Ground broke this spring on a homeless village in North Portland, a controversial idea aimed at providing homes to those who might otherwise live on the streets.
The concept, which is gaining traction in Oregon, got a boost last year from Meyer's Affordable Housing Initiative:
"I think there's a widespread sense that if we keep doing what we've been doing, we're never going to meet more than a sliver of need," said (Michael) Parkhurst, program officer for the Meyer Memorial Trust, who helps lead the trust's $15 million, five-year Affordable Housing Initiative.
Last year, the Meyer trust gave Eugene's Square One Villages $148,200 to support an unconventional housing alternative: a homeless village. Emerald Village, which broke ground in May, is a permanent, cooperatively owned settlement. Each of its 22 tiny houses, ranging from 160 to 280 square feet of living space, will have its own kitchenette and bathroom and will rent for $250 to $350 per month. Construction on the village began in May.
"If you'd have asked me a few years ago, would Meyer Memorial Trust be putting money into that, I'd have been skeptical," Parkhurst says.
Check out the Portland Tribune's full story, by Thacher Schmid, here.
Michael Parkhurst, program officer for Meyer Memorial Trust's Affordable Housing Initiative, says we need more models, including homeless villages like the Kenton Women's Village shown here. Photo by Jaime Valdez
At first glance, Oregon’s Willamette River and the Río Laja in the Mexican state of Guanajuato look starkly different.
The two rivers’ mouths are 2,600 miles apart. And while the Willamette Valley is verdant and rainy, the Laja runs through semi-arid lands with few trees. Salmon, so central to the Oregonian ethos, aren’t found there.
Though their climate and ecology may differ, six restoration experts from Guanajuato visited Oregon this month to explore a commonality between two places: Water and the communities it connects.
“Water is the base element for all ecosystems,” said Mario Hernández Peña, director of the botanical garden and nature preserve El Charco del Ingenio, who traveled to Oregon as part of the June 2017 exchange. “No matter where in the world you are, it’s a common resource.”
The visit was the latest highlight of an international partnership the two basins launched in 2015 as part of the Willamette community’s receipt of the 2012 Thiess International Riverprize. The award, which recognizes exemplary efforts in river protection and restoration, includes an opportunity to collaborate with a watershed outside the prize winner's home country in an exchange program known as Twinning. Meyer's Willamette River Initiative stewards the project on behalf of the basin's restoration community.
“It’s so valuable to be able to talk, to connect, and to learn from our international peers about how they approach similar watershed conservation challenges in a different social and environmental context,” said Tara Davis, coordinator of the Twinning project.
Many of the Willamette’s biggest watershed health challenges are also present in the Laja. Restoration practitioners in both basins are working to improve water quality, increase migratory bird habitat, foster community engagement and restore ecological function to former gravel mines. And both basins face competing priorities for how water is managed and allocated.
The Twinning project is designed to encourage dialogue about how to tackle those challenges through repeated visits to one another’s home turf. But just as importantly, the project has yielded fruitful relationships between people with a common interest in protecting water in the Willamette Basin and Mexico, a country with strong connections to Oregon.
One-in-eight Oregonians identify as Latino, many of them with Mexican heritage. The Willamette Basin includes some of Oregon’s largest and fastest-growing Latino communities.
“At a time when the public relationship with Mexico is framed in terms of division and exclusion, a project that focuses on building collaborative relationships between conservation professionals from both countries is particularly meaningful,” said Allison Hensey, director of the Willamette River Initiative.
Already, the Twinning partnership has revealed promising collaboration opportunities.
Recognizing that some migratory bird species spend time in both watersheds, partners from the Willamette and Laja have teamed up to explore opportunities to monitor bird populations and use the data to prioritize habitat restoration.
Participants in the June exchange hoped to take the Twinning partnership a step further, leaving with inspiration for increased collaboration in the Rio Laja watershed and an idea for a future project the two basins could tackle together. It didn’t take long for a theme to emerge.
As exchange partners traveled up and down the Willamette River touring projects and meeting with partners, the conversation always came back to people.
“How do you get the public to care about restoration when you’re working in such an urban environment?” Laja partner Javier Vega Ruiz asked as the group toured Talking Water Gardens, a wetland restoration and water treatment project in Albany.
Willamette partners shared a number of techniques, such as hosting school students for on-site science lessons and designing public spaces into restoration plans, but acknowledged community engagement is a challenge in the Willamette, too.
Vega Ruiz’s question spurred others as the two sides sought to learn from one another.
How can conservation workers be better advocates for the communities hit hardest by environmental threats, particularly low-income people and racial minorities? What are the best examples of restoration work that improves ecological conditions while creating beautiful, useful community spaces? And what can we do now to shape the next generation of environmental stewards?
For Heather Medina Sauceda, a board member for the Calapooia Watershed Council who often works within Oregon’s Latino community, the exchange trip itself became an exercise in the power of human connection. Medina worked with Mario Magaña Álvarez, an Oregon State University 4-H outreach specialist to underserved communities, to bring several of Magaña Álvarez’s Latino students along for a day of the exchange.
The pair, who are both Latino, hoped exposure to Mexican leaders in science and conservation would help the teens imagine themselves in a career field that, in America, is still predominantly white.
“It’s powerful to see leaders who look like you,” Medina Sauceda said.
The exchange also held personal significance for Medina Sauceda. Born in Michigan, she grew up with a love for the outdoors that led to a career in agricultural conservation. She had never associated her career choice with the farming culture of her heritage, but interacting with the Laja visitors revealed a profound link between the two.
“I might not have realized in college why I was drawn” to conservation work, she said. “To have that tie with this group coming up from Guanajuato made me feel like it’s something deep down inside; that it has to do with that cultural connection.”
By week’s end, representatives from the two basins saw a partnership opportunity in their shared ambition to connect people through the rivers that sustain them. The migratory bird group has begun discussing ways to involve the community in its bird monitoring efforts. Other Willamette and Laja partners hope to work together on youth engagement initiatives. They are exploring the possibility of sharing environmental curriculum for students in Mexico and Oregon or launching an exchange program that pairs students from each watershed on a scientific project.
The conversation is just getting started, Medina Sauceda said, but “there’s a lot of potential for the future.”
Until eight months ago, 16-year-old Ayanna Beaudoin had never touched a fishing pole. She’d never camped. With few exceptions, she rarely left the Portland area.
But over a weekend in May, Beaudoin awoke in a tent under the towering conifers of Willamette National Forest, and by 10 a.m. she was wading knee-deep into the rushing spring waters of the Middle Fork Willamette River, 140 miles from home and light-years from the day-to-day stresses of urban teenage life.
She was among 14 teens who had come to this river on a trip organized by Soul River Inc., a Portland-based nonprofit that connects veterans and urban youths with experiences in nature designed to nurture environmental and community leaders. Most of the youths on this trip were Portland-area residents whose race, socioeconomic status, or other life circumstances can leave them at a disadvantage to their peers.
Ostensibly, they were here to fish. Over three days on the Middle Fork, they would learn to tie a fly and properly cast a line and how to identify fish species. But Beaudoin had a simpler, more profound explanation for the trip’s purpose.
“Creating a family,” she said. “Everyone here is super encouraging and positive. That’s kind of what family is supposed to be.”
Finding ‘Soul River’
That’s exactly the experience Chad Brown aims to provide the kids in his program.
Fishing and outdoor experiences are Soul River’s hook, he said, but the core goal of every outing is to create an environment that encourages personal growth among the youths. He calls it finding their soul river.
“When you can understand what that is,” Brown says, “that becomes your special place that can help you build a stepping stone in coping with the life challenges that come before you.”
The trips, which Brown dubs “deployments,” are central to Soul River’s mission and deeply personal for Brown.
A U.S. Navy veteran whose four years of service included deployments to the Gulf War and Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, Brown emerged from duty with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. When his trauma pushed Brown to the brink of suicide, fly-fishing became the coping mechanism that pulled him back.
He founded Soul River in 2013 to share his belief in the power of rivers to heal and transform, particularly with underserved urban youths who might lack the means to access Oregon’s wild places.
“The gear can be expensive. Transport to the river can be expensive. It’s time-consuming,” Brown said. “You don’t find a lot of blue-collar folks who can commit to all that. Mom and Dad are working hard. They don’t have time to buy into that lifestyle.”
National surveys of outdoor recreation participants indicate the community skews older, whiter and wealthier. A 2014 report from the Outdoor Foundation found 40 percent of people who recreate outdoors have a household income of $75,000 or more. Although minorities make up more than a third of the U.S. population, they represent only a fifth of visitors to national parks, according to National Park Service survey figures released in 2011. A survey of U.S. Forest Service visitors from 2008 to 2012 found even starker underrepresentation: Ninety-five percent were white.
Since launching Soul River, Brown has transported youths to the far-flung reaches of Oregon and even to the Arctic Circle. Combat veterans serve as their guides and mentors.
On the deployments, the kids learn practical outdoor and survival skills and get lessons on how to be stewards of the land. They’re given opportunities to lead their peers and expected to take responsibility for the duties inherent in keeping camp. And perhaps more importantly, they’re given the time, space and encouragement to learn about themselves.
“What makes fishing so special is that it welcomes an opportunity to learn about science, to learn about art, history, culture, yourself,” Brown said. “The river connects to everything.”
Knowing the Willamette
This time, part of the curriculum would include a comprehensive primer on the Willamette, a well-known but oft-misunderstood river.
Once a dumping ground for industrial waste and municipal sewage, the river of today is clean enough to swim in, fish in and use as a drinking water source. Yet its polluted legacy continues to stoke fears that prevent some Oregonians from connecting with the watershed in their own backyards.
With support from Meyer, Brown used this fishing trip as an opportunity to teach the youths something new about their home watershed by arranging for Willamette River conservation leaders to speak each night.
Gabe Sheoships, education director with the Friends of Tryon Creek and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, detailed the river’s historic importance among Oregon’s tribes. He taught the campers about the Willamette’s First Foods — the salmon, lamprey, wapato and other foods that have sustained tribal people for eons — and shared techniques for cooking them.
Scott Youngblood, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department’s Willamette River Greenway ranger, taught them that the river is 187 miles long and that 13 dams plug its tributaries. He detailed its history and tipped the students off to internship opportunities in the Willamette conservation field.
And Michelle Emmons, serving in the roles of Willamette Riverkeeper south valley advocate and education and outreach coordinator for the Middle Fork Willamette Watershed Council, discussed why youth conservation leadership and advocacy efforts were important, how to get involved, and which career opportunities exist.
The kids also learned about the river firsthand during afternoons spent plunking lines into the blue-green water.
“I like to think of my arm as a windshield-wiper,” 15-year-old Andre Tharp explained as he took a break from fishing. “You don’t want to cast with your wrist.”
Healing souls, growing leaders
But it’s not all for the kids. The veterans who help Brown lead the trips say they get just as much out of the deployments as the students.
The kids don’t recognize their guides as battered soldiers, said Matthew Dahl, an Army veteran and Soul River volunteer. They see them as friends and mentors. In this setting, the veterans’ experience with pain becomes a teaching tool, making them ideal mentors for youths dealing with teenage traumas.
“They make me realize that what I’ve been through doesn’t define me,” Dahl said.
The program hasn’t been around long enough to track students’ success long-term. But if Kolby Cantue-Cliette’s experience is any indication, Soul River seems to have landed on a successful model for bringing up leaders.
Like most of Soul River’s youths, Cantue-Cliette had no experience outdoors when she joined in 2016. Since then, she has been to the Owyhee Canyonlands, the Olympic Peninsula and the Arctic Circle, developing into a confident leader and teacher among her Soul River peers. On the Willamette deployment, she interviewed the river’s conservation leaders during taped news segments designed to spread outdoor knowledge and appreciation to a broader audience.
She spends her free time converting classmates into conservationists. And this fall, she is headed to the University of Oregon to pursue an environmental studies degree — something she never would have considered before joining Soul River.
When she goes away to school, Cantue-Cliette plans to bring a fishing pole.
“It’s part of me now,” she said. “It’s in my blood.”
The Willamette River restoration community recently hosted six visiting representatives from the Río Laja River Basin, in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, for an exchange of knowledge and practice in watershed restoration.
The five-day visit in early June was the latest highlight of an international partnership the two basins launched in 2015 as part of the Willamette community’s receipt of the 2012 Thiess International Riverprize. The award, which recognizes exemplary efforts in river protection and restoration, includes an opportunity to collaborate with a watershed outside the prize winner's home country in an exchange known as a Twinning project. The Meyer Memorial Trust's Willamette River Initiative stewards the project on behalf of the basin's restoration community.
Many of the Willamette’s biggest watershed health challenges are also present in the Laja. Restoration practitioners in both basins are working to improve water quality, increase migratory bird habitat, foster community engagement and restore floodplain function following gravel mining operations, among other shared priorities.
Tara Davis, who coordinates the Twinning project on behalf of Meyer Memorial Trust, said the partnership has enabled participants from both basins to share expertise, engage in cultural exchange and develop professional relationships through multiple visits to one another’s home turf.
“It’s so valuable to be able to talk, to connect, and to learn from our international peers about how they approach similar watershed conservation challenges in a different social and environmental context,” Davis said.
Representatives from the Willamette visited the Laja for a week in March and August 2016, while a Laja visitor came to the Willamette Valley in December 2016. This time, Laja visitors included scientists and advocates from the government, nonprofit and university sectors.
“It’s been a very positive experience,” said Mario Hernández Peña, director of El Charco del Ingenio, an important botanical garden and nature preserve in Guanajuato. “The information we’re taking back to Mexico will help us think of new ways to make positive change in our home environment.”
The week culminated in a planning session intended to identify opportunities for further collaboration and brainstorm ways to apply learnings from this visit to Laja partners’ efforts in their home basin.
Learn more about the about the Twinning exchange here.
For additional information about restoration efforts happening in the Willamette Basin, visit willametteinitiative.org.
Fernando Rivera Valdés (foreground), an agricultural engineer from the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, discussing watershed conservation during a tour of restoration sites along Price Creek in the Willamette watershed.
Tillamook County Housing Task Force recently completed a housing assessment to identify short-term solutions to address the extreme housing crisis in Tillamook County.
Here is a preview of what Erin Skaar, Executive Director of CARE, had to say:
Ask anyone in the county what the most critical issues facing the county are, and housing will be in the top three,” said Skaar.
Unscientific opinion polls last year showed that 80 percent of those answering the poll agreed – housing, especially affordable housing, is a serious problem in Tillamook County.
“What makes this such an important issue for Tillamook County is that it is not just low income housing that is not available, it is all types of housing,” Skaar said.
The Tillamook Headlight Herald dives deeper into the story and report here.
Meyer grantee Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare scored a big win in New Markets Tax credits to build a 52-unit apartment complex for low-income individuals, homeless veterans and people with mental illness. The building will also house an on-site medical team coupled with mental health and addiction services.
Portland Business Journal covers the $28M investment in Northeast Portland here:
Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, a nonprofit that provides housing and health care services to people living with mental health and addiction issues, has secured $4.5 million in New Markets Tax Credits for its Garlington Center. The investment, a partnership with National Community Fund, a Community Development Entity affiliated with United Fund Advisors, will help fund the $28 million project, which is currently under construction at 3034 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
“We are striving to create a valued space where being mindful and treating the whole body is easy and accessible for our community,” –Dr. Derald Walker, President and CEO of Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare.
Nearly 100 guests filled the Douglas County Library for a chance to network with some of Oregon's largest funders at the Nonprofit Association of Oregon's Resource Roundups.
“The more we can find out about these organizations and what their priorities are and how they go about making their decisions about where funding goes, the more we can maximize our efforts to figure out what projects we should put forward and how we can be successful in supporting those,” said Marilyn Cross of the McKenzie Community Development Corporation
The NAO's resource roundups provide opportunities for nonprofit staff, board and volunteers to meet and connect with funders to learn about available resources.
Multnomah county’s new idea to fight homelessness idea: Build tiny houses in people's backyards and rent them out to families with children now living on the streets.
The Oregonian wrote about the four tiny houses scheduled to launch June 2017:
Once in the tiny houses, the families will plug into existing county services, including a mobile team that helps people stay in their homes after experiencing homelessness. That includes resolving disputes with landlords, helping manage unexpected expenses and job help.
A family of four costs $32,000 a year to house and help in a shelter. That same family could be supported in one of the pilot project's tiny houses for $15,000 a year during the five-year contract.
People of color, low income communities and rural and tribal people are at the front line of environmental and climate injustice.
OPAL
Source:
Fred Joe Photography
Organizers raised the voices and issues of those most impacted by environmental hazards — people of color, low income Oregonians, rural communities and tribal people — at the People’s Climate March on April 29.
Following a blessing from Native Elder Ed Edmo (Shoshone-Bannock, Nez Pierce, Yakima) at Dawson Park in Northeast Portland, a crowd of nearly 3,000 set off for Buckman Field in Southeast Portland. Marchers repeated a familiar chant, first in English, then in Spanish, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!”
Intersectionality reigned at the event organized by Oregon Just Transition Alliance. Zen monks demonstrated alongside marchers protesting immigration sweeps and no-cause evictions. Vegans waved “no more meat” signs and youths wearing “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts chanted alongside youths supporting farmworker rights and children holding “Kiddos for Climate Justice” signs and marchers for social justice.
Multnomah County commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson addressed the diverse crowd at Dawson Park: “Listen to front-line communities. Show up for racial justice, economic justice, worker justice and climate justice. Our fates are tied. Everyone has a role to play.”
“This is a demonstration of front-line activism,” said Huy Ong, executive director of OPAL, a recent Meyer grantee and a member of the Oregon Just Transition Alliance along with APANO, Beyond Toxics, Environmental Justice Oregon, PCUN, Unite Oregon and Rural Organizing Project. “The community is here demanding action to stop and reverse climate change and to grow our collective power.”
Carrying a sign that read “System Change, Not Climate Change,” People’s Climate March participant Charlie Graham said he was marching because the world is in crisis.
“The system is the problem,” said Graham, a retired elementary school teacher from Hillsboro. “It’s not just the environment over here or politics over there. Housing, climate change: we’re not on a sustainable path.”
All along the route, one of Tiffany Johnson’s hands gripped the palm of her 9-year-old daughter, Ona. The other hand held a sign that touched on many of the issues on demonstrators’ minds: “This is All Native Land: Love is Love, Immigrants Rights, Science is Real, Environmental Justice, Black Lives Matters, Women’s Rights and Feminism.”
“We go to all the social justice, police reform and environmental marches,” Johnson said. “But we don’t often see ourselves (Ona is Native American and black; her mom, Native American) reflected in the leadership or messages. Native people are commonly left out. It’s really important that Ona see the connections, that she claim her place and her voice.”
Rinzan Pechovnik, a priest from the No-Rank Zendo, a Zen Buddhist temple in Southeast Portland, scanned the crowd of thousands.
“This is the fundamental march,” he said. “We have to throw our bodies in to let the world know we care.”
Cary Watters (Tlingit), a Community Engagement Manager at NAYA, banged a hand drum leading marchers past the convention center.
“Ecological and social justice is really key,” she said. “You don’t have one without the other.”
Mary Phillips recently relocated to North Portland joined the march with her daughter-in-law, Erin, and son Mike, a program associate on Meyer’s Healthy Environment portfolio.
“We have to stay vigilant,” Phillips said. “Climate change affects everything — jobs, health care, housing — and this march shows how intersectional it gets. We’re all together in this.”
A recent interview with Hispanics in Philanthropy shone a spotlight on Affordable Housing Initiative program officer Elisa Harrigan and the work Meyer has been doing around defending the rights and safety of immigrants.
The dialogue with Elisa begins with grantmaking sparked by immigration executive orders in early 2017:
After the recent immigration executive orders by the U.S. president, Meyer’s CEO Doug Stamm responded swiftly. In a post, Stamm called the orders “hateful and inexcusable and counter to the principles of our republic,” and said the foundation group “must stand for the rights of all people of color, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ community.” As a symbol matching its pocketbook to its principles, the trust has announced $190,000 in grants to organizations on the front lines of immigration battles.This included $20,000 each to the American Civil Liberties Foundation of Oregon and Unite Oregon, a local organization focused on racial justice.
The grants are only the latest Meyer moves dedicated to improving cultural outreach. According to Elisa Harrigan, a Latina leader and officer at Meyer’s Affordable Housing Initiative, the organization has worked hard to become more responsive to the needs of underserved Oregonians. Her presence is one example of that change.
