Maddie Davidson is a Street Roots intern with Tivnu: Building Justice.
I departed from New York City to Portland on Sept. 1, knowing well that my gap year would be meaningful. I just wasn’t sure exactly how.
Now, gazing over my last eight months interning for Street Roots, learning about housing injustice and exploring my own values and identity, I’m starting to define the “how” for myself.
How did I get there?
After many discussions and internal monologues, I decided to spend the year between high school and college in Portland in a program called Tivnu: Building Justice. This is a Jewish social justice gap year program based in Portland that pairs participants with internships, holds educational programming, and trains us in construction to work with and for Portland’s houseless population.
In early September, my Tivnu supervisor reached out about an opening at Street Roots. The position wasn’t the front line. It’s not what you picture when you think Street Roots. It was development: back-end support and cleanup, deposits, reports, data entry — left-brain work. I hadn’t interacted with this type of job before, but it intrigued me nonetheless.
As exciting as it felt to work with an accomplished, grassroots activism-hubish nonprofit, I was hesitant about the nature and stereotypes of development work: hunched over a computer, little interaction with co-workers, no “real” work. On top of that, the pandemic meant that I was going to be working remotely, which I had never done before, instead of being present in the workplace. I understood that most of the Street Roots work is connection based, so not being present worried me about missing out on staff and vendor interaction.
I wondered what the year would look like.
Would I be able to form connections through a remote and computer heavy role? How can I find meaning in tedium?
As it turns out, the tedium was inevitable, but I found ways to infuse personality in those certain tasks. I had projects that let me interact with different sectors of the organization. In the Venmo reports I completed, I compiled and organized our customers’ Venmo payments and then sent them off to turn into checks for our hardworking vendors. There, I got a glimpse of some of the vendor-customer relationships through the note sections without getting the chance to meet them. One customer said, “I appreciate the kind service each week. Thank you.” Such simple words make my heart so happy. This experience helped me see the bigger picture of my work, which can be easy to overlook.
I’ve been able to learn in ways I wasn’t expecting, greatly due to my magnificent supervisor, Street Roots Development Coordinator Nina Lee. When explaining a work process, Nina dives deep into the “whys” of our work. Why this wording? Why that method? Why this amount? This practice is why I can understand and explain donor-bank relationships. We get the work done while having authentic colleague connections and learning an additional otherwise untapped layer of learning. The added context made it easier to get behind different projects and complete them more fully.
All throughout my internship with Street Roots, I’ve been working at Cascadia Clusters, a nonprofit that builds tiny-home village facilities while employing and teaching unhoused people in the process, helping them to gain construction trade skills. This year, we’ve gone to the C3PO camps to support villagers and build temporary housing options and spots. These two worlds collide quite frequently and feed into each other in ways I couldn’t have appreciated in the beginning. Construction lends me contact and context while Street Roots takes me behind the curtain of activism.
(Editor’s note: Street Roots’ newspaper and editorial department operate independently of Street Roots’ advocacy arms.)
We’re essentially addressing the same issue from two very different spots and perspectives. I got to see how they work together.
Over the last eight months, I’ve collected an important perspective on what it takes to be an activist. Much of the work happens backstage. The organizing and consolidating and spreadsheeting are what make an organization run and do the good that this world needs more of. Street Roots has departments focused on development, editorial, vendors, outreach and advertising. We need every piece of the puzzle to see a whole picture. Peering over the last eight months, I see clearly how the pieces all worked together to create a beautiful memory and manual for my future.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication 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. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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