of them works in isolation; they know how their services fit into the local or regional ecosystem. Understanding community-level context is another aspect of being tied into systems change — i.e., if you are working on one part of the solution, who else around you is working on other parts?
The examples shared here are by no means exhaustive, but they demonstrate that, yes, the Building Community portfolio does fund some direct services. We look for providers who envision a world in which their services are no longer necessary, grounding their approach to get there and taking reasonable steps in that direction.
We're excited to partner with organizations that are occupying this important space.
— Erin
Volunteers and staff at North by Northeast Community Health Center’s community health fair, "Health on the Corner” | Photo provided by Northeast Community Health Clinic
“A journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do, what you will find, nor what you find will do to you.” — James Baldwin
In 2017, Meyer received numerous proposals from organizations seeking to increase equitable outcomes by including diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in their missions, diversifying staff and leadership, providing DEI training, or creating an equity lens through which to filter policies and deliver programming.
We know that embarking on a DEI journey can be an incredible growth period for an organization, but the destructive history of oppression and ongoing persistent injustices are big and personal, which can make stepping onto this path really scary! The 2017 Race to Lead report published by the Building Movement Project reported results from a survey and interviews conducted with more than 4,000 nonprofit staff, capacity builders and funders around the United States. One finding indicated that 48 percent of people of color and 39 percent of whites agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement “nonprofits trying to address race and racial equity in their organizations often create tensions they are not equipped to resolve.”
This statistic made me curious. What does it take to be “equipped” for a journey toward diversity, equity and inclusion? Are there common pitfalls that we can anticipate? What are the “tensions” that show up and how can we address them effectively? To reflect on these questions, I turned to leaders I know who have done this work from different vantage points: Jeana Frazzini, former director of Basic Rights Oregon; Cliff Jones, a Portland-based DEI consultant of more than 30 years; and Dr. Gail Christopher, who has designed racial equity and healing work for decades and most recently led the development of Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation implementation and guidance at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
In a series of blog posts, I’ll share what I heard from each of these leaders about organizational readiness for DEI. We’ll hear about practical strategies, success and challenges, and the personal impact that the DEI journey has had on them. Through this process, I’ve learned so much from these colleagues through their candor, courage and their willingness to share - and about what might be the true costs of integrating DEI into an organization’s work. My hope is that, while each experience is different, you will also be able to use the wisdom from these leaders for your own organizational and personal journeys.
Jeana Frazzini served in board and staff leadership roles at Basic Rights Oregon (BRO) from 2000 to 2016, including eight years as executive director. During that time, BRO was tackling big issues like marriage equality; a statewide nondiscrimination policy; inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) students in schools; and a shift in the lesbian, gay and bisexual community to be inclusive of people who are transgender.
As a movement, the LGBTQ community has struggled with marginalization and exclusion of LGBTQ people of color, despite overwhelming evidence that LGBTQ people of color experience some of the most inequitable outcomes related to health, employment and poverty due to the compounded impacts of racism and heterosexism. Jeana, a white woman, recognized that Basic Rights Oregon was not meeting their mission of serving and including all LGBTQ Oregonians in their movement building and advocacy work. With the support and leadership of her board of directors and staff, BRO embarked on their DEI journey in 2005 and intensified it over the next five years. The work is ongoing. (BRO’s leadership benefited from significant technical assistance and support from Western States Center throughout this process.)
Jeana and I sat down over breakfast to talk about what she and BRO learned about DEI and organizational readiness (a meaty topic, with food to match!).
Basic Rights Oregon’s journey
For Jeana, engaging in DEI work meant not starting with something like diversifying the board and staff and getting some training.
“It was important to line people up on the what and why,” she said. “The what was the intention and it was explicit: to become an anti-racist organization. The why was more a process of discovery, achieved by getting some challenging feedback from people of color in the community who shared that Basic Rights Oregon was not meaningfully engaging — and often tokenizing — LGBTQ people of color and that BRO’s inability to address race issues meant that their opposition was able to advance discriminatory policies, including the 2004 constitutional amendment defining marriage as between ‘one man and one woman.’”
As hard as the feedback was, it was meaningful and honest, and it helped BRO leadership more deeply recognize that the organization had a problem it needed to address.
With buy-in on the what and why, the organization began to assess the scope and scale of the issue and identify areas of growth. It was at this point that they put a training plan in place to more directly address real-time training needs and aligne staff and board with basic terms, language and understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion. That created a shared foundation from which to move forward.
“Even with this ‘prework,’” Jeana said, “not everyone had the same vision of what the end result will look like or where the ‘end’ is. The process is like a series of waves.”
In Jeana’s example, the bottom of the wave could be the need to increase staff diversity. But, she said, people shouldn’t cut corners to get to the “crest” by simply recruiting and hiring diverse staff, where nothing has changed but the diversity quotient. The old ways have to change, and the next trough will be trying to figure out why diverse hires are not retained and what are the barriers that are keeping the old ways in place.
Lessons learned about equipping the journey
Basic Rights Oregon’s vision was to transform the organization.
But along the way, Jeana, the board and staff quickly discovered that this work is more than that.
“Leaders need to recognize that this is not only about organizational transformation but individual transformation,” she said, “and then support people to take a personal journey as well as an organizational one.”
Some things that helped BRO navigate and balance personal and organizational needs included establishing principles and practices that went beyond the usual ground rules for group process and organizational planning:
Create a “brave” space, not just a safe space. This ground rule allowed people to step further into risk-taking.
If the organization is large enough, have a cross-program, cross-positional “Transformation Committee,” charged with being a place where people can bring questions, ideas, feedback and concerns.
Don’t lose sight of the environment in which we are operating. Recognize that our organizations and we as individuals are part of a larger system of inequality that is continually reinforced in our society into everything we do.
Explicitly identify the expectation that things will get emotional, and that’s OK. In dismantling systems, it can be really painful for people to become conscious of their own biases. This is not business as usual. You can’t continue to do the same things and except the same results.
This is long-term work, but without a way to measure progress and accountability, staff may feel that it’s a waste of time or just another exercise to “check the DEI box but doesn’t result in meaningful change.” Once shared goals are established, spend time collectively identifying a set of benchmarks to measure progress to your goals. A map of the journey can also help people see that their own priorities have a place on the journey, even if it’s farther off.
Examples of benchmarks Basic Rights Oregon established included having all staff and board go through training within a certain amount of time, committing paid staff time to the work, setting benchmarks for meetings with leaders of color, and creating supports for those meetings such as work plans and conversation guides.
At the same time, hold the process loosely enough so it develops as it needs to develop, while maintaining accountability and understanding of what progress looks like.
Be mindful of the leadership in the room, about how much space leaders take up, and be a role model. As a leader you have a dual role: You are managing your own emotions and find your own counselors outside the room.
Include support for staff, such as coaching and space for people of color to be together and for your white staff to do the work they need to do separately.
If you are working with both staff and board, keep in mind that the staff are together every day, working out issues and may outpace the board’s ability to do the same.
I asked Jeana if there was anything she would do differently now that she’s had this experience at Basic Rights Oregon.
“BRO had a typical policy that employees should bring concerns to their supervisors in the course of regular check-ins,” Jeana said. ”But because conversations about race can be so difficult, it would be good to establish a shared approach and specific policies to address concerns. One option that comes to mind is to bring on a mediator who builds trust across the team and can be called upon as conflict comes up.
“Personally, I would have liked to do more work early on to understand white supremacy and white privilege. Our process wasn’t inclusive enough about white people doing work to understand our history and ongoing role in upholding these systems. I recently listened to the ‘Scene on Radio’ podcast, which includes a series called ‘Seeing White.’ The series illuminated the work that white people need to do to understand the construct of whiteness.”
Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion
I wondered what it meant for Basic Rights Oregon to be committed to this work. Jeana shared that the commitment evolved over time.
“Early on we had a general idea that we had a responsibility as an organization to meet the needs of all queer and trans people in Oregon — including people of color,” she said. “As we did the work, the commitment became operationalized through investing in the leadership of people of color in our organization and in our programming, which meant how we allocated resources and how staff were supported to do their work. Commitment goes back to getting clear about what your values are — the commitment and values will be tested in the context in which we work: white supremacist culture.”
One example, Jeana said, would be turning down funding when funder values don’t align.
“For every donor or volunteer who didn’t understand, 10 other donors or volunteers stepped up,” she added. “So fears about losing funding are totally unfounded, in my experience. We had hard conversations with donors and funders and practiced with role plays. Again this is where humility comes in — knowing ahead of time you don’t have all the answers.”
I asked Jeana about surprises along the way.
“We had this rich experience internally, then we had to figure out how to operationalize our plans and discover how to work this in — it’s so important to figure out how people can see and feel it becoming real,” she said. “We had a process to build work plans. On every person’s work plan there was a place to ask, ‘What are your racial justice goals?’
“There were a lot of surprises along the lines of unexpected benefits of the process. The way in which it deepened relationships across teams. We had a very pleasant surprise in the way the work expanded the organization and opened BRO up to funding, opportunities for partnerships, volunteer activism/engagement.” For Jeana personally? “Because the process required difficult conversations, I surprised myself in my capacity for courage,” she said
I wondered if there was one thing Jeana wishes all nonprofit leaders knew as they step onto the DEI path?
She thought for a moment.
“This is the work — this isn’t a distraction from the work, or really even optional, particularly in this moment,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter what issue area, geography or constituency that your organization prioritizes. We had a realization that our view of what was possible, necessary or needed was so limited by our lack of organizational diversity. Just the way we thought about what was needed in the community was based on such limited information and was reflected in our policies. Our work then became so much richer.”
I’m so grateful to Jeana and to Basic Rights Oregon’s current co-directors, Nancy Haque and Amy Herzfeld-Copple, for allowing us to share BRO’s DEI journey!
Next time, I’ll share a conversation with consultant Cliff Jones, who has helped organizations establish strong DEI principles and practices for more than 30 years.
