Welcome to part two of the Equitable Education portfolio's three-part series focused on Latino male educators.

According to the most recent Oregon Statewide Report Card, 22.6 percent of Oregon's public school students are Latinx while only 4.5 percent of Oregon teachers match these students. That gap in visual and cultural representation in our classrooms contributes to the persistent achievement gap for Latinx students as compared with their white peers. This lack of diverse representation is consistent throughout Oregon's education leadership.

Earlier this year, I sat down with Portland Public Schools' (PPS) new superintendent, Guadalupe Guerrero, just one of three male Latino superintendents scattered across Oregon's 198 districts, to talk about the journey to his current leadership position as well as his hopes for a more diverse and representative Oregon education workforce. The superintendent took the helm of PPS just after the 2017-18 school year began and recently celebrated the completion of his first school year with graduates around the district.

Superintendent Guerrero often shares his belief in student-focused leadership, but for Oregon's Latino boys and young men, he may represent a specific hope for the future. In the Education Week article linked in the first blog of this series, one of the students interviewed said, "You can't be what you can't see." The superintendent is making himself visible and providing a leadership model for all students in the district, with a keen eye on empowering Latinx students.

Like other students of color, Latinx students are lagging behind in achievement and graduation rates across the state and country: 69.4 percent of Latinx students in Oregon graduate on time as compared with 76.6 percent of white students. Recently, as the keynote speaker at the Mente Summit, an event created to inspire male Latino students through role models and mentorship to graduate and pursue higher education, Superintendent Guerrero encouraged the young men in attendance to work hard for their dreams and reassured them that success should never mean leaving behind their culture. In the current political climate, that's a powerful message that is in many ways contradictory to messaging they may receive in some of their schools and greater communities. This interview has been edited.

Bekah Sabzalian:

How did you find support as a young male Latino teacher? Do you think the needs of male Latinos differ from other teacher candidates, teachers and administrators?

Guadalupe Guerrero:

When I entered education, it was as a classroom aide [paraprofessional] and serving in a community where I lived alongside students. I shopped at the same markets, went to the same laundromats, ate at the same places. For me, working in schools was and is about serving the community.

As far as the question around the needs of male Latinos, I think that many of the supports and needs are the same that any new teacher would have. Hopefully, there's mentorship, there's district and building support, there's coaching available to all of our new educators. But hopefully, we're putting an especially mindful eye on our new professionals that may feel more isolated or feel a little bit of a cultural disconnect when they're working in a school where they may represent the only adult of color in that community.

Bekah Sabzalian:

Since moving to Oregon you tweeted, "Can we increase efforts to better ensure there are more teachers and educational leaders of color in the state of Oregon? We need to effectively recruit, prepare, hire and support diverse candidates." What are your ideas for getting this work done?

Guadalupe Guerrero:

There are some proven strategies we should be incorporating, here in Portland Public Schools, everywhere, especially in urban school districts. There's a diversity that exists with support staff or paraprofessionals. This is the group of employees that's the most embedded and familiar with the community; they're very known to the families and the students. We should encourage them to get their certifications, and we should support them.

School districts should be working closely with all of their surrounding higher education institutions. I've made it a real priority to get very familiar with all of the local university presidents and college of education deans. I've now met with all of them, and my line of questioning is similar when I first meet with them: "Tell me about the connective tissue between your institution and PPS. Tell me about your teacher education program. Tell me how you recruit, what kind of candidates you're looking for? How are you promoting diversity in those programs?" Because I well understand, if candidates of color are not completing their programs, then I'm not going to have a pool in the end.

Also, I've led in school districts where we partner with universities to create an urban teacher residency program. That's another pool of folks who, in partnership with the colleges, we're able to embed in our schools and have the benefit of a full-time resident working under a mentor teacher while they're going about their studies. Generally, a principal will have a resident working under a teacher in their school; then something opens up, somebody retires, the resident teacher tends to be the natural candidate for a slot because they're already woven into the fabric of the school. Urban teacher residency programs and other residency programs like that featured in the article are very important components.

We can also start at the high school level. We think of traditional career and technical education (CTE) programs, but you can create one for teachers, too. Here, students are getting that experience while in high school, learning about some of the pedagogy that drives the profession and finding on-ramps into some of those higher education programs. You see a lot of college of education deans now rethinking how you get a four-year education degree and certificate. I think that's forward thinking. I think it's tough for folks that are contemplating the profession to do another year of graduate study. The tuition and the investment of time it takes can be a barrier when you're not necessarily entering a high-paying career. I think if this country had its priorities right, it would emphasize the importance of public education. We would think about how to incentivize the career for talented individuals, those who are fantastic with kids but just can't afford to make teaching a career.

Bekah Sabzalian:

Recently, a PPS high school student of color asked you at City Club about diversifying the teacher workforce before he graduates. You responded that education leaders must move carefully to ensure that implementation is effective. How do you balance the urgency of the issue, clearly demonstrated by this passionate student, with careful implementation that often takes a great deal of time?

Guadalupe Guerrero:

First of all, I applaud that student for bringing it up and for having the agency to say, "I know you're building a school system out, and I want to experience and get a taste of that before I walk across the stage."

How do you balance the urgent with systemic building? There are some pools where educators or support staffs of color do exist. What I would say is, how do we begin to identify some of those individuals and elevate their visibility for our students? We see some small examples of that happening now. I'm very interested in seeing how do we take that paraprofessional who is very dynamic, who has great relationships with the students and the families, and involve them in visible positions? Like student advisers, student success coaches, how can we have them lead culturally specific student unions? We should have them lead affinity groups so that we increase the access that students may have to adults of color who work in their school communities.

That's one immediate mechanism we might be able to move on more rapidly so that the student doesn't have to wait for a chance to work with diverse educators. We have a number of schools that are piloting that work.

Bekah Sabzalian:

The article talked about the barriers male Latino teachers face, one of them being community perceptions of low pay, lack of visibility and a knowledge gap around advancement opportunities. What do you see as significant barriers to creating a steady pipeline of Latino male teachers?

Guadalupe Guerrero:

When you bring up community perceptions of the profession, that doesn't necessarily only apply to future educators of color. I think the education profession in this country certainly doesn't always carry the level of status or commensurate compensation that we say is important when they're serving our children. So there's that, then you layer on top of that educators of color, or college graduates of color, who we already know don't represent a high percentage of those who finish higher ed. They're posed with a question, internally, around, "What are my career choices going to be?" Often times, they're first in their families to graduate college, so when they're faced with making a choice like that, I think, in many families, they tend to lean the conversation toward certain vocations. Teaching doesn't tend to, unfortunately, come up first. For those with a Latino background, we know that in Latin American countries, "El Maestro" carries not just a term of endearment, but a pretty high level of esteem. There is certainly some respect for the profession.

But it is a challenge. How do we not only encourage more college graduates to consider the profession, but how do you attract graduates of color to entertain the idea of serving, often times in an underserved community, with students who perhaps might look like them?

Bekah Sabzalian:

Statistically, there are not many Latinx professionals serving as principals or in district leadership roles. What was the push that made you make that leap into administration?

Guadalupe Guerrero:

I have to say part of what drew me to education was that I didn't generally have a positive K-12 experience. Starting off as a young teacher, I didn't generally have a positive experience. In this profession, one can't help but notice that things could be a lot better. I think what sustained me through those early years is a feeling of fortification and nourishment from the community around me. I was a Spanish bilingual teacher. Naturally, the 30 fourth- and fifth-grade kids in my combination class, they all looked like me as did all of their parents. For me, I felt good about the teaching and learning experience that I was able to provide. Those were sort of the best years of my career in some ways, were my first years as a teacher. I know people often say those are the toughest years. I can tell you my first year as a teacher was by far my best year. I just had a great time. I loved the connections with my students and their families.

When I made the decision to move into administration, there weren't a lot of Latino principals but I knew some and I knew they were doing good work and I appreciated hearing about their experience. I think part of it is, we apply a lot of these characteristics to our Latino students; in many ways they're similar to Latino young professionals. There's a certain tenacity, persistence and grit that exists in the community. We tend to only use those words with people of color, but we're used to modeling those characteristics.

Bekah Sabzalian:

What supports would be helpful as more diverse educators take the leap into administration and district leadership?

Guadalupe Guerrero:

We need monthly dinners for our new administrators. Let's bring together our first-year principals, especially those of color, and make sure they're there. Reach out, give them that personal invite and let's order pizza and talk about how it's going. Let's talk about what the challenges have been, what's going well, and let's talk about some of the "just in time" learning the districts can provide for them. You're coming up on evaluation season or budget development time or hirings. We need to make sure to give you white-glove service all the way through.

Sometimes new educational leaders may be a little shy to raise their hand and express, "I don't know how to do this." Maybe it goes back to some of the persistence mindset like, "I'll just figure it out." We don't want any of our folks to work in isolation. We want them to feel very supported in this already challenging work.

Bekah Sabzalian:

To end things out, I'm wondering, what has kept you in education all these years?

Guadalupe Guerrero:

Well, public education still has not guaranteed the opportunity that it promises to students of color. They continue to represent the bottom end of a very persistent achievement and opportunity gap. There is a lot of important work that remains to be institutionalized. We need to reimagine public education so that it serves all students, all diverse learners. Not just kids of color, kids with disabilities, kids who are language learners, immigrant students, historically underserved kids.

We have not yet delivered on that promise and what keeps me motivated is to do my part, to try to be the best servant leader that I can be to elevate this, both as an important topic and also to concretely do something about it. There's something fundamentally wrong with the system when you see the kind of disproportionality that affects our students of color. They're the most often referred to the office, they're the most often suspended, they're most often the ones who drop out, they're most often the ones who are not prepared when they enter kindergarten.

Our new teachers are less likely to look like our students. It's hard to find principals to lead our communities of color who are themselves diverse. We are in the state of Oregon where out of 198 school districts there are only two other Latino male superintendents in this entire state. It's no different when you look at the 10,000 school districts in America.

I think it's important to make sure that the demographic is more representative of a country where our students are increasingly of diverse backgrounds to raise the lens and sensitivity to the needs of students, to approach this work in a more culturally responsive way. I am here, taking up the challenge, doing my part in a school system that unfortunately demonstrates many of the same patterns and see if we might disrupt that. Key to the work is joining hands with a lot of partners and supporters who are like minded and who see that serving our children is of the greatest importance. That can't be just a conversation, that can't be something that maybe happens 10 years from now, but something we can do today, tomorrow and begin to put into place networks of support for our students and our educators who are motivated to serve our students of color to be more successful. That doesn't mean you have to be a person of color to contribute to that. We just have to share the same equity and social justice commitment.

–– Bekah

---

In this interview, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero uses the term Latinos when speaking about the entire community. At Meyer, we often use Latinx as an alternative to Latino or Latina to refer to people of Latin American descent. Latino male specifically references males from the Latinx community.

The 2020 U.S. Census is coming, and by now you may have heard that it's slated to include a question about U.S. citizenship status. That question has implications for the accuracy of the count, and the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the count has implications for all of us.

Indeed, census data have a tremendous effect on distribution of resources. In 2015, more than $10 billion of federal funding was allocated to Oregon based on census data. Census data are also used to determine sites of schools and other infrastructure; businesses regularly use the data when deciding where to locate and invest. The shape of our voting districts and allocation of representative seats in government draw upon census data. Perhaps your organization refers to census data, too. Meyer does.

Data collected in 2020 will have far-reaching impact, so anything that gets in the way of a full and accurate count is concerning. It is widely believed that asking about citizenship status will suppress U.S. Census participation. Immigrant communities, who already experience real consequences of harsh public discourse and policy, are very likely to be undercounted as mistrust of the government keeps many folks from answering Census questions, regardless of their own citizenship status. We're hearing this directly from community leaders we've spoken to.

Oregon's attorney general has joined a lawsuit with 17 other states seeking to bar inclusion of the question. And you can take action, too.

The Commerce Department, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau, is accepting public comments about the 2020 survey. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NALEO Educational Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice are working collaboratively to encourage nonprofits and the public to submit comments before the August 7 deadline. They've created a simple portal at CensusCounts.org to make the process as easy as possible. I used it to submit comments myself in just a few minutes.

–– Erin

The city of Newport and Portland State University are partnering to collect information from coastal communities about how they view water issues.

Newport News Times wrote about the new partnership for collective input from Oregon coastal communities:

“It’s Oregon’s Kitchen Table, which is through Portland State University. The city received a grant of $185,000 from the Meyer Memorial Trust for the collective policy or collective process to determine what are the long term best practices for dealing with the watershed in Lincoln County,” said Spencer Nebel, Newport’s city manager. “This is part of the pilot project that’s being funded by the state as well.”

Data collection is crucial to ensuring the well-being of human and natural communities and reducing environmental harm. A two-year grant from Meyer's Healthy Environment portfolio will support this project's efforts to ensure that natural systems are healthy and able to adapt to changing conditions and long-term impacts in the Mid-Coast region.

Meyer will select a small number of projects to develop innovative approaches to housing affordability in Oregon, with initial grants of up to $125,000 available early in 2019 and potential follow-on grants in 2020 to further develop the pilots and broadly share results of the work.

Defining the problem

Meyer prioritizes stable, safe and affordable housing as one foundation of a more equitable Oregon. A shortage of housing generally has driven up rents and home prices across the state, and for those unable to earn enough to pay for even very basic housing without help, the consequences can be life-altering. A growing body of research shows that housing instability contributes directly to poor performance in school, difficulties getting and keeping a good job, and poor health outcomes.

Our tax code and social policies invest billions into housing in the form of property tax deductions (for mortgage interest and property taxes) that mostly benefit affluent households. For poor people, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, and people of color, public investment (outside of prisons and jails) has been rather less lavish.

Even at that, publicly subsidized affordable housing has long been under intense scrutiny around cost. Hardly a week passes without a new article or news segment challenging the ostensibly high cost of new affordable housing. The urgency behind that concern is understandable, as the gap continues to grow between the demand for affordable housing and the public investment necessary to meet the need. There's no doubt we must look for ways to get more from every public dollar going into affordable housing.

Beginning in 2015, Meyer has sought to play a constructive role in this conversation, convening 16 experts as the "Cost Efficiency Work Group" and producing a report aiming to clearly articulate the factors that tend to drive up costs in affordable development and to focus on real opportunities to bring down costs.

Part of this work is a communications challenge. Subsidized affordable housing is different in significant ways from market-driven real estate development, and there are constraints that are beyond developers' control that make it easy to put affordable developments in an unflattering light for those unfamiliar with the special nature of this work. There's also an important conversation about tradeoffs between long-term lifecycle costs and upfront construction costs -- building smart for the long term is not necessarily "inexpensive."

Still, in the face of urgent unmet need and a widespread skepticism about government's ability to respond effectively, it's critical to achieve as much as possible with the limited amount of public subsidy available. Although it's unlikely there's a completely novel "silver bullet" approach to creating affordable housing no one has ever thought about or tried before, it does seem worthwhile to support exploring new ways of looking at these perennial issues.

Changing the frame: focusing on the big-picture outcome

In mid-July 2018, Meyer will release a Request for Proposals that builds on our recent efforts to support innovative work around how to provide more affordable housing by lowering costs. In 2015-16, we awarded funding to five projects looking at different approaches to bringing more housing online at a lower cost, and we continue to follow that work with keen interest.

For this RFP, we wanted to open the doors even wider to innovative ideas and approaches and to focus more clearly on the end goal: creating as much access as possible to affordable housing for as little public subsidy as possible. To that end, we are defining a "moonshot"-style challenge, focusing creativity and energy around a specific, lofty goal.

The 1 Million Months Challenge ("1MM"):

Bring us your best ideas for guaranteeing 1 million months of affordability, using as little public subsidy as possible.

This takes a bit of unpacking. There are many possible paths to 1 million months; here are some potential examples to illustrate the kinds of ideas this could include:

• Piloting an approach to build, site and deliver new factory-built units meant to be affordable for 20 years that would aim for just under 4,200 units (240 months x 4,167 units = just over 1,000,000 months of affordability)

• Creating affordable units for 60 years with lower rents through cross-subsidy from other income-producing uses in the same properties, aiming to scale up to about 1,400 total units (720 months x 1,389 units = over 1,000,000 months)

• Maybe your best idea doesn't involve building any new housing? Exploring a sustainable approach to master-leasing new units in the private-market for five-year increments, staggered over time, to assist nearly 17,000 households five years at a time (60 x 16,667 = over 1,000,000)

The key point is that we are leaving it up to people who know the most about these challenges to define how to reach the goal. We're framing the goal this way to emphasize flexibility and focus on the outcomes:

• Flexibility: This is less about developing "projects" than creating a viable model or path; we are explicitly open to purely financial strategies that deliver on the outcome of creating more access to affordable housing.

• Outcomes: We are not necessarily focused on production of units (although more housing is important, and some strategies will rightly focus on that), but rather on the end-goal of housing large numbers of people for an extended period of time.

Finally, it's worth highlighting that we're pulling the focus away from the raw total development cost to focus on what really matters most: the amount of public subsidy required to achieve the goal.

Unlike a typical Meyer RFP, we're not looking for affordable housing projects per se, but a model or path that changes the game. You could say we're trying to "get out of the way" of solving these problems, by putting as few limitations as possible on what counts as a solution. We're calling the question for those who insist that the current system doesn't deliver bang-for-the-buck and there are better ways to do things. Ultimately, the point of this RFP is to give you an opportunity (and some resources) to take an idea or a notion or intuition that you've been thinking about and build it out to a full-fledged plan, test it, improve it and share it.

Sharing ideas, results and lessons learned will be a central part of participating in this experiment. Project teams funded under this RFP will be expected to participate in a learning cohort with each other, sharing and critiquing ideas, and helping each other refine and improve each model. Additionally, Meyer will create a variety of platforms and public events to highlight this work, to broaden the circle of folks around the state trying to think about these challenges in a different way and improve upon the ways we help people into housing they can afford, and ultimately to help public funders and other partners identify new models and approaches worth their support.

About the RFP 

The strongest proposals will be invited to submit more detailed proposals in the fall, with decisions and grant funding in early 2019. Grantees receiving funding under this RFP will be eligible to request follow-on implementation grants to be awarded in early 2020.

Finally, because it matters who is being helped and how much rent they are able to pay, and because there are distinct challenges in this larger context of cost and efficient use of subsidy, Meyer has defined three categories under the RFP and hopes to make awards in each:

1. Hard-to-House or Extremely Low Income: Housing solutions affordable to people/households between 0-30% Area Median Income (AMI), and/or designed and specifically intended to assist populations with significant challenges around access to affordable housing:
   • Transition Age Youth exiting foster care
   • Immigrants and/or refugees
   • People of color
   • Indigenous communities and tribes
   • People with disabilities (including severe and persistent mental illness)
   • Domestic violence survivors
   • People released from incarceration or people with a criminal record
2. Rural Workforce Housing: Housing solutions intended to serve residents of rural communities up to 100% of the local AMI. "Rural" in this context means any community not located within one of the federally defined "Metropolitan Statistical Areas": Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, Salem, Eugene-Springfield, Medford, Corvallis, and Bend.
3. The Open Challenge: Housing solutions affordable to households at or below 60% AMI that do not fit in the other two categories.

Applicants will be asked to specify one of the above categories when they apply. Meyer's intent is to make at least one award in each category, depending on the quality of proposals received.

For more answers, check out this recording from our 1 Million Month Challenge Information Sessions or contact me directly at michael [at] mmt.org (michael[at]mmt[dot]org) or (503) 228-5512.

–– Michael

The application deadline for this RFP was 5 p.m., on Tuesday, August 13, 2018.

Cost Efficiencies: 1 Million Month Challenge RFP details

1. Award amount + grant period
2. Information sessions

• Funds will be awarded in two stages: 

  • Concept Development (early 2019)

  • Implementation (late 2019 or early 2020)

• For Concept Development, Meyer expects to award grants ranging from $75,000 to $125,000 (up to $550,000 in funding will be available in this stage.)

• Grantees awarded Concept Development funds under this RFP will be eligible to for Implementation grants (up to $1.2 million in funding will be available.)

• Final award decisions are expected in January 2019, with first-year payments released in February 2019.

Meyer staff will present an overview of the RFP and be available to answer questions at two information sessions:

• Tuesday, July 24, 9:30-11 a.m.
• Monday, July 30, 3:20-5 p.m.

Both information sessions will be held in Portland at Meyer’s office (425 NW 10th Avenue, 4th floor); interested parties may also participate by telephone conference. Visit our official event page to RSVP.
 

Funding Timeline

 

Oregon needs new, bold and innovative ideas to solve our affordable housing problem. What's your idea?

In March, I joined the nine other Momentum Fellows of Philanthropy Northwest for a dynamic two-and-a-half-day retreat. This was our first time reuniting since we met six months ago when we began the Momentum Fellowship. The fellowship has placed us at different foundations across the Pacific Northwest and has offered us programming and network opportunities to jumpstart our careers in philanthropy.

Who are we?

During our retreat, we shared an immediate excitement and bonded as we rode the ferry on a typical gray and rainy Seattle day to Bainbridge Island. It just so happens that all the Cohort II fellows are women – an important connecting factor. We are a culturally and racially diverse cohort of Native Alaskan/Iñupiaq, African American, Iranian, Latina, Hawaiian-raised, biracial and Asian American women – and came to philanthropy in the Northwest through different paths. One common thread is that we are keenly aware of the inequalities and intersections among race, gender and class – and are starting to navigate this highly privileged and uncommon place of power and resources. While working in philanthropy, many of us continue making impact in the communities we’ve worked closely with in the past.

What did we learn?

Besides bonding time and learning leadership skills, I didn’t know what to expect from the retreat. Our coordinator, Maya Thornell-Sandifor, put aside our looming doubts and immersed us in a rich and balanced training with activities led by other thoughtful, highly skilled women (thank you Maya, Mares, Michelle, Jan and Sindhu!). We explored the themes of adaptive leadership, reflective practices, understanding roles and self-care.

Things came together on this beautiful, magical island. It was then when I actualized the reason for pursuing this fellowship. I had left a stable job at a philanthropic institution, moved across the country to an unfamiliar city. My adaptive challenge was both physical/environmental and professional. This fellowship was the opportunity I was yearning for: to take a step back and reflect on my role in philanthropy, engage in deeper intentional learning and move forward better informed on how to best share my skills and perspectives. I am now equipped with more tools and support than ever before.  

Supporting people of color in philanthropy

Having worked in philanthropy for several years, I’ve had my share of challenges around equity as a person of color. I have personally experienced and witnessed colleagues of color lacking the support needed and having requests for additional resources denied – and ultimately leaving jobs due to subtle racism. Meanwhile, white counterparts seem to easily receive the institutional support, trust, acknowledgment and encouragement needed to succeed and grow. I also noticed that as an Asian American female, I am perceived by some colleagues as a non-racial person unaffected by racism in the workplace.

How do we set up systems for people of color to get continuous support and stability? How do we go beyond simply focusing on diversifying the faces in philanthropy to creating a place where we thrive and see greater leadership in philanthropy? Communities of color are often credited with being resilient in the face of incredible hardship, but we must shift our efforts to address how and where we drop off and get destabilized in the sector and in society. How do we institutionalize and implement equity with good practices and clear policies alongside our fluid culture?

Another adaptive challenge is the need to have deeper dialogues on class and economic inequality in the funding world – especially among ourselves as funders – and chip away at our cultural discomfort with this subject. Can we lead such talks, including what wealth means for people of color in philanthropy? Economic disparity, power structures and access are not marginal issues we can choose to tackle but truly a central part of our work as funders pursuing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

The value of professional support

As I explore how we can use data to push for greater equity in philanthropy during my fellowship, one of the tools I have found incredibly valuable for my development has been the professional coaching included in our fellowship. While I have been lucky to have long-time mentors help me with career and life choices, having a coach partner who holds me accountable and encourages me has been another layer of support and sustenance (thank you Holly!).

As an immigrant (and now an ex-New Yorker), I have always known the necessity in adapting physically and culturally to new environments. With a greater appreciation and understanding of adaptive challenges and reflective practices, I look forward to this journey along with my Momentum sisters. I will continue to engage in self-care, whether they be meditative walks on suspension bridges or wrapping myself up in one big cinnamon roll hug.

— Mijounga Chang, Momentum Fellow in Data

 

Editor’s note: The Momentum Fellowship, coordinated by Philanthropy Northwest, aims to prepare professionals from underrepresented communities, particularly communities of color, for successful careers in the philanthropic sector. The Momentum Fellowship is part of Philanthropy Northwest’s commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Photo credit: Jenny Miller, Momentum Fellow at the Rasmuson Foundation

It takes transformative leadership to be a true hero of the river restoration field.

As a business owner who makes his living restoring native Willamette Basin habitats, Rosario Franco is quite literally transforming this important watershed, tree-by-tree and acre-by-acre.

The Willamette River Initiative is proud to have presented Rosario with the River Hero award in December 2017. The award recognizes his outstanding contributions to the effort for a healthier Willamette.

"Rosario is respected and admired by so many people in our Willamette River restoration community," WRI Director Allison Hensey said as she presented him with the award during the initiative's December grantee meeting. "He and his crews are doing the work everyday of healing this river system."

Rosario got his start reforesting timberlands in the Oregon Cascades, before taking his first restoration planting job in Portland in the the mid-1990s. By 2006, he had launched his own business, R. Franco Restoration.

Rosario and his crews soon became indispensable members of the Willamette Basin restoration movement, known for their specialized knowledge of native plants and habitat restoration, their project planning, planting and landscape maintenance skills and their commitment to the cause. With their help, the pace of Willamette restoration has increased dramatically over the past decade.

 

Rosario estimated he and his crews have planted more than 14 million trees and shrubs since the early 2000s, including 900,000 last planting season alone. It's not uncommon for them to put 50,000 plants in the ground in a single day.

Despite the staggering volume of work, Rosario knows his sites intimately. He visits six or seven times before planting ever begins, spending two to three years clearing weeds, surveying the landscape and deciding which plant species are best-suited for the area. Often, he and his crews know their restoration sites better than the landowners.

When asked why he does this work, which requires long days of physically demanding labor under stormy winter skies, Rosario's passion shines.

"You fall in love with a project," he said. "You see the changes, you see how (the work sites) look when you started and then, every year, how they change. That makes you want to learn more and do the best every time."

Today, Rosario employs more than 30 people full-time, year-round. He trains his employees not just in the technical aspects of the job, but why the work is essential to protecting our drinking water and creating fish and wildlife habitat. As a result, Rosario's employees are skilled, knowledgeable and passionate about the work they do for our rivers.

"We depend on Rosario and his crew, and could not meet our goals without him," said Jeff Baker, stewardship manager at the Greenbelt Land Trust, which has worked with Rosario to plant more than 300,000 trees and shrubs in the past five years.

In fact, said Kathleen Guillozet, Willamette Model Watershed Director with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, he is "among the most respected conservation leaders in the Willamette Basin."

But beyond his reputation as an invaluable work partner, Rosario is known for his kindness, dedication and humility. That "care factor," as North Santiam Watershed Council Executive Director Rebecca McCoun put it, is what sets Rosario and his crews apart.

"Rosario treats each site as if it's his own personal property," McCoun said, and restoration outcomes are better as a result.

Rosario's contributions to the river extend beyond his day job. He has been a leader in the Willamette restoration community's cross-border exchange with restoration groups from the Rio Laja watershed in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, welcoming visitors into his home and providing learning opportunities for forestry students from the watershed northwest of Mexico City. Rosario has also shared his knowledge and experiences during speaking engagements throughout the region.

We are fortunate to count him as a hero within our river community.

Rosario Franco, owner of the R. Franco Restoration planting company, accepts the River Hero award during the Willamette River Initiative’s grantee celebration dinner, Dec. 13, 2017.

A key outcome for the Equitable Education portfolio is increasing workforce diversity in public K-12 education. We're always on the lookout for research and programs with the ability to grow our knowledge about this important equity issue. That's why an article from ED Weekly focused on building a pipeline of male Latino educators caught our attention. The article highlighted barriers that male Latino teacher candidates face when deciding to enter a teacher preparation program, challenges they may face while teaching within the education system and targeted programs designed to support their success. Latinx students make up about 25 percent of our student body nationwide, but only 2 percent of our teachers are male and Latino. In this blog series, inspired by creating a more reflective education workforce, I'll share recent interviews I've had the privilege to engage in focused on the unique experiences and perspectives of male Latino educators in Oregon. All the interviewees for the series are male Latinos, spanning the education profession but with commonality in their purpose and struggles. We hope by sharing their stories and their insights, we'll be able to draw attention to the great value male Latino educators bring to public education and help to spark conversation around the state toward recruitment and retention of this rare and impactful population of educators.

The first interviewee in our series is Marty Perez. Marty is an accomplished educator; he's been teaching for almost a decade at both the middle and high school levels. He is dedicated to the teaching profession, dual immersion programming and closing the achievement gap. He is vice chair of the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission representing secondary educators and serves on the Oregon Governor's Council on Educator Advancement, where his valuable insights helped to shape the council's November 2016 report. The son of a Mexican American immigrant and a Klamath tribal member, Marty has spent his life navigating a bicultural, bilingual family while striving to promote academic excellence through Latino and Native representation in our public schools. Currently he teaches high school Spanish in the Portland area. This interview has been edited.

 

Bekah Sabzalian:

What inspired you to enter teaching?

 

Marty Perez:

I was about ready to finish my undergraduate degree in 2008, and I was looking for my next chapter, my next step. I had spent all this time and energy into a four-year degree in Spanish literature. I got a minor in business, and then I got a second minor in economics. I was very vulnerable about my next stage in life, and thankfully, I heard about the Sapsikwala teacher training program at the University of Oregon. I decided, "Hey, I could be an educator. I could be a teacher, and I think that I could be a pretty successful Spanish teacher." That is exactly what I did. I applied for this federally funded program and received a letter confirming my admittance.

That was when all the chips were in for me to become an educator. I decided that if somebody was going to pay for me to be a teacher, if somebody was going to invest in me for a certain mission or a vision, then I'm going to try to hold true to their investment for as long as I possibly can. I was committed to teaching in schools with Native American populations. I've taught in Alaska, California and Oregon.

Another moment when I knew education could be a calling was when I was a sophomore and junior in high school. I used to tutor fifth- and sixth-graders through the 21st Century Community Learning Program, which used federal money to provide supplemental resources to students in the areas of math and English, and I enjoyed it. It was maybe one and a half, two hours after school. I was making enough money in that moment to pay for my car payments and some gas, and I felt like it gave me this experience that wasn't too formal. I was able to interact with kids on a different level, that wasn't this teacher level. I felt like I had ways to communicate the tricks to navigate certain benchmarks, or content standards, or whatever the function may be; I felt that I was able to convey a message that it was attainable.

 

Bekah Sabzalian:

It sounds like when you decided to pursue teaching, it was in a supportive program.

 

Marty:

You know, I really read through the Sapsikwala mission statement and materials; my experience echoed 90 percent of the statistics that were stated. Growing up in small rural town, Tulelake, Calif., I had zero educators of color. To reference the Ed Weekly article, I could really relate to the teacher, Angel Magana, making a connection with other people of color in the school building who are not in an educator role. My mom was an instructional assistant, or a teacher's assistant, who worked in the school system: In my eyes, the roles that people of color are carrying out in schools, day-in and day-out, are just as important as a teacher, principal or politician. Without them and their work, the school environment would not function.

In the graduate program, we were a cohort within a cohort. Thankfully I had that experience. I just felt like when I was in the Sapsikwala program, there were some twenty-odd Native American educators who were pursuing the same dream, trying to envision the same mission that was set before them. That support definitely led to my success.

 

Bekah:

Once you became a teacher, how did you find support?

 

Marty:

As a first-time Spanish teacher, I was living in Anchorage, 3,000 miles away from everything I was familiar with. I quickly became friends with the school secretary, the custodial staff, the people who were holding down the "service" positions within the school. That made my time there bearable. I also was a very gregarious person; I reached across different departments and found friends in the math, special education and English departments. I tried to make sure that everybody knew that I was here to not only be an educator, but also to make those connections that would ultimately make me feel like I belonged in the building. They did an excellent job at Mears Middle School in Anchorage.

But if we were to analyze the teaching staff by race, there were only a handful of educators of color among close to 80 staff members. Most of the them were working in the world language department and or in the Indian education program.

 

Bekah:

I love that example about how you just built community so you could stay.

 

Marty:

And I had to.

 

Bekah:

You're from a culturally and racially blended family. How has that affected your approach to teaching?

 

Marty:

My dad worked in agriculture for 30 years. My mom, the only one of eight in a Native American household who graduated high school, has been extremely impactful. They've both affected my approach to teaching because I feel like their stories are often left out of text books; they're left out of examples; they're left out of conveying a message that the work that they put in to the system is ultimately as important as any other profession out there. I will often reference my dad and my mom when I teach and when I bring up certain concepts, especially talking about strict parents or Latino experiences. My students truly understand and love and have validation from that perspective.

 

Bekah:

Your mom is from a Native tribe and your dad was born in Mexico?

 

Marty:

My mom, myself and my daughter, we are from the Klamath tribes. We're of the Modoc Tribe, and my dad is from a little, little place in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. His town is called El Mezquite Grande. He came when he was 12 or 13 to the United States and has been working in agriculture ever since. He taught himself how to be a mechanic. He can barely read or write but he can tear apart huge heavy machinery and diagnose a problem and fix it. He is self taught, which is incredible. Such resilient genes reside in myself and my daughter, but don't ask me to fix anything. I will save that for the experts.

 

Bekah:

What's kept you in education all these years? What makes you hopeful for Oregon's education system?

 

Marty:

You know, I will say, I always think back to the Sapsikwala program and their vision and mission of getting indigenous educators inside classrooms to teach indigenous students and other students of color in a way that is missed by the majority of the teaching field. I wanted to stay true to the mission, and they invested a lot of money in me to become an educator. Even though they only asked us to make our repayment for a few years after we received our degree and our license, I sometimes have a hard time letting go because somebody has invested money in me. I was given an opportunity, and I feel grateful for it.

I also feel like what keeps me in my current position is my department. I couldn't ask for a better department, and when we spoke about my community that I formed in Alaska, I've been creating this community in every position since. I feel like I have a community at my high school. I don't have to explain myself when I am upset regarding something I just heard or some micro-aggression that I just had to deal with. They get it, and they don't only get it in real life, but they're able to convey that "it" in a different language as well. I think it's remarkable to know that the community, the department, has helped me stay in a difficult environment.

What originally hooked me at my school has kept me there: the students. I saw a lot of students of color who were poor on the socioeconomic scale, but they were rich in knowledge and they were so wealthy with grit and they wanted so much for their family. They wanted so much for their community, and they were determined to get it. Knowing that I helped them keeps me hopeful and fuels my desire to continue in the teaching profession.

 

Bekah:

How do you help your students navigate experiences that they have, that they feel are discriminatory or they feel are microaggressions?

 

Marty:

I've had a lot of students come up to me, and they say, "I see you as that angry uncle who will go to bat for us. I see you as that strict father that we know, if we step out of line, we will get reprimanded or get corrected in some way." I will put my title on the line when it comes to helping students sort and navigate a system that was not designed for them.

I have many students bringing problems and dilemmas to me that are often never repeated to anybody else, other than maybe their parents. They share with me and I bring it to my administrator's attention, and I think it's important for them to know that they have an advocate, an ally and a teacher on their side. I won't be the one to tell them, "I think you're stepping in the wrong direction or you're overreacting to something that wasn't meant to be big." I will always try to validate their perspective and their concern. I try to give them the tools that they need to be successful, in order to graduate on time.

 

Bekah:

We have big gaps, right? We have made some progress but the achievement gaps between students of color, English Language Learners, students with disabilities, they've remained consistent. We've never reached a point where we've had a representative teacher workforce that matches the students. But we do know that where there are highly skilled representative teachers, there is positive achievement for students of color. We do know representation and culturally responsive teaching works, we just haven't gotten there yet.

 

Marty:

I think that a lot of what is achieved by having students taught by educators of color is often something that is hard to measure. How do we measure that positive cultural shift? How do we measure the ability to reflect on your own person, see a teacher leader who looks like you, can understand your struggles and because of this, know that you're not confined to entry-level positions?

I feel like I would have been content working alongside my dad in the fields and his message to us always was, "Don't ever feel like this work that I do is below you." It is something that is needed, and my dad is probably one of my biggest fans.

I remember when I graduated with my bachelor's degree, he used to tell everybody, "Oh my son's a licenciado." Licenciado has a double meaning: It could be a lawyer or just somebody who has a formal degree. It was almost like that was his entry point into many conversations. "My son is a licenciado; he has this degree." I carry my dad and his story with me, on my shoulders, and I guess he vicariously tells his story through me.

It's beautiful to know that there are so many stories out there in this world that have never been told, they've never been taught in a public forum. It is disheartening and it's sad that classrooms have excluded the stories, cultures and histories of so many of our students. I think all kids, regardless of color, deserve to hear these diverse stories and they also deserve to be taught by a qualified individual who loves their job, a teacher who's passionate about kids and what they bring to the table.

 

Bekah:

Thank you for doing what you do, Marty!

Marty Perez is an accomplished educator; he’s been teaching for almost a decade at both the middle and high school levels. He is dedicated to the teaching profession, dual immersion programming and closing the achievement gap.

I’m standing inside a cabin, a wooden structure too sturdy to be called a shack but with enormous gaps between boards where the mud has worn out. I’m thinking about the bed in this room: Who got to sleep in it? How many of them shared it? Was it even comfortable? The view out the back is of a canal that was dug to keep the ground from flooding — this is swamp land, after all. Our tour guide has reassured us that the resident 6-foot gator, Buford, would probably stay out of our way today because it was too cold for him, and I’m wondering: Did they have to contend with alligators on top of everything else?

The cabin is an original Whitney Plantation structure. It has four rooms, two in front with a double-sided fireplace to warm both and two in back. Inside are a few beds, a spinning wheel, a single chair and a table for eating. It was home to up to 20 people at a time, so there was never any privacy. It strikes me as a sad place to come home to.

By contrast, the “Big House” is a broad structure with bedrooms upstairs, sitting and dining rooms downstairs, and galleries on both levels and both sides. It actually isn’t that impressive in size, and I remember Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil.”  The house is built in a style called Creole cottage: two levels, with rooms only accessible via the galleries. The thing that stands out most about this house is the way the rear gallery functions as a panopticon.

Passion project

Whitney Plantation was opened to the public in 2015, a passion project of retired lawyer John Cummings and the brainchild of historian Dr. Ibrahima Seck. The museum cost about $8.6 million of Cummings’ personal money and took over 15 years to build. I first read about it in 2015, when The New York Times published an article describing the museum as “both educational and visceral.” This assessment, I would say, is apt. Whitney Plantation is America’s first museum of slavery and slaves, and it has changed the region around it. There are many plantations along the “German Coast” that are open to visitors and double as event venues, but until Whitney Plantation, they focused on the white masters’ homes and lives exclusively. Today, the Laura Plantation, a nearby museum focused on Creole women, has a permanent exhibit dedicated to the people who were enslaved there.

The tour begins in the gift shop and visitor center, where guides greet guests before taking them through a series of monuments and historical buildings. Guests are allowed to visit the grounds only as part of a structured tour, as museum guides work hard to control the narrative. They keep those enslaved at the center while they educate visitors about the region, the technologies and the buildings on the site. Many museum employees are former visitors who fell into an uneasy love with the place, and I can understand why. As a historian, I can appreciate the way the museum balanced historical specificity and accuracy with a deeply humanistic intimacy. The emphasis is on names and experiences, not statistics and dates, and I came away having learned and felt in equal measure. I credit Dr. Seck with knowing just how to strike that balance (and I credit John Cummings with knowing enough to begin by hiring one of the world’s top scholars on the subject).

Slavery on the human scale

When we use the word scale in philanthropy, we usually think taking something to its largest and broadest possible configuration. At Whitney Plantation, I got a sense of something I can only describe as the human scale of slavery: shrinking my view of the system down to the level of the personal. I began to appreciate the amount of manpower it took to produce hundreds of thousands of pounds of sugar or to build a levee, using 18th century technology. I understood more profoundly that American slavery was, as Dr. Seck put it, by design “a transfer of technology and know-how experienced for many centuries on African soil” and that “Cajun” and “Southern” foodways aren’t just influenced by West African culture — they are West African.

My thoughts are still unsettled about this experience. I glimpsed something I cannot, yet feel compelled to, describe. I recorded on my heart Lucien and Marie Therese, two babies who share my birthday. Their names were inscribed on the Field of Angels, a memorial dedicated to the 2,200 slave children who died before the age of 3 in St. John the Baptist Parish. I crouched inside a metal prison cell where runaways and those destined for the auction block were crammed.

I also stood inside Antioch Baptist Church. The church was built by the Anti-Yoke Society, an organization founded by freed black people in St. James Parish 8.5 miles down the road, to pay for Christian burials. They built the church as a place where they could worship the way they wanted to, as free men, women and children, and later “biblicized” the name to Antioch. It is the first stop on the tour. Beautiful statues of children, representing the hundreds who were enslaved along the German Coast, sit and stand at intervals in the church. The children are the heart of this museum, and guests are constantly reminded that the violence of slavery was violence inflicted on children.

Finally, I have stood in a garden that memorializes the bravery of the 1811 German Coast Uprising. This memorial is optional, not part of the tour. Visitors are asked to remain silent, and the only sound is the gentle tinkling of wind chimes. Roses bloom on either side of the central installation, a series of sculpted heads on pikes. After the largest slave insurgency in American history, those captured were beheaded and their heads were displayed along the river road. Disturbing and controversial, it too is a part of the history of this particular place.

The area around Whitney Plantation feels a world apart from the vivacity and wealth of New Orleans. It sits amid a dozen correctional facilities in Southern Louisiana. It’s hard not to see the continuity between these systems designed to imprison black people and exploit their labor. The panopticon lives on. Places like Whitney Plantation put a human face on imprisonment and guide us all toward a more empathetic future in which reparations are not only possible, but imperative.

Without a doubt, I would advise everyone to visit Whitney Plantation. As America’s first attempt to deal with the realities of slavery, it gives to the visitor much more than the toll it takes. Until you get there, I recommend the following readings and videos:

• Dr. Ibrahima Seck’s monograph, Bouki Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750-1860, published as a companion piece to the museum itself.

• Essence reporter Dana Blair tours Whitney Plantation with Dr. Ibrahima Seck in Were Slaves Really “Well-Fed”? Tour the Whitney Plantation and Find Out. This video is a must-see, as it takes the viewer through several key memorials and spaces.

• The New Yorker’s video of the creation of the Whitney Plantation, America’s First Museum Dedicated to Telling the Story of Slavery is great for understanding what’s possible and what it takes to build a museum of this type.

• “Building the First Slavery Museum in America,” by David Amsden, is the article that started it all for me. The New York Times, Feb. 26, 2015. The Times also has a video with 360-degree views of the site: “Southern Slavery, Unsanitized,” by Chris Carmichael, Samantha Quick and Neeti Upadhye.

— Rhiannon

This sculpture at the Whitney Plantation represents the longboats that took captives from the shores of Africa to the slave ships.

We open Meyer's 2018 Annual Funding Opportunity today! Our annual funding call invites applications from organizations, programs, initiatives and collaboratives determined to make systemic changes so the Oregon we live in and love becomes a state built on a foundation of equity. This is the third annual funding call since we redesigned Meyer's programs in 2016.

We launched our new funding program after 33 years as a mostly responsive grantmaker. In those days, the awards reflected a wide array of need based on the myriad requests we received. In Oregon, there's hardly a town without a sign marking a library, a food pantry or community gathering space this foundation helped to fund. Our impact was often just that tangible. Today, the impact is no less real, but it aims to be deeper and more profound.

Since our redesign, Meyer's grantmaking has grown significantly more focused. We've made 342 annual funding opportunity awards in the areas of community, education, housing and the environment since 2016, totaling $40 million. Through those grants, Meyer has supported the work of the Oregon For All coalition, a group of social justice nonprofits working to prevent policies that harm immigrant communities; the efforts of Craft3, working to establish a clean water loan program that helps Oregon homeowners, many of them low-income, repair or replace failing septic systems; the goals of Reading Results, aimed at increasing the number of benchmark level third-grade readers among historically underserved students in Multnomah County and the Nancy Devereux Center, guiding people experiencing homelessness in Coos County to find and keep permanent housing. These and hundreds of other awards reflect the innovation, intention and impact of organizations committed to removing barriers and creating pathways toward a more just and equitable Oregon for all.

As I wind down my role as Meyer's chief executive officer, I'm extremely grateful to our nonprofit partners who have leaned in with us over the past two years to help shape our equity-based funding portfolio frameworks and share their insights on equity, policy and systems change, innovation, risk and opportunity to deepen Meyer's impact.

I feel a great sense of hope for the future of Oregon as a result of our state-wide partners' dedicated work and collaboration. It is a true privilege and honor to support and work shoulder-to-shoulder in moving your good efforts forward.

We eagerly look forward to reviewing applications received this year!

— Doug

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