For Allen Butera, Street Roots isn’t just an income opportunity. It’s work that helps make his recovery process possible.
“I’m more focused on my recovery right now than anything else,” he said.
He’s been staying in a clean and sober facility and participating in a six-day-a-week program since February.
“Street Roots is great because I can choose my own hours,” he said. “I choose how long I want to go out there, and I’m not tied to it.”
Allen’s biggest motivator to start his recovery process is his strong desire to advocate for others. Allen has a mental disability, and he hopes to help others with disabilities and bring understanding to those who have no experience with mental illness.
“Being mentally handicapped, you seek ways to feel better,” he said. “I mean, everybody wants to feel better, and it’s unfortunate that many people with mental disabilities, they turn to drugs or a lot of bad things to comfort themselves.”
A lack of understanding is what Allen stressed most as the problem that holds people with mental disabilities back.
“People don’t understand,” he said. “A lot of people don’t live with those thoughts or those disabilities and you can’t blame them. But it’s all over the country, all over the world.”
Allen believes that people with mental disabilities largely go unrecognized and untreated in our society. He wants to help change this.
“The obvious is people just completely disregard somebody with a mental disability as crazy or as worthless, or will never be a part of society or anything, and that’s the shame, that’s the sad part.”
His mother is another motivation to Allen in seeking help to begin recovering. She is terminally ill and also has a mental disability. He moved to Portland from Chicago nine months ago to be with her.
“She’s the one who basically brought to the light that not only can I fix myself, but I can try to help other people too,” he said. “She showed me that by not only guiding and pushing me in the right direction to get treatment — she does that for other people also.”
Allen isn’t sure yet exactly how he will advocate for others, but he’s worked with the National Alliance on Mental Illness in the past, and thinks that it’s a “wonderful organization advocating for mental illness rights.”
“I can’t obviously help everybody in the world, but if I can even help just one person feel better about themselves or their mental illness or anything,” he said.
Street Roots is one way Allen is immersing himself in the surrounding community.
“Anxiety’s a big part of my mental disorder, and (vending) is really pushing down the barrier for me,” he said. “It’s not forcing me to talk to people, but it’s helping me to talk to people. It’s helping me to just be more vocal, be more social.”
He enjoys the people he gets to meet and talk to while he’s selling the papers.
“It puts a smile not only on the vendor’s face, but on the people who purchase the paper,” he says.
You can pick up a paper and chat with Allen in front of Nordstrom on Southwest Broadway and Yamhill streets from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
