At Street Roots, old materials have a new purpose
This article was orginally published in Street Roots, an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots.
DIRECTOR’S DESK | The Village Building Convergence helped us reimagine our space from refuse, and the symbolism isn't lost on us
by Kaia Sand | 14 Jun 2019
Village Building Coalition volunteers built an archway in the Street Roots office with fallen branches. From left: Timothy Kennedy, Laquida Landford and Seed Sprouting. (Photo by Kaia Sand)
Timothy Kennedy gathered a circle of volunteers in the Street Roots office to launch a second day of renovation. He explained that as a natural builder, he draws from what is abundant in the region. Maybe it’s rocks or mud or fallen timber. In a city with wealth, it’s our refuse, the windows and doors torn down all around us.
The wealth is only increasing in Portland. According to the city of Portland 2018 State of Housing Report, in the past five years the share of households earning $100,000 or more increased from 23% to 27%. So the symbolism of the materials was not lost on us. We built our space from the detritus of a wealthy city while we strive for unhoused people to have doors and windows – attached to places to live.
Kennedy gathered those volunteers on Sunday, June 9, the last day of the Village Building Convergence, 10 days of more than 30 community-built projects, music and workshops on placemaking. The convergence is an annual project of the nonprofit City Repair.
At Street Roots, volunteers constructed offices from windows salvaged from boat docks, doors collected at the ReBuilding Center.
Au Nguyen affixed an alder beam to the Street Roots office space.
They built frames from fallen alder logs gathered on the Manzanita family land of Street Roots writer Helen Hill. They packed cob walls from soil dug up to make space for bodies in local cemetery. We are never far from the dead at Street Roots – too many people die on the streets, and we insist on honoring them in our work.
This spring, Helen Hill painted a lipstick-red, glittered sign proclaiming the kitchen in the vendor office “Francine’s beauty parlor,” to commemorate our beloved late Francine Park where she frequently bedazzled her face with mascara and lipstick. It is fitting that the soil comes to make space to honor the dead, because our work is built from stories and love and legacies of those who come before.
Volunteers renovated our office space only just over a month since Mark Lakeman – a key organizer at City Repair, Village Building Convergence and Communitecture – visited Street Roots to plan this community effort.
But it was 20 years since he met Bryan Pollard, one of the Street Roots founders, who invited him to “these organizing meetings with a group of people trying to do something extraordinary,” as Lakeman told Helen Hill in an interview Street Roots published last year.
“(Pollard) could have said, but he didn’t use these words, that they are regenerating the place where justice begins. That was the start of Dignity Village. I was invited to just come listen, and I was absolutely compelled to return over and over again.”
And for the next 20 years, Lakeman has been involved in supporting villages for unhoused people, repurposing the materials lying around and drawing upon the skills and dreams and resourcefulness of the people living outdoors.
Many people on the streets are great recyclers and waste pickers, often repurposing waste into structures for camps. Unhoused people leave a small carbon footprint, but they are on the front lines of a climate in turmoil, breathing in forest fire smoke, seeking refuge in winter downpours under overpasses increasingly filled with inhospitable boulders.
Lakeman brought Robin Koch, a designer with Communitecture, to draw up plans, and Timothy Kennedy, who Lakeman described as a national treasure in the movement. They patiently worked with our staff as we bounced to and fro, tag-teaming to deal with breaking news, racing into the vendor office as voices ricocheted out. They saw our staff in our raw and frayed form and suggested they could soften the sound with clay-painted walls and textile, and shepherd light through the office by building walls with repurposed windows. Robin drew up a plan that brought elements of their village concept to our workspace.
Now I look at the gathering spaces they created and feel hopeful. The little newsroom in the northeast corner of the office has, as its cornerstone, a brick of newspapers that supports an alder pole. I think about how this spring, senior staff reporter Emily Green walked in the office door again and again after interviews with fire, county and city employees, after sitting in on 911 sessions, piecing together logistics and costs for the Portland Street Response, and I wonder what will come next. Twenty years in, we’re just getting started.
I recently had a conversation with Street Roots vendor Jaison Kirk, on a KBOO show he hosts and Somya Singh produces. We marveled at how Street Roots enlivens human interactions through the exchange of news on black-and-white newsprint – the equivalent of the vinyl record; an analog form.
“Having the vendor out there takes it all the way back to the paperboy,” Kirk said.
A newspaper exchanged on street corners matters and, seen afresh, acquires a new urgency. A theme emerged in our conversation: We circle back with new vision.
And so it was apt that is how our office spaces were renewed – with old materials given new purpose.
Lakeman has been with us since the beginning, when Pollard invited him to be a part of Dignity Village. And then, when we needed renewal during our 20th year, he was there again – the whole community was.
As a nonprofit, that’s how we survive — the kindness of volunteers, the ingenuity of partner organizations, the contributions of donors. That’s why our fund drive is so intrinsic to our operation. This is how we keep it all going, printing the paper, staffing the office, keeping filtered water flowing for vendors in these hot, hot days.
We still need to raise $25,000 by June 30. Please find the envelope stapled inside the June 14-20 issue of Street Roots, or go to streetroots.org/donate.
From our office built by the goodwill of the community and the doors that were left behind to a budget built in part through contributions made by all of you, we are a community organization, determined to be creative in the face of adversity, focused on solutions in the face of great struggle.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.