McCoy Village is a nondescript apartment complex on the busy intersection of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Prescott Street. But walk inside its double doors and there’s a large room filled with a dozen kids ages 7 to 13 busy doing their homework.
This is the office of The Giving Tree, a Portland-based nonprofit dedicated to providing disadvantaged, low-income people access to the arts, culture and recreation.
Founded in 2006 by Wendi Anderson, the Giving Tree already serves at least 50 to 70 people a week. Anderson spends 30 unpaid hours each week visiting people who are moving from homelessness into single-room occupancy housing.
“When they’re in transition, they are given the basics,” says Anderson, 34. “A room with a bed, a dresser, clothes, food boxes—but that’s just surviving.”
“It’s the first time that they’ve had four walls around them,” she says. “It’s not the social environment that they’re used to, and they don’t realize what is out there for them.”
Anderson’s mission: to take those people out of their rooms to experience Portland—to First Thursdays, parks, the Oregon Zoo. The Giving Tree also provides a space for kids to come after school and do their homework. And in the summer, the Giving Tree hosts an all-day program with as many as 22 kids supervised by Anderson, who got into social services through her work as human-services coordinator for a property-management company.
“One of the most rewarding parts of my job is seeing their eyes light up when they recognize something…and ‘get it,’” she says. “They just aren’t surviving, they’re living.”
The Giving Tree aims to expand its scope in the future. But what Anderson is really anticipating is watching the kids she is working with grow up.
“I’ve helped a couple apply to college,” she says. “But it’s so hard to get older kids to come, because they’re like, ‘It’s not cool.’”
When she talks to the younger kids about college, she doesn’t say, ‘If you go to college.’
“I say, ‘When you go to college,’” she says. “And talk like it’s reality.”
FACT: Anderson will be helping the adults she works with learn how to cook healthy meals from the food boxes they get. She will be eating from the food boxes herself, to know more about the options they have. “I’m vegetarian and eat organic,” she says, laughing. “So it might be a little hard.”
Follow Neal Armstrong down a narrow staircase in the back of Northeast Alberta Street’s Community
Cycling Center, and you’re suddenly immersed in a singular world.
Hundreds of bikes of all makes and sizes and in all states of disrepair are everywhere: adult mountain bikes hung from ceiling racks, mountains of children’s bikes stacked on the floor, every open space filled with boxes of used parts awaiting a new life.
Amazingly, there is order amid all this chaos thanks in no small measure to the center’s 29-year-old volunteer and event manager.
Armstrong speaks affectionately of the many programs that will become homes for these bikes—almost all donated to the Center, where they are cleaned and refurbished before being passed along.
There is the Create a Commuter Program, in which low-income adults get a bicycle complete with lights, lock, helmet and rack to help with their commuting needs. Or Armstrong’s baby, the Holiday Bike Drive, in which every December, 500 bikes are provided to underprivileged children.
It is Armstrong’s job to organize these volunteer-fueled projects while creating an environment that feels rewarding to everyone involved.
By any measure, he has succeeded. CCC has built up a staggering volunteer base to help with its cycling-related programs—more than 2,000 people donated 16,500 hours of their time last year. But Armstrong, who has been with CCC for two years—after finishing a Peace Corps stint in West Africa—isn’t content simply with big numbers.
“I want to promote and provide volunteer opportunities that engage deeper than just coming in for a couple of hours,” he says. Armstrong sees volunteering, which he has been involved with in one shape or another since high school in Tucson, as a way for people to become more involved and invested in their community.
“This organization and my job are a perfect blend of everything I want to work for,” he says of CCC. “It creates opportunities for the community through volunteering, and it gets people on bikes, giving them the confidence and freedom to get outside.”
As a measure of the Center’s success, he points to the number of people who repeatedly volunteer, people with all different levels of mechanical skills who continue to spend their free time preparing the rows and stacks of bikes for a new life on the road.
“We’ve transferred the goals of the organization to the goals of the community,” says Armstrong, surrounded by bicycles in all directions. “People have a place here.”
FACT: Wondering if Armstrong was named for the famous astronaut? Don’t. He says his parents “just
really liked the name Neal.”
Not everyone’s job might involve poetry reading, a drag show and suicide counseling—all on the same night.
But as resource center supervisor for the Sexual
Minority Youth Resource Center, that’s all in a day’s work for Zan Gibbs. Since 1998, the 32-year-old Montreal native has focused on the Southeast Portland center dedicated to providing a safe and supportive place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning youth.
Gibbs has been at SMYRC nearly since it started, when there was nothing comparable in the Portland area. She sees an average each day of 40 to 80 at-risk youth age 23 and younger. And Gibbs obviously loves her job.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s been 10 years,” says Gibbs, who’s known around the center by such names as “Papa SMYRC” and “Zanimal.” “It’s a different experience every day.”
Gibbs is in charge of supervising the approximately 75 adult volunteers who run the place.
Her days at the center are as surprising as the kids who walk in. “You can never predict the stability or crisis level of anyone walking in the door,” she says. A typical day at SMYRC, she says, is one where she has to “wear 20 hats, have 20 arms, and 20 eyes…. Everyone needs to get their needs met, and everyone has different needs.”
Gibbs says the biggest reward of working at SMYRC has been her realization that “youths can do whatever they set their minds to, given the opportunity.”
Recently, this sort of inspiration took root in Gibbs’ life as well. Having suffered from asthma since childhood, she became so inspired by the progress of her LGBTQQ youth she decided to take part in an Ironman competition. And this past summer, with full support from SMYRC youths and coworkers, plus seven years of training, she completed her goal.
“This place is such a part of me… I can’t even imagine not being here,” Gibbs says. “I’ve learned more from the youths here than anywhere else in my life.”
The Center for Intercultural
Organizing in Northeast Portland looks like the scene of a party. Amid bright walls painted in orange and yellow, chairs are covered in boxes of fresh pizza and bags overflowing with candy.
But Kayse Jama, the center’s 33-year-old executive director, wears a pressed gray suit and a serious expression. Jama, a Somali-born Muslim, founded the center four years ago to counter the Islamophobia he felt mounting around him after Sept. 11.
All that pizza is left over from a party to kick off a letter-writing campaign encouraging grassroots organizations throughout Oregon to fight two proposed statewide ballot initiatives. One initiative would cut funding for English-as-a second-language classes; the other would require local government to cooperate with federal immigration officials.
The center has 105 members, half of whom are immigrants or refugees. It encourages participation in community organizing and local government because, Jama says, “We believe that the people who are affected by the issues should take a leadership role to solve those issues. We facilitate and provide the trainings for them to organize cross-culturally, allowing the community members to take charge.”
The issues Jama refers to—immigration reform, xenophobia and access to education—are familiar to him.
Jama left war-torn Somalia in 1998 and came to the United States, where he worked 12-hour days in San Diego without wages in exchange for room and board.
“I suddenly found myself a Black Muslim immigrant refugee in the US,” recalls Jama, who moved to Portland in 1999 because it was smaller and cheaper than San Diego and because he had a Somali friend here. “That didn’t give me a lot of space to feel empowered or respected. My goal is to prevent other immigrant-refugees from experiencing what I have seen and experienced.”
Jama encourages immigrants to become organizers and take free classes at the center to learn about civil engagement. The center is working with Oregon Action and Latino Network to create the Diversity and Civic Leadership Academy, where refugees, immigrants and people of color can learn leadership advocacy techniques plus the ins and outs of local government. The center’s yearlong academy will be an expansion of a six-week workshop already offered by the center.
“Portland is one of the whitest cities in the US,” Jama says. “Immigrants and refugees cannot survive alone, in our own ethnic groups. We provide a space where they can come together to organize and strategize to impact the issues that they are facing.”
FACT: Portland has an estimated 75,098 immigrants and refugees (about 14 percent of Portland’s population). The Center for Intercultural Organizing works with immigrants from 52 different countries.
