Check out our friend Allyson at Pacific Holiday on NE Fremont talking on Fox 12 about how she struggled during the pandemic and her clients stepped up to give back.
https://www.kptv.com/consignment-store-pacific-holiday-opens-its-doors-to-customers/video_2b86f3eb-b9ed-5b68-8f0d-1ec0eb90f768.html
Portland police conducted a number of homeless camp cleanups in Old Town and Chinatown on Thursday, after announcing earlier this month they would carry out “high visibility patrols” focused on crime prevention. PPB said the patrols were in response to residents’ perceptions of being unsafe in the neighborhood.
Police Chief Jamie Resch said the patrols aren’t merely to keep downtown clean.
By Molly Harbarger | The Oregonian/OregonLive
At night, Carolyn Sterling knows she can hear him outside her tent. So she keeps quiet and keeps to herself.
If he comes around during the day, she’ll walk through the gathering of homeless campers who line one end of Couch Park in Northwest Portland as if she doesn’t have a care in the world, just to send him a message that he can’t get to her.
But she is also scared. Because he has before.
“It’s just hell,” Sterling said. “It’s bad, and I’m scared and there’s nothing to protect me right now.”
Sterling is one of dozens of people experiencing domestic violence — or rightfully fearing they might — who have become more visible in food lines but harder for social service workers to track amid the pandemic. Victim advocates say it is more daunting than ever for affected Portlanders find to find safety and security from abusers.
Services are still available. Crisis hot lines are still answering calls. Advocates have adapted as best they can to get those in domestic violence situations the help they need even when they can’t contact them in person.
But it’s gotten more difficult to provide victims and potential victims, mostly financially strapped women, an exit from a bad situation, and nonprofit and agency budgets are strained by the effort.
The Oregon Legislature’s Emergency Board allocated $2 million in extra funding to the domestic violence services system in April, a welcome infusion of cash. But it won’t go very far, according to workers in the system.
“We will go through it all so quickly,” said Fay Schuler, executive director of Portland-based crisis line Call to Safety.
Even before the stay-home order in mid-March, she struggled to find enough room in shelters or affordable housing for women needing to relocate to safety and funding for staff to assist them, Schuler said. The pandemic is just thrusting the problem into the spotlight.
“The system is broken. There’s just never been enough resources and we’ve never had a solution for domestic violence that’s survivor-centered,” Schuler said.
CALLS INCREASE AMID PANDEMIC
Call to Safety helps Oregonians experiencing domestic abuse. An advocate picks up the phone or responds to a text and helps create a plan for the person at the other end to stay safe or get out of a violent situation. That work is still happening — in fact, the organization extended its hours when people can call or text for help.
But these days staffers sometimes have little to offer other than a voucher to pay for a night in a motel or a train ride to relatives.
Schuler said people are tapping those funds more than ever.
The transportation offer was usually not a first choice before, but now people are agreeing to stay with family in Texas or California at a rate she hasn’t seen before. And they are blowing through the motel vouchers.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Call to Safety has used its entire annual budget for motel vouchers, and the need is only increasing. That’s about $300,000 worth of nights in motels.
Calls to the crisis line increased 10% in April over the year before, Schuler said. The “lethality” of circumstances — the chances of death if a person must stay in an abusive situation — has also increased.
Guns are in the home. Abusers are more consistently violent. Schuler and her colleagues judge those rates by the reports of people who call in.
Police data appears to back up their assertions.
For instance, Clark County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Brent Waddell said that harassment calls, a measure the sheriff’s office uses to measure domestic violence reports, have increased by about 40% over the former highest average for this time period. Calls about restraining order violations have also skyrocketed, mostly due to abusers who leverage the governors’ stay-home orders to convince the person who obtained the restraining order to let them back home.
Waddell is also serving as a case manager right now, so he is going through every newly filed arrest report and said it appears that domestic violence assaults have also increased.
The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office shows a 40% increase in felony domestic violence cases referred for prosecution from local law enforcement in April. While some of those cases might be older than the pandemic, there were more cases received than the past three Aprils.
And Clackamas County’s district attorney’s office saw a 47% increase in domestic violence cases last month over its April average.
That’s partly why Schuler must blow so much of her budget on motel vouchers. Before the pandemic, she said, her organization determined about one person a month seemed at high risk of death and needed to be in a motel right now.
Now, the average is seven.
STUCK ON THE STREET
Sterling, 66, lived in a motel room after leaving a homeless shelter, where she had been staying with her ex-husband. She acknowledges she had returned to her ex-husband in the past, a cycle experienced by many abuse survivors.
She was on track to get an apartment in an affordable housing complex.
She has a restraining order.
But agencies can’t put victims up in hotels for unlimited amounts of time, even when they think it’s best. Sterling said she left the motel because her ex-husband found her there and she felt unsafe. The apartment fell through because of the wreck her ex made of her finances, she said.
In March, just as the city was shutting down, Sterling got a tent from Rose Haven, a day center for cisgender and transgender women, and set it up just a block and a half away.
She said that it’s clear her ex-husband doesn’t mind ignoring her restraining order, but at least she can be close to the one place she feels safe and comfortable right now.
The community at Rose Haven is a small luxury for the women who gather outside of First Immanuel Luther Church in Northwest Portland. Rose Haven, housed at the church but not affiliated with its ministry, used to allow women to come inside and hang out for most of the day, but social distancing protocols have moved their operations outside and reduced the hours to 9 a.m. to noon.
The women can get a meal, pick up tents and sleeping bags and spend time with other women who are homeless or on the edge of it. Nearly all of them have also experienced some form of emotional, physical or sexual abuse either while living on the street or as the cause for why they are on the street now.
Dorothy Pepper walked out of her apartment one day in September after years of abuse by several partners. She had to leave everything, she said. Since then, she has received some medical help but the camping supplies and emotional support she gets from Rose Haven are about all she has.
She is frustrated that her only source of income now is what she can gather from holding up a sign asking for change while she waits for space in shelters or other services. Even with a cane, a painful hip injury makes it hard for her to traverse town and stand outside in lines at the places that are offering food or other services.
Christine Keery, a Rose Haven social worker who helps women experiencing domestic violence, tries to connect Pepper to as many places to get money, food and help as possible. But she feels she can offer little more than a sympathetic ear these days.
“It’s frustrating to see ladies not being able to find a safe place, because now they’re stuck in the loop of homelessness and poverty,” Keery said. “What got them here in the first place is domestic violence.”
Before coronavirus, she could at least reliably send women to one or two empty beds at a publicly funded homeless shelter that remained open at the end of the day. Now, she can almost never find a place inside, even when the circumstances seem dire.
Often, she all she can do is provides a phone for the women to dial Call to Safety.
“They come to us and what?,” Keery said with a defeated lift of her shoulders. “We give them a tent?”
Rose Haven domestic violence 4_30_2020
Dorothy Pepper became homeless when she left an abusive partner. She is now frustrated that she must ask for money on the street to survive, and is especially frustrated that the services she could receive for her medical and psychological needs are paused during coronavirus. Photo by Mark Graves/The Oregonian Mark GravesMark Graves
‘ALMOST AT A STANDSTILL’
El Programa Hispano Católico runs the only domestic violence program specifically designed for the Latinx community in Portland. It is so tapped out that people who call its crisis line are most often referred to other nonprofits that don’t have many Spanish-speaking staff.
That program, UNICA, is serving its clients virtually and has adapted as much as possible to the pandemic restrictions. But calls are coming at the same pace as always while shelters are either shut to new arrivals or slow to move people out, forcing those who can’t stay in an untenable situation into homelessness.
“Our communities of color especially have already been disproportionately impacted” by homelessness, said El Programa Deputy Director Brigitte Rodriguez. “When you add to that domestic violence or sexual assault, the pandemic — it’s a little more challenging.”
So the staff who answer the phone spend a lot of time triaging callers, connecting them to the services available in the meantime, moving them into motels and talking through back-up plans if the caller decides to stay with an abuser for the time being.
While the call load hasn’t gone through the roof, the severity of the circumstances has ratcheted up, Rodriguez said.
That indicates to her that when the stay-home orders lift, UNICA will receive an avalanche of calls from people who haven’t had an opportunity to get away from a controlling partner.
Alexis Robinson-Wood, director of development for domestic violence shelter operator Bradley-Angle, is preparing for that. Bradley-Angle’s shelter is technically admitting new residents, but as the only domestic violence shelter doing so, the unmet demand is stacking up.
The nonprofit’s staff are desperately trying to move people into housing from the shelter to open more beds, but that is as tough for the domestic violence system as it is for the homelessness system. Advocates struggle to meet with landlords and process paperwork fast enough. The flow in and out of the shelter has nearly stopped.
“The problem is not so much whether or not we’re open, but whether or not we’re able to have the space,” Robinson-Wood said. “Now, it’s almost at a standstill.”
A DOOR TO LOCK
Carolyn Sterling bought a phone at the end of April because she had a telephonic court date. She had to testify against her ex-husband in a case in which he was accused of beating her.
Dressed in all black and white, complemented by her tiny white companion dog Aft, she rustled out of her tent on the morning of the court date and marched her phone down to Rose Haven to charge.
Sterling talks confidently and fast, she makes no bones about how much marijuana she has turned to smoking to manage the stress of her daily life. She admits that she has gotten into conflict with some domestic violence service providers and feels let down by the system.
She apologizes for swearing when saying that she won’t be messed with anymore but means it that much. She’s gotten tough, she said.
But having a cellphone – which can let people she doesn’t want to talk to reach her — makes her a little anxious. And preparing to testify against someone she said has broken her arm, cracked her pelvis and punched her in the head felt a little bit more nerve-wracking as a disembodied voice than in person.
Sterling hopes that her case is successful but expects her ex will be back once he is released from jail.
She likely won’t feel safe until she has a door to lock, she said, but she hasn’t gotten to touch a doorknob much since the pandemic started, so that feels far away.
If you are experiencing domestic violence, here are resources mentioned in the story:
Call to Safety: 1-888-235-5333 or 503-235-5333
El Programa Hispano Católico’s UNICA program: 503-232-4448
Rose Haven: open 9 a.m. to noon, Monday through Friday, at 627 N.W. 18th Ave. in Portland
Bradley Angle
— Molly Harbarger
mharbarger@oregonian.com | 503-294-5923 | @MollyHarbarger
In the past few months, Oregon Harbor of Hope, with support from donors including OCF’s Oregon Community Recovery Fund, has distributed thousands of tents, sleeping bags, and face masks around the Portland Metro region. Its mobile shower and laundry trucks offer a rare opportunity for people experiencing homelessness to access hygiene services through the pandemic. And they’re working on longer-term solutions, too.
In the same collaborative vein that Homer Williams witnessed in San Antonio, Harbor of Hope partners with dozens of other service providers in the region and readily shares procured resources. Tents and sleeping bags are dropped off at Portland Rescue Mission, Rose Haven, Street Roots, and even as far away as the Troutdale Police Department. Surgical grade masks are given to area hospitals, while the non-surgical masks are distributed at campsites and to people working for nonprofit organizations. Homer believes in supporting other organizations engaged in work around homelessness. “There are so many good people on the front lines. The quality of people who work in this space—you just can’t believe it,” Homer recounted, quickly adding praise for his own team including co-founder Don Mazziotti, Lisa Marandas, Marissa Cade, Matt Bordonaro and Susan Gadotti. “This is a team effort.”
COVID has delivered a fierce economic blow, and it’s reflected in the increasing need. “We are seeing different faces at the trucks and in the food lines,” Homer said. “Some of these are people who have never been in a food line in their lives.”
People of color, already disproportionately impacted by housing insecurity, have also been harder hit both economically and by the health impacts of COVID. “We have a structural issue, and we need to address it. Everybody deserves a safe place to sleep, they deserve hygiene, healthcare, and food—those are the basics of life,” Homer said.
Read the full article here: https://oregoncf.org/community-impact/community-stories/hygiene-and-housing-how-oregon-harbor-of-hope-is-bridging-the-gap-through-the-pandemic/
Katie O’Brien, Rose Haven’s Executive Director talks about the intersection of poverty and trauma and how these issues are escalated during the COVID-19 crisis.
A story to inspire hope. Celeste came to Rose Haven when she was homeless and addicted. She returned in recovery with a newborn. She now works at another local non-profit and helps refer people to Rose Haven.
Watch her success story and learn more about Rose Haven here.
Thank you to GMS Media for the great video!
We are still watching the donations come in, and are confident we can reach our goal of $200K!
You can make a gift today and help us support our programs at makeitreign.org!
Check out some of the local press coverage of the event!
Watch Live footage from the event and interviews with Guests and BOD members on Fox 12
Watch Katie O’Brien explain nuts and bolts of Reigning Roses on KGW 8
Listen to Liz Starke explain Rose Haven’s Programs on Portland Radio Projects Community Voices
by Ericka Cruz Guevarra and Conrad Wilson OPB Jan. 28, 2019 5 a.m. | Portland, Ore.
Andre Gladen was shoeless and scared for his life when he knocked on a stranger’s door in Southeast Portland earlier this month.
He had come from the emergency room at Adventist Medical Center, less than a mile away. He told the man who answered his knock that he feared someone was trying to kill him.
Gladen was asked to leave. When he didn’t, the building landlord called 911, hoping police would come help Gladen.
Instead, Gladen pushed his way into an apartment. A struggle ensued. A Portland officer used his Taser on Gladen. That didn’t stop him. Finally, the officer shot Gladen three times, puncturing both of his lungs. Police say he was taken to Oregon Health & Science University, where he was pronounced dead.
His family says Gladen was blind in one eye, suffered from schizophrenia and had taken medication for bipolar disorder. The family also confirmed with Adventist that Gladen was at the hospital that morning, though what for remains unclear.
Almost seven years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice found that the Portland Police Bureau engaged in a pattern and practice of force against people suffering from mental health crises. The bureau has taken steps to improve how it responds to people suffering from mental illness.
Gladen’s death marked the third time in nine months a Portland officer has shot and killed someone who appeared to be in the middle of a mental health crisis. The Jan. 6 shooting renewed criticism of the Portland Police Bureau and how its officers respond to people experiencing mental illness.
The front of the apartment on Southeast 96th Avenue and Market Street where Andre Gladen was shot and killed.
Conrad Wilson/OPB
Yet politicians, mental health advocates and police say that law enforcement agencies have inherited a role they’re ill-equipped to play, yet too often do. In a system that works, people experiencing mental illness would receive the care they need before they hit crisis mode — long before police become involved.
Elected officials and mental health advocates say even the state’s most well-resourced region — the Portland area — is woefully inefficient and under-funded when it comes to maintaining the safety net for some of Oregon’s most vulnerable people.
Multnomah County leaders and mental health advocates say police shouldn’t have to respond to people in mental health crises as often as they do right now in Portland.
A better system would have more resources to catch people before they hit a crisis point; and structures to address both short-term mental health treatment — places for people in an immediate crisis — and longer-term options that help people learn to manage their mental health and live independently. It would also include more solutions to other problems that can exacerbate mental illness, such as the lack of affordable housing.
Portland and Multnomah County have never truly had such a comprehensive system.
“People think there was this ideal age where people get ideal care and everything was rainbows, puppy dogs and cotton candy,” said Chris Bouneff, executive director of the Oregon chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “It was so far from the truth it boggles the mind.”
Oregon used to rely heavily on big government hospitals to house people being treated for mental illness. But over the last 50 years, federal officials began to realize these institutions didn’t work and were too expensive. Oregon’s largest institution was found to have violated patients’ rights. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice determined conditions and treatment at the Oregon State Hospital violated the U.S. Constitution.
“We were warehousing people,” Bouneff said.
Federal policies slowly did away with such large public institutions, shifting the focus instead to private hospitals and community-based outpatient services. The idea was to steer people needing psychiatric help to doctors closer to home as a way to both save money and improve treatment.
In Oregon, deinstitutionalization accelerated in 1995 with the closure of the Dammasch State Hospital in Wilsonville. The state was supposed to put the money it had been using to run Dammasch into community housing programs for hundreds of patients, as well as private hospitals to treat people in crisis.
“However, those resources were never really fully diverted,” said Sharon Meieran, a Multnomah County commissioner and emergency room physician in the Portland area. “People were let out of the institutions, but there wasn’t anything to catch them.”
Today, despite changes and efforts to improve mental health care in Oregon, there’s still a lack of continuity in care. Patients don’t move smoothly through a logical system of mental health treatment and recovery, said Albert, whose Portland day shelter staff often encounter people suffering from mental illness.
Bob Joondeph, executive director of Disability Rights Oregon, said the state is still trying to put more dollars toward mental health providers, but the needs continue to outpace funding.
“It’s been happening slowly,” he said.
And there’s one more reason police in Oregon’s largest city end up responding to people suffering from mental illness: Portland’s housing crisis.
Multnomah County’s homelessness crisis exacerbates – and even creates – mental health problems for people whose worst days end up unfolding on city streets.
The lack of housing and the complicated realities of scratching out a life outdoors can increase one’s likelihood of encountering police.
“Especially for people who don’t have a place to live, you’re going to see their healthcare needs and perhaps their behavioral health crisis unfold in public areas,” said Sarah Radcliffe, an attorney with Disability Rights Oregon’s Mental Health Rights Project.
So police become the first responders to mental health crises. It’s a role officers have often struggled to fill.
Gladen, an African-American man who was visiting family from Sacramento, represents the worst case scenario. Police were called to help him. But had he survived, he may have ended up in jail — not a hospital or mental health center — for trespassing.
That’s the rub for law enforcement, who acknowledge the tools at their disposal are not designed for mental health treatment.
Andre Gladen.
Courtesy of Portland Police Bureau
“We don’t want to criminalize mental health, mental illness. That’s not what we do,” said Capt. Lee Eby, Clackamas County’s jail commander. “Unfortunately, as everybody has said, it’s become kind of a cliche: Jails are the new mental hospitals.”
Eby said that’s not the function of law enforcement and should not be the role jails play.
“That’s a big question for society,” he said. “As the public, the community, we have to decide how we want to handle that.”
The Portland Police Bureau, for its part, has tried to handle that by creating more tools for dealing with people in crisis.
Bureau leaders were rethinking their approach to mental illness even before the 2012 U.S. Department of Justice settlement. In 2013, as part of the city’s efforts to comply with federal officials, the bureau created a Behavioral Health Unit.
Teams are comprised of an officer and a mental health clinician who work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. The bureau recently expanded from three to five BHU teams.
“We function in more of a follow-up capacity,” said Casey Hettman, the acting lieutenant who runs the Behavioral Health Unit. “We really serve to do some follow up on the back end for individuals that are maybe more chronic or have more acute needs.”
BHU officers triage and assess whether they can assist in connecting people to mental and behavioral health services.
Hettman said sometimes that’s helping someone make a doctor’s appointment. Other times, it’s picking someone up and taking them to and from an appointment.
The behavioral unit gets roughly three referrals daily from patrol officers, Hettman said, and ends up working with about 500 people every year.
While BHU officers work to connect people to services, they’re not service providers. Much of the daily, face-to-face work of interacting and responding to mental illness falls to regular patrol officers.
Acting Lieutenant Casey Hettman runs the Behavioral Health Unit at the Portland Police Bureau.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra/OPB
All of Portland’s roughly 930 officers receive 40 hours of crisis intervention training, which covers how to talk to someone in a mental health emergency, how to spot someone in crisis and how to handle suicide threats.
Around 129 have an additional 40 hours of “enhanced crisis intervention training.” They’re the ones the bureau looks to when it receives mental health-related calls, Hettman said.
Even with more options and training, police say that they’re still not the best people to respond to a mental health crisis.
“Unfortunately, if you look at a police officer — the uniform and all the tools that are adorned on our persons when we’re at work — they’re not tools for mental health treatment or mental health care at all,” Hettman said. “But absent anyone else that’s capable of dealing with the situation as it’s occurring, we’re kind of the de facto individuals that are called to respond and help mitigate that crisis.”
Officers have access to a 24/7 crisis team of mental health clinicians through Project Respond, a partnership with Cascadia Behavioral Health. That program allows law enforcement in Multnomah County to call a mental health provider to assist at a scene. Clinicians responded to 2,410 calls last year. Portland Police made 629 calls for service, though other law enforcement agencies in the county also rely on the service.
Project Respond providers do deploy to the scene, but only after a police officer determines that someone is having a mental health crisis — something that can be hard to do in a tense situation.
“I kind of think of a proverbial waterfall, and we’re kind of catching people at the base of it when the crisis has run its course,” Hettman said. “We’re kind of there collecting the people at the bottom in the worst moments at the depths of their crisis where it would be ideal to coordinate and do whatever we can upstream to prevent them cascading off the waterfall.”
The police investigation into Gladen’s death and police conduct is ongoing. What’s known is that Gladen had a history of mental illness, and he was at the emergency room at Adventist Medical Center just hours before his fatal encounter with police.
Emergency rooms, like police departments, are increasingly called to handle acute mental health situations. And like police, ER doctors and nurses sorely lack the resources to do that well.
“They have become … that place where people in behavioral health crises end up,” said Meieran, the county commissioner and ER doctor. “I would say that our systems are absolutely not built around addressing the needs of someone who has severe, persistent mental illness.”
Meieran said ERs are the most expensive, least effective places for people suffering from mental illness.
Capt. Lee Eby is the jail commander in Clackamas County.
Conrad Wilson/OPB
“Unfortunately, as everybody has said, it’s become kind of a cliche: Jails are the new mental hospitals.”
Capt. Lee Eby, Clackamas County’s jail commander
For one, they’re largely designed around immediate, emergency care for physical crises — like strokes or heart attacks — and are not equipped with the specialists needed to handle mental health problems. So in many cases, patients who entered the ER in a mental health crisis end up being discharged without ever getting the long-term treatment they need.
Bouneff with the National Alliance on Mental Illness said intervention needs to happen earlier and at all levels. The idea of people in crisis ending up in jails or emergency rooms represents a failure in health care, he said.
“So somebody reaches crisis where their only choices are law enforcement and the emergency room,” he said. “They’ve reached that, by in large, because we’ve failed somewhere else in our healthcare system to prevent that person from getting to that state.”
To address holes in the system at hospitals, Portland-area providers worked together to create the Unity Center for Behavioral Health, a dedicated emergency room for mental health.
The center has 107 beds, but only for people with urgent needs. As is common with other emergency departments, Unity occasionally reaches capacity – known as “divert status” – and can no longer take additional patients. Unity has also struggled with administrative problems, and state investigators raised serious safety concerns about the center within its first two years of operation.
Unity’s existence has aided, but not solved, the situation.
“It’s just a part of the puzzle,” Meieran said. “Expectations were such that we’re going to solve world hunger; this is going to be the answer to everything.”
Advocates say one of the first steps in the path to adequate mental health treatment is stable housing.
“People don’t need to be institutionalized for years, but they sure do need a supportive, safe environment to get well, which is not going to happen in a month, or two months, or even six months,” said Albert, with the Rose Haven women’s shelter. “Might take years for somebody to be really able to rehabilitate and heal.”
Neal Rotman, Multnomah County’s interim Mental Health Division deputy director.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra/OPB
Where to do that remains an open question. Multnomah County officials say Oregon doesn’t have even one dedicated mental health shelter that will keep someone all the way through recovery. But they’re working on it.
Earlier this month, county commissioners authorized their staff to take a serious look at purchasing a 25,000-square-foot historic warehouse, valued at $4.3 million, in downtown Portland.
Neal Rotman, Multnomah County’s interim Mental Health Division deputy director, spent years looking for a building suitable for filling two critical needs – mental health care and housing – and focus on more sustained care led by people who themselves have recovered from mental illness.
“This will be something that people want to come to,” Rotman said. “It will be another alternative.”
If everything goes as planned, the new shelter could open by mid-2020. Advocates and local leaders alike caution against viewing the plan as a once-and-for-all fix.
Instead, they say, it’s just one more attempt to patch a hole in the system – another opportunity to pull people out of the cycle that too often ends in deadly encounters between police and people who needed help they didn’t get.
If you or a person you know in Multnomah County needs 24/7 mental health crisis intervention call 503-988-4888 or 800-716-9769.
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