Meyer’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is reflected across all its portfolios. In this batch of Housing Opportunities grants, we are pleased to support an effort cultivating a new generation of talent by placing culturally diverse paid interns in rural Oregon housing and community development organizations over the next three years.
The California Coalition for Rural Housing launched the Rural West Internship Program in 1998 and, over the years, has placed over 140 interns. Over half of those continue to serve rural housing and development agencies — as staff, Directors and board members.
“The program provides a critical pathway for students to pursue professional positions in the affordable housing field while simultaneously developing qualified candidates for the field, “ says Gisela Salgado, director of leadership and programs for California Coalition for Rural Housing. “As a graduate of the program, I feel proud and honored to work with current interns and fellow alumni in the field — people I respect and admire — who care deeply about creating a more equitable society and making a difference in people's lives.”
After running the program in California for over a dozen years, CCRH expanded in 2010 to Washington, Oregon and, most recently, Arizona. Six interns have successfully completed the intern program in Oregon. Meyer support will enable six more interns to be placed in Oregon, one per year at two different agencies, CASA of Oregon and Willamette Neighborhood Housing Services.
The program is an important step for recruiting, training and retaining students who may not otherwise know about the housing field.
“Our diverse interns reflect the diverse cultural and linguistic demographics in Oregon and the West,” says Salgado.
With leadership of many rural housing organizations approaching retirement, the time is ripe for building a more diverse pipeline of new professionals. “We see future opportunity for expansion in Oregon and welcome discussion with interested rural housing and development partners.”
When Nils Christoffersen accepted a new job at fledgling nonprofit Wallowa Resources in Enterprise in Oregon’s remote northeastern corner in the summer of 1999, founding director Diane Daggett assigned him a single task: listen.
During his first months, she simply wanted him to go into the community, to better understand local residents and their culture and to learn their fears and dreams. The approach reinforced the most important lesson Christoffersen had learned from years of rural economic development work in southern Africa: You may think you’re well-trained and educated, but people on the ground know more about their place, culture and landscape than you do.
Enterprise, a cattle and farming town set amid prime logging country, was a long shot to remake itself as a hotbed of sustainable economic development. The era of big timber was on its last gasps. All three county sawmills were closed. The days of clear-cutting massive, old trees were long past. One-in-five locals had lost their jobs, and longtime residents were moving away.
After leaving Africa, Christoffersen had been on the hunt for a rural U.S. community that was using sustainability and a commitment to land stewardship to remake itself and assert leadership in ways that he had seen overseas. That’s when he learned about then-Wallowa County Commissioner Ben Boswell’s unusual step of co-founding Wallowa Resources as a nongovernmental economic innovation and experimentation engine. From the ashes of the big timber era, Boswell and his peers envisioned a new restoration-based economy.
Helming a nonprofit situated squarely in the radical-middle could sometimes make Christoffersen the enemy of the two extremes. But Wallowa Resources had a determined board of directors, support from the Wallowa County commission, funding from the USDA’s Rural Development program and an initial strategic plan for the organization. Most important, there was a core group of local stakeholders who believed they could reinvent themselves.
Wallowa Resources launched a large sustainable ecosystem management program, including an effort to manage weeds on 1 million acres of private and public canyonlands that generated $480,000 in payroll and local contracts. A few years later, Wallowa Resources brokered the Arroz Stewardship Contract, a plan for the management of U.S. Forest Service land with buy-in from 20 organizations, resulting in the county’s largest successful commercial timber sale in years. More than a dozen local investors joined Wallowa Resources in their new for-profit subsidiary, Community Smallwood Solutions, to create a small-diameter log processing business.
By 2009, two years after Christoffersen had assumed the executive director role, Wallowa Resources had recruited Integrated Biomass Resources to co-locate with Community Smallwood Solutions to produce chips, hog fuel and pest-free certified firewood. In 2012, Integrated Biomass Resources took over Community Smallwood Solutions and established a 70-acre campus on the site of what was once the county’s largest mill. That same year at the request of Baker, Union and Wallowa counties, Wallowa Resources organized a forest collaborative to advance forest and community resilience across northeast Oregon; the effort serves as a model for federal forest management in Oregon and across the country. Wallowa Resources produced a draft watershed restoration plan for 100,000-acre Lower Joseph Creek in 2014.
Perhaps Wallowa Resources’ greatest accomplishment is its role in helping to evolve the region’s culture toward a new, can-do economy based on sustainability principles. Local cattle ranches have evolved toward grass-fed beef and other niche markets, while large river restoration projects there are seen as national models. Wallowa County even gave the former hospital to Wallowa Resources to become a hub for 13 mission-driven organizations and agencies. Afterschool and summer programs, high school internships, and hands-on work experiences spurred by Wallowa Resources reach nearly half of Wallowa County’s students, giving practical hope to a new generation.
Christoffersen believes the community-benefit approach that worked for Wallowa County can work for other rural regions.
At the heart of Wallowa Resources’ work is organizing: identifying leaders, listening to them and getting out of the way to let leaders lead. Christoffersen seeks authentic connections with people that sustain the natural resource base of the economy in ways that align with the law, local culture, markets, broader public values and ecosystem management best practices.
Seventeen years on, Christoffersen is still listening.
What he hears often: The legacy of past management activity — heavy logging, overgrazing and mismanagement of water, combined with the current drought cycle and declines in federal funding — begs a new social contract between rural communities and urban and suburban populations. We are all, as they say, in it together. But building a complicated mosaic of trust, innovative finance and long-term investments balanced with the practical needs of culture, food, water, environment and jobs will require innovation, commitment and daring.
In towns such as Enterprise, revival can feel tenuous when rural neighbors still struggle. Putting communities back together, and being given the social license to do it, remains the work of one organizer, one weaver, one catalyst and one sustaining organization at a time.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, a theme bubbled up in many news stories and kitchen table discussions: Women still feel invisible in many aspects of society.
A new comprehensive report on women and girls in Oregon, the first in a generation, aims to remedy that feeling.
Count Her In, a 120-page tour de force of analytics and research has revealed significant gender equity problems in Oregon. The state hasn’t seen much improvement for women since the 1980s, and in some cases, we’ve actually gone backward.
Within two weeks of the report’s release this fall, it was mentioned in four out of five gubernatorial debates. The report will, no doubt, reset the table for policy and lawmaking across the state. And yet, the existence of the report raises the question: Why was it produced by the Women’s Foundation of Oregon and not the state, which is mandated to produce such data?
When the statewide Women’s Foundation of Oregon (WFO) opened its doors in 2014, it wrestled with how it could raise the visibility of women’s issues and make a difference. When the WFO asked the organizations it supports how to move forward, the collective answer was surprising: Instead of more money, the organizations needed information that helped them make a better case for why they needed money. It was from this service-sector plea that the Count Her In report was born.
WFO Executive Director Emily Evans borrowed her family’s RV and hit the road with her team. With majority funding from Meyer Memorial Trust, additional funding from others, and the efforts of local volunteer organizing teams, they traveled to Bend, Burns, Medford, Newport, Pendleton, Ontario and the Umatilla Reservation. They went in-depth in all large urban areas and even relied on Spanish-, Somali- and Russian-speaking translators in Forest Grove, Gresham and parts of Portland to make sure ethnic groups weren’t ignored.
Along the way, the researchers at ECONorthwest crunched the information from more than a thousand interviews, several thousand data points and years of Oregon census data. Then they compared the results to every state in the country.
Here is a small sample of the broad findings.
An estimated 1 million women and girls – over half of Oregon’s female population – have experienced some form of sexual or domestic violence.
Nearly a quarter say they have been raped.
Oregon women have the highest reported incidence of depression in the country and women are twice as likely to attempt suicide as men.
Women and girls deliver nearly 2 billion annual hours of caregiving for family members, much of it free and with dramatic impacts on their careers, education and earning trajectories.
Nearly one-third of women and girls are struggling to make ends meet: Women earn between 53 and 83 cents on the dollar, depending on race and ethnicity, for every dollar white men in Oregon make.
For women of color, the racial wealth gap combines with the gender wealth gap to create a compound negative effect. Sixty percent of all minimum wage workers in Oregon are women.
This year, only one of Oregon’s 39 publicly traded companies is led by a woman.
There are still some Oregon counties where not a single woman serves in countywide office; this matters because counties are often the biggest providers of services to women and girls.
Of course, the news isn’t all bad: Women vote at higher rates than men in Oregon, commit fewer than 5 percent of violent crimes, comprise more than 70 percent of public educators and 80 percent of health care workers, give of their money and time more than Oregon’s men (and most women nationally), serve in statewide office at some of the highest rates in the country, and met the state’s 2025 goal for college graduation in 2014 — eleven years ahead of schedule.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown said after reading the report that although “some could point to our successes, and say, ‘See, it’s not so bad here,’ the data in this report doesn’t lie.”
Advocates say the findings match hard data to an unsettling reality they’ve witnessed for years: Oregon’s women and girls are struggling. According to Elizabeth Nye, executive director of Girls Inc., she spent years feeling like she was shouting into the wind, unable to substantiate what she was saying.
Count Her In changes all that. The report is a wake-up call, a celebration of resilience, and an opportunity to do things differently. And, as the report says, it’s an irrefutable imperative for change. WFO’s Evans says that the goal now isn’t small tweaks or a few more dollars to service providers, but structural and systems change. It’s recognizing that the structural barriers are highly interrelated and that if they’re not recognized and changed, then we’ll see stagnation.
Systemic racism and gender inequity are huge problems in Oregon, meaning women and girls experience disproportionate barriers to success. Today, thanks to the Women’s Foundation of Oregon’s report, progress can no longer be blamed on a lack of clear and compelling data.
On a sweltering weekend last summer, Rahsaan Muhammad worked the crowd at the annual Peace & Unity Fest in Northeast Portland, stopping neighbors to talk toxics during lulls in the afternoon’s music.
A few miles across town, Mary Ann Warner chatted about the Willamette River’s polluted sediments with members of the Iraqi Society of Oregon during a riverside picnic at Kelley Point Park. She spent the next weekend feeding people experiencing homelessness while discussing the contaminated fish that many people catch and eat from the lower Willamette River.
Meanwhile, Irina Phillips planned a summit for Russian-speaking teens to explore training programs for jobs on the proposed seven-year, $746 million effort to address the cancer-causing soils lining the river from the Broadway Bridge to the Columbia Slough.
All three activists care deeply about the outcome of a federal effort to decontaminate the Portland Harbor Superfund Site, and all hail from communities that, too often, are excluded from discussions about our community’s future.
Through a $40,000 grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust, the trio are working as organizers for the Portland Harbor Community Coalition, a diverse alliance of community groups concerned about the social and environmental justice issues related to the planned cleanup of Portland’s waterway.
Their demands are simple: The coalition seeks a strong, fair plan that entitles those most harmed by the river’s polluted history to an equally outsized benefit from the cleanup.
That means fighting for cleanup standards that make the river’s resident carp, bass and catfish safe for everyone to eat. It means insisting that cleanup contractors hire a diverse, local workforce. It means prodding decision makers to involve people experiencing homelessness, immigrants and people of color in discussions about how the river will function after the health risks are gone.
For these three, the work is deeply personal. These are their stories.
Rahsaan Muhammad
Muhammad, an African-American business owner, activist and artist, proudly describes himself as “a central-city Portlander, all the way.”
But he admits it hasn’t been easy to keep a foothold in the city’s inner reaches. Portland’s black community, once concentrated near the harbor in North and Northeast Portland, has moved outward as those neighborhoods gentrified into predominantly white residential districts.
Muhammad saw a community that once lived, worked and fished along the river — deriving livelihood from the harbor while its toxic legacy threatened their health — at risk of losing out when the time came to address the mess.
He worried cleanup planners would focus their public outreach efforts on communities living close to the harbor and in doing so would fail to reach displaced black Portlanders.
“I can’t tell you how many pounds of carp and catfish all of our families have eaten over the years, not knowing the impacts,” he said. “Rectifying the environment should include rectifying things for the people, too, even if they don’t live here anymore.”
Mary Ann Warner
Warner is the child of Latino migrant farmworkers. For decades after the Delano grape strike of the 1960s, when farmworkers walked off the job to protest their exposure to dangerous pesticides and below-minimum wage earnings, her father refused to purchase grapes.
“‘We’re not eating food that makes the workers sick,’” he told his daughter.
Those early experiences influenced Warner’s work as an advocate for the Latino community.
Latinos are among Portland’s poorest residents, with nearly a quarter living in poverty and two-thirds earning below-average incomes, according to a report by the Coalition of Communities of Color and Portland State University. Language barriers prevent some from accessing information about the risks of eating fish from the Superfund site. Making matters more difficult, Warner said, regulators frequently make token efforts to include Spanish speakers but fall short of truly reaching them.
“You can’t just send out a postcard in Spanish and expect people to come to your public meeting,” she said.
Instead, Warner said, you must go to them. She frequently speaks about the health risks of the Portland Harbor at Latino community events and provides Spanish translation at public meetings about the Superfund site.
Irina Phillips
The issue of river health became personal for Phillips as a graduate student in the mid-1990s, when she experienced a life-threatening allergic reaction after waterskiing in the Baltimore harbor.
A legacy of industrial pollution from the city’s steel industry has tainted the harbor with toxic chemicals, and doctors told Phillips the contamination may have triggered the reaction that swelled her throat and constricted her airways.
“The water looked fine,” said Phillips, who immigrated to Oregon from Russia as a college student in the 1990s. “I just didn’t know there was so much bad stuff in it.”
When Phillips learned about the Willamette’s polluted sediment, she was driven to inform Portland’s Russian-speaking community about the risks. She also sees the cleanup effort as an opportunity to create upward mobility for a Slavic community plagued by poverty.
“There will be jobs available to do the cleanup,” she said, “and the cleanup plan should prioritize training local people do to the work.”
The cottonwoods that tower over McDowell Creek still amaze Richard Bates.
It’s been nearly six years since the Sweet Home-area farmer, desperate to stem the gradual erosion of his land into the creek, worked with the South Santiam Watershed Council to plant saplings along a quarter-mile of its banks.
The planting was a happy marriage of convenience: Council workers saw the project as an opportunity to provide shade for the creek’s threatened steelhead, and Bates found a solution to his disappearing property line.
Now, Bates says, “it’s starting to look like a jungle.” And those eroding banks? “Where things were getting tromped to death by cattle, now they’re being held together by trees.”
Bates couldn’t have known when he agreed to the project that the saplings would also benefit the basin’s economy. But the unique partnership that nourished those trees from seed to forest has provided jobs for dozens of Willamette Valley workers and consistent business for five local, family-owned nurseries.
The partnership is called Contract Grow, and it’s an example of the widespread benefits stemming from an unprecedented push to restore the Willamette River and its tributaries. It’s also a testament to the power of combining restoration dollars with crucial support to help groups do more restoration, more effectively.
Many watershed councils had done restoration on a small scale, working with a handful of property owners at a time. The new investment meant they could partner with hundreds of landowners, with hundreds more interested in joining.
Recognizing that the new capacity could trigger growing pains, Meyer in 2009 began funding a full-time staff position at the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to support watershed councils as they scaled-up their impact.
The groups until then had been buying plants in small quantities: a few bigleaf maples to shade a sliver of riverbank, a few Oregon grape to fill the understory. They purchased potted plants at retail value, about $3 apiece. To a home gardener, that might seem reasonable; for a watershed council buying plants in volume, it was neither affordable nor convenient.
“I was literally calling six different nurseries to get the plants, then stuffing them into my car to get them to the site,” said Sarah Dyrdahl, executive director of the Middle Fork Willamette Watershed Council.
The need for a better system was clear.
Kendra Smith, who had observed the success of a bulk plant-buying contract developed by the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services and then adopted by Clean Water Services in the Tualatin River watershed, saw an opportunity to replicate the model.
Under her leadership, the basin’s conservation groups began combining forces to submit one large, annual order to nurseries contracted to grow plants for their projects. In doing so, they gained control over the type, quantity and quality of species they transplanted.
Pre-ordering also allowed them to specify bare-root plants, which are far more affordable than potted plants. The switch saved millions of dollars in materials alone, while also eliminating the waste and physical strain of transplanting trees from plastic pots. And because the groups placed their order two years in advance, nursery owners gained certainty that the seeds they sowed would be in demand when the time came to harvest.
“It’s one of the things that has allowed our business to achieve a sustainable point,” said George Kral, owner of Scholls Valley Native Plant Nursery in Forest Grove. Today, the Willamette Basin contract has become the nursery’s second-biggest source of business.
But somebody needed to get all those saplings in the ground, and then maintain them while they grew into established trees.
Enter Rosario Franco. The Aumsville resident began his career replanting forestland after logging. But when conservation groups began launching projects that required Franco’s skills, he saw a niche to fill.
“This planting is good for the habitat, the water, the fish,” Franco said. “It’s a good feeling to know your work is doing that.”
In the years since, the basin’s restoration groups, together with area landowners, nurseries and businesses like Franco’s, have planted more than 4,000 acres. They’ve increased the pace of restoration sixfold since 2009.
The surge in business has enabled Franco to pay 33 full-time, year-round workers — a rarity in the seasonal planting industry.
When crews finished planting Bates’ property, the farmer gained a stable riverbank, new fencing to keep his cattle out of the stream and a tranquil campsite for his grandchildren’s frequent visits.
Even fish and wildlife seem pleased with the results: A family of beavers has taken up residence in the newly-wooded waterway. Their dam, built in part with branches from Bates’ trees, traps water in cool, shaded pools that make a perfect haven for steelhead.
In a rainforest, shafts of sunlight pierce through the topmost layer, illuminating the darkness below and sparking new growth. Seattle-based Canopy borrows its name from this notion of spotlighting new growth, focusing on regional investment.
Canopy’s goals are simple: to strengthen communities by identifying opportunities for diverse stakeholders — nonprofit institutions, for-profit organizations and individuals — to put capital to work locally in innovative ways that benefit investors and the places we call home.
Canopy addresses:
A lack of information among decision makers (by making research and information available in a centralized hub)
A lack of sophistication among investors and investees (by addressing both the supply and demand side)
A lack of incentive for investment consultants to participate (by creating a new model with different investment criteria and new frameworks to assess performance)
Canopy’s innovative investment research, training and management nurtures local and regional funders to join together and plant their capital right here in the Pacific Northwest. Doing so plants communities in a more fertile, regional economic ecosystem.
“Canopy democratizes the investment field by broadening participation and welcoming collaboration, so capital can flow to where it’s needed most in our communities,” says Lauren Sato, chief operating officer of Canopy.
Founded in 2103 by the Russell Family Foundation of Gig Harbor, Wash., The Laird Norton Family Foundation of Seattle, and Meyer Memorial Trust, Canopy aims serve a diverse mix of private foundations, government entities, corporations, individuals and other stakeholders. Along with seeding the enterprise, Canopy’s founders share the expense of sophisticated institutional research, provided by a partnership of Canopy, the Threshold Group and the University of Oregon. Without this otherwise cost-prohibitive research — accessible to all members — smaller foundations and other investor likely would opt for traditional, global investments in diversified markets. But with Canopy, they have the unique opportunity to invest their assets right in their home communities. And the founders oversee the company and prioritize its operations to ferret out funding organizations and regional investment opportunities, such as local businesses with positive social/environmental impact and significant investor return.
As a capacity-building organization, Canopy also trains investment-fund managers in how to find, manage and best utilize greater amounts of capital, ensuring long-term regional investments that withstand the rigor of institutional due diligence and attract new sources of capital. Together, funders decide just where to invest the wealth. When Canopy’s members pool their knowledge and financial resources, they leverage their efforts to financially invest even more in their communities, more than they ever could alone.
It’s a lot like that rainforest.
It could never exist without a myriad of trees anymore than Canopy’s members could generate regional prosperity without collaborating. Together, they’re transforming how funding institutions and individuals put their capital to work. Just as the forest makes room for new growth, Canopy is opening the way for a new generation of investors — ones whose numbers are only increasing — to help their communities thrive.
For nearly 30 years, Pacific Rivers has been a key player in protecting and maintaining healthy rivers and watersheds in Oregon.
Their mission: to use advocacy and policy work to assure river health, biodiversity and clean water for present and future generations. Since helping to pass the nation’s first and largest federal river protection act in 1988, Pacific Rivers has been dedicated to enshrining protections for rivers and watershed ecosystems in the Northwest.
Part of their focus is to ensure that Oregonians have access to drinking water free from chemicals and pollutants.
Pacific Rivers has prioritized educational initiatives to bring to light dangerous and harmful environmental practices affecting the watersheds in remote and rural communities, and they work to create space to educate the public about the environmental impact risky business can have on rural communities. A three-year, $150,000 grant for organizational development and communications in 2015 supported their efforts to increase the visibility of their work throughout 19 counties across Oregon.
At a recent standing-room only screening of Behind the Emerald Curtain, supporters in Portland learned about an endangered community 90 miles to the west. The film focused on the coastal town of Rockaway Beach, in Tillamook County, where logging and chemical spraying are having a negative impact on the health of neighboring residents and waterways. The event helped teach and mobilize Oregonians about harsh environmental practices affecting rural areas outside cities and what they can do to help. Pacific Rivers will be screening the film throughout western Oregon until February to engage and inspire community members to help reform the Oregon Forest Practices Act and then releasing it online for a national audience. A schedule of screenings can be found on Pacific Rivers' home page.
Following the film, Pacific Rivers Executive Director John Kober facilitated a group discussion led by local community members and field experts. During the Q&A, he exhorted Portlanders to do their part in defending the future stability of Oregon’s watersheds and the health of rural communities dependent upon them.
Along with the development grant, Pacific Rivers received a technical assistance grant of $15,000 to partner with the Center for Diversity and Environment to guide their ongoing diversity expansion efforts. Pacific Rivers, which was already committed to equity, diversity and inclusion, recognizes that environmental progress depends on a diversity of voices and residents, said Kober.
“Pacific Rivers plays a valuable role in protecting clean water and watersheds across Oregon. We also really appreciate their genuine commitment to equity,” said Jill Fuglister, director of Meyer’s Healthy Environment portfolio. “With the combination of support for branding, communications and diversity training, we’re grateful to help Pacific Rivers make its work more relevant to all of the state’s diverse communities.”
Living Cully’s efforts to purchase the Sugar Shack aim to ensure that Cully residents can stay and rise with the neighborhood at a moment when gentrification is displacing low-income residents priced out of urban communities around Oregon.
Back in 1998, the year Street Roots started publishing a newspaper focused on homelessness and poverty across Portland, residents of the Cully neighborhood in Northeast Portland got some bad news: The old Young’s Marketplace building, about two miles south of Portland International Airport, was about to become an adult video store with "related businesses," as The Oregonian reported.
That set off alarms. The neighborhood had been fighting a crime problem for years and making progress. A porn shop was a step in the wrong direction.
Neighbors tried to stop the plan, but couldn’t. Over the next few years, the L-shaped building turned into a sort of porn supermarket, featuring not only videos but strippers, dancers and, reportedly, prostitution. The black-and-white checkered Sugar Shack building was a neighborhood black eye. Neighbors groused but had little recourse.
Then in 2014, the owners of the Sugar Shack were indicted on charges of tax fraud. It was the opening the neighborhood needed. The building and land went up for sale and a community organization called Living Cully, a collaboration between several groups representing Latinos and Native Americans in the neighborhood, rallied support to buy the lot for $2.3 million, putting up the first $55,000. Hundreds of Cully residents raised another $50,000 towards the purchase.
Meyer Memorial Trust awarded $200,000 to secure the loan to the collaboration of Verde, Hacienda Community Development Corporation (Hacienda CDC), Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA) and Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East.
Today, what was once a neighborhood blight is a vessel of hope for the Cully neighborhood, one of Portland’s most racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. While the area around the Sugar Shack is becoming increasingly gentrified, making it harder for low-income people and people of color to stay in the neighborhood, the new Living Cully Plaza aims to ensure that Cully residents can stay and rise with their community.
Tony DeFalco, the Living Cully coordinator for Verde, said local stakeholders will define the future uses of the site.
"We’re looking at a whole range of things," DeFalco said. "Community-serving retail, potential for job and economic activities for people to work at or grow their businesses out of."
DeFalco said the 26,000-square foot building will reflect the character and face of the neighborhood and its goals. For months, volunteers have been cleaning up the property, picking up trash, landscaping, and even painting a mural. In 2016, they expect to decide how to use the space.
DeFalco said what’s happening with the Sugar Shack property shows what can happen when groups work together.
"The biggest thing it shows is the power of a real collective impact model," said DeFalco. He said that when groups with a variety of interests merge their thinking and their power, they can attract the support they need to make change happen.
Poverty is a familiar bedfellow in Oregon. Statistics tell the alarming trend. Theater helps shift the numbers into dialogue.
In the first decade of this century, the numbers of people living in areas of concentrated poverty in the state grew to make Oregon home to one of the most severe increases in the nation. Proximity to clusters of poverty is a cruel amplifier: low-income families living in concentrations of poverty face higher crime rates, poor housing conditions and fewer job opportunities.
The problem is both rural and urban: A recent report estimates that roughly one in three of Multnomah County’s 760,000 residents earn less money than required to meet their basic needs. Children, communities of color, immigrants and refugees, single-parent households and persons with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by poverty — with poverty rates for these populations far higher than their rates in the population as a whole, according to a 2014 county report.
A Portland theater recently took on the issue of poverty, with solutions in mind.
Founded in 1999, the Sojourn Theatre blends performance and dialogue to engage communities in conversations about race, class, leadership, demographic change, public education, civic planning, housing and community sustainability.
Their February 2015 run of “How To End Poverty in 90 Minutes," turned the Portland Playhouse into a social-science laboratory. The goal of the experience of the play/lecture/workshop/theatre piece/public conversation: to erase the silence around poverty and provide a starting point for dialogue. Meyer was proud to support the theater's work with a $25,000 grant in October 2014.
During performances, the ensemble members gave each of 100 attendees the opportunity to learn about and actively engage with the realities of poverty in Multnomah County. Together, they decided how to best direct $1,000 of each evening’s receipts — $17,000 total over the run — toward poverty eradication.
“We wanted to host a conversation about poverty where we invite different perspectives and ideologies into a room to wrestle with this often silent issue,” Sojourn Theatre founder Michael Rohd told PDXMonthly. Rohd left Portland in 2007 to teach at Northwestern University, where he developed the show.
After each 90-minute performance, each audience member was handed a ten-dollar bill and asked to spend it on one of five approaches to ending poverty: System Change, Education, Direct Aid, Making Opportunities, and Daily Needs. The exercise aimed to help participants overcome the sense of helplessness that comes from being overwhelmed by issues of poverty.
A reviewer in the Oregonian wrote of the sell-out production: “Sitting alone writing a check to alleviate poverty feels like throwing a pebble into the abyss, while passionately exploring the issue with 99 other theatergoers leads to action with real weight behind it. The revolutionary insight of this production is that solutions are to be found only when we work as a community.”
To Salomé Chimuku, already a veteran of social justice and public policy reform at age 25, equity is a familiar concept.
“It’s just a new label,” says the first prize winner of Equity Illustrated, a design contest sponsored by Meyer Memorial Trust and Northwest Health Foundation
“Equity is the biggest safeguard against fear,” she says. “The more you understand equity, the more compassionate you become. You’re understanding where someone is coming from.”
Salomé’s family immigrated to the United States from Angola after generations of armed conflict: a 42-year long fight for independence followed by a 37-year civil war. Both her grandparents and parents were born into war. The idea that inequities lead to strife was drilled into Salomé at an early age.
“My dad really tried to instill in me the idea that fear is the easiest thing to build, but it’s unsustainable. Love is the hardest thing to build but it will last you forever.”
In her first place entry, Salomé sketched a series of faces in a comic-strip style, each of them talking about a facet of equity. The comic is based in reality: The people are her friends, the words, their own. When family dinner conversations revolve around equity, and what you do for a living is focused on equity, and your friends also work for social justice, equity becomes a frequent topic of conversation, explains Salomé.
The contest was her first, although she’s been creating art for many years as a coping mechanism for complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“It’s a good way to express all the things that are going through your mind,” she says.
As a first-generation immigrant who is black, female and queer, Salomé believes the best equity conversations happen “when you remove pressures and folks can really be honest with themselves.” Sometimes those conversations happen at work, over drinks, or at a show. “You can be having a very deep conversation about equity and then (club music) comes on and you start dancing,” she says.
Salomé hopes the images help people understand how disparate resources can lead to unhappy outcomes.
Her professional work toward equity began during an internship at age 18 in the office of then-secretary of state Kate Brown. There, Salomé helped craft a program that registers new citizens to vote at their naturalization ceremonies — a policy now being adopted by other states. Since then, Salomé has worked on local legislation as the Director of Public Policy and Advocacy for Unite Oregon (formerly the Center for Intercultural Organizing), a Meyer grantee, and as a Politicorps Fellow for the Bus Project, an initiative funded by Meyer, NWHF and Brainerd Foundation.
Now her current assignment managing Oregon’s Law Enforcement Contacts Policy and Data Review committee (LECC) brings equity to law enforcement at the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute, a governor-appointed committee charged with assisting Oregon law enforcement agencies with stop-data collection and analysis training, improving community relations and policy recommendations. Their tagline: “Using data and experience to influence policing policy that will create equitable outcomes for all Oregonians.”
“In a training, law enforcement officers may sit in a room and describe how they feel they’re being put in a box because of the actions of a few of their kind; but they don’t see the connection to groups that have been profiled who feel exactly the same way,” she says. “People don’t see their own bias, even at the micro level. I felt like Equity Illustrated was a good way to get people to think.”
What is Equity?: Salomé Chimuku, (she/her), placed first in the 2016 Equity Illustrated design contest sponsored by Meyer Memorial Trust and Northwest Health Foundation.
