Grantee StoriesJanuary 5, 2016

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.”

View more of Salomé’s work on her Facebook page: https://m.facebook.com/ArtbyEsoko

A PDF version of Salomé’s winning illustration is available here.

 

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.