The Street Roots ambassadors grew animated discussing the topic of ranked-choice voting.
They considered how this method of voting could motivate people to vote because they might feel like their vote carried more weight since, even if their top candidate didn’t advance, their next preferences would be considered.
The ambassadors — people who have experienced, or are currently experiencing, homelessness and also work as Street Roots vendors — gathered last Thursday for a workshop led by Sol Mora, civic engagement manager for Coalition of Communities of Color to gather information for the charter review process , an every-ten-year effort to review the city’s charter.
Mora has led these workshops to make sure voices that are often left out are, in fact, let in.
In addition to Street Roots, she has also worked with people gathered by the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, Hacienda CDC, Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, Africa House Center, Pacific Islander and Asian Family Center, Slavic and Eastern European Center, Muslim Educational Trust, Native American Youth and Family Center, Next Up, Unite Oregon, Urban League of Portland and Verde. The public can sign up to comment at the Feb. 17 charter review meeting .
Six Street Roots ambassadors were masked up and brimming with ideas as they talked with Mora about what it would mean to have city council representation at a neighborhood level, and the importance of elected officials knowing what mattered to their constituency.
Several people ruminated on the kinds of structures they had witnessed in the towns where they had grown up when they considered whether Portland should move to a city-manager-style government.
The fact that Street Roots ambassadors are involved in these discussions is part of an intentional shift we’ve undertaken as an organization. Too much policy that impacts the lives of unhoused people is written without their input, so we are focused on insisting elected officials view unhoused people as their constituents. This includes gathering information through surveys to inform policy.
Most of our efforts have been channeled through the ambassador program, dreamed up and managed by Raven Drake, who began as a vendor herself. At the beginning of the pandemic, Raven was homeless, looking out for other people camped along the interstate to make sure they could isolate should they contract COVID-19. She had gathered medical supplies and set up a quarantine tent. Soon, though, she was helping the Multnomah County Health Department write guidelines for unhoused people and organizing Street Roots vendors to get that information and supplies out to people camped around the region.
Now, once a year, vendors can apply to be one of ten ambassadors who undergo trainings and then engage in outreach, surveys, as well as “civic circles” with community members that emphasize learning from each other. Ambassadors also work with local college students.
The Poor People’s Campaign, launched by Martin Luther King Jr. and reinvigorated in a contemporary movement co-chaired by Reverends Dr. William J. Barber II and Dr. Liz Theoharis, highlights the significance of organizing an estimated 140 million poor and low-income people to vote.
To do so would be about “Waking the Sleeping Giant ,” as they named their report showing where they organized low-income voters to get out and vote in 2020. They saw statistically significant upticks in voter turnout.
Voter outreach “around an agenda that includes living wages, health care, strong anti-poverty programs, voting rights and policies that fully address injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy can be effective across state borders and racial lines,” the report declares.
Street Roots is focused on voter outreach locally. During the 2020 election, Street Roots ambassadors went out on the trails to help unhoused people register to vote.
We remind elected officials unhoused people are their constituents who have necessary feedback. So we’ve put particular effort toward surveys that can gather that information . It’s not a matter of simply tossing up an online survey and calling it done; there are too many barriers to this approach.
Instead, our ambassadors hit the trails to reach people experiencing homelessness.
Ambassadors are paid for conducting these surveys, as well as leading outreach and trainings, through specific contracts and grants with 99 Girlfriends, Meyer Memorial Trust, the Oregon Community Foundation and the City of Portland Office of Civic Life’s Constructing Civic Dialogues and Seed Grant initiatives.
Our first effort in this regard was a survey gathering information for the Portland Street Response pilot, “Believe Our Stories and Listen ,” in 2019. During the first few months of the pandemic, we surveyed people on their preferences for temporary shelter and housing , as well as asking people living unsheltered what they needed to inform the implementation of the Metro Housing Services measure .
We did all these surveys with Portland State University’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative and other grassroots organizations. It’s been an important partnership. PSU HRAC can help us construct and evaluate surveys that we implement. In addition, a survey reported on for The Oregonian by Nicole Hayden was conducted by Street Roots ambassadors. The survey showed 91% of the 300 respondents surveyed experienced a camp sweep, and of those, 95% said they hadn’t been offered other services before their camp was swept.
Ultimately, without hearing directly from the people who are impacted by policies, too much guess-work is driving policy making. Unhoused people's voices need to be hear, and they need to be recognized as constituents.
As Shailly Gupta Barnes, the Poor People’s Movement policy director writes, “They are the sleeping giant yet to be pulled into political action, but who hold the potential for us to realize the nation we have yet to be.”
Correction: An earlier version of this column included a quote from an Oregonian article attributed to city spokeswoman Heather Hafer. The Oregonian updated the original article to correct the quote and its context, adding a note to the article. We updated this column to reflect those changes, removing the quoted passage from Oregonian.
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