Scott, a homeless-rights activist and Dignity Village co-founder, does trash pickup for Ground Score and graces Street Roots’ chalkboard with his art
In the past couple of years, Scott Atkins has changed his life. He’s been doing things he never thought he could do and feeling feelings he never had before.
It didn’t happen by magic. But he can identify a clear turning point. It was on the last day of the weeklong Oregon Eclipse Festival. Music was playing; Scott was dancing. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see a person he’d admired for years. They said, simply, “I just want you to know you’re my favorite dancer at the festival, and I’m so glad I got to see you and tell you this.”
This was a person — Scott doesn’t care to name them — he had put “on the highest pedestal. I had no idea they knew who I was.” But in that moment, he knew that this person saw him as just as beautiful as he saw them. “That was the breakthrough. It was beyond a miracle, and I’ve just been riding that ride ever since.”
One day, Scott decided he wasn’t going to define himself based on his past.
“It was one of the scariest things I’d done,” he said, “because at that moment, I didn’t have an identity.”
So he set out to find an identity that worked. He watched people he admired, saw how they lived, and little by little took in and instilled those qualities in himself.
“And in doing so,” he said, “I’ve found a lot of tears have come, but they’re tears of happiness. It’s been really uncomfortable for this guy, but the best thing at the same time.”
One thing that hasn’t changed is Scott’s advocacy for poor and homeless people. Since the late ’90s, he’s marched in everything that had to do with homeless rights. He lived in a big communal Portland home with several other dedicated activists, many of them involved with the nascent Dignity Village. Among them were Jada Mae Langloss, known fondly as the unofficial mayor of Dignity Village. Jada Mae died in 2004, but thinking of her still makes Scott smile.
“I learned a lot from that woman,” he said. “She got up every day, put on her boots, and went out on the streets and talked to people. I learned to put myself out there in a way that makes me no different than anybody else, so that I can humanize with everybody.”
Scott was one of the co-founders of Dignity Village.
“My heart was always in that, but in a different way than it is now,” he said.
Today, he’s living in tents and shelters, but he continues to work for a better Portland. For years, he’s freelanced at events, cleaning up trash in exchange for keeping the recycling. He adopted a small stretch of land called Audrey McCall Beach near the Hawthorne Bridge, where he goes to reflect. He was picking up trash there one day when he met the director of Ground Score, a Portland organization that hires homeless people to pick up and sort trash and recyclables. She hired him on the spot.
GROUND SCORE: Organization puts homeless Portlanders to work for a fair wage
His first Ground Score assignment was leading a group of about 30 business executives to clean up an area by the railroad tracks on Southeast Division Street. They won a $100 gift card, which they presented to Scott.
“They said it was because I was such a genuine person. I started to cry in front of all of them,” he said.
Street Roots is a big part of the change in Scott’s life.
“I tell people it’s the little paper with the big message,” he said. “It saves lives, a life like mine.”
He sells the paper at Scrap PDX on Southwest Alder Street and Southwest 17th Avenue.
Scott’s taken over the giant chalkboard at the Street Roots office, updating it regularly with art and quotations that express his heartfelt beliefs. He draws portraits. Only a couple years ago, Scott didn’t think he could draw.
“I try not to place limitations on myself, and I realized in doing so, an amazing world opens up,” he said. “For me to be experiencing the things I’m experiencing at my age — I just turned 50 — it’s like beyond a miracle.”
What he’s learned, Scott said — from Jada Mae, from that day at the Eclipse Festival, from Street Roots — is that we never know whose lives we’re going to change.
“Do something positive, put something out there, and it could be someone’s life’s defining moment.
“Sometimes a little bit of contact is all someone needs.”
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