Opinion | As construction continues at Street Roots’ new building, I am reminded compassion is key
His hands lifted to the sky, the man was chanting. He did not seem to notice me or any of the people in hard hats from O’Neill Construction Group and Finish Line Concrete Cutting who were working to remove concrete from the basement.
The man had wandered near the site at the corner of Northwest Third Street and West Burnside Street where Street Roots is renovating a building to double down and expand our programs. As the workers lugged broken chunks of concrete to the dumpster, it wasn’t safe for the man to stand near the live construction site.
I knew I needed him to move. I stood with him for a moment, acclimating him to my presence. Jose, a journeyman for O’Neill Construction Group, walked up.
“He’s blessing the site,” I offered.
“Thank you for blessing the site,” he said to the man with the kindness I’ve seen again and again from Jose.
In the Catholic tradition in which I was raised, it was Good Friday. The man seemed to be doing the sign of the cross, so I reciprocated, almost falling into the rhythm. I began to move toward the gap in the fence, pursuing a delicate balance. I knew not to position my body so that the man would feel trapped. No one likes to feel trapped, and this becomes particularly important when engaging people who are behaving in ways that are difficult to predict. Someone might panic.
And yet I wanted to guide him out. Luckily, he seemed to latch on to me a bit, moving as I moved. He was not otherwise acknowledging me in a way I could understand, continuing to bless everything. As I moved away from the fence, so did he, and Mishele Martin, the project manager, smiled and waved from the building’s upper window, relieved because she works to keep everyone safe, which has expanded with this job to people on the streets.
It has been a powerful experience working with O’Neill Construction Group. Owned by Maurice Rahming and Ali O’Neill, they are a leader in minority contracting. O’Neill and Rahming devote a great deal of time to supporting pre-apprenticeships, apprenticeships and to pursuing equity in the trades.
While we’ve been planning this project with them for several years, we are only a month into construction, with about seven months to go. It’s a tight corner full of challenges, only blocks from our current rented space.
During the first week of construction, vendor program director DeVon Pouncey, Street Roots custodian Nettie Johnson (who has trained as a peer support specialist) and I led them in a de-escalation training. We talked about how to hold one’s body to reduce a person’s sense of threat — showing one’s hands, creating space so each person can easily exit, breathing so that a person might mirror that calm. We provided them the information for calling 911 for Portland Street Response, and we are all on speed dial, so to speak.
Ultimately, we’ve been moved by how committed this team of construction workers is as they learn the names of people who are camped nearby and extend compassion while they, ultimately, pursue a complex construction project in the heart of Portland.
One morning recently, Francisco, the job foreman, worried that people camped outside the gate might be in the line of danger as a truck hauled in a dumpster. Street Roots staffer Gary Barker began to talk to the people who were camped there. The biggest challenge, he learned, was that it was raining, and one man had a hole in the bottom of his tent that he had precariously plugged. If he moved the tent, water would rush in. So Gary worked with him to create a plastic lining, a temporary fix since we didn’t have quick access to tarps, and the man was able to move his tent further down the street.
The construction crews start early, in the dark of morning, before the traffic on Burnside Street is too thick.
Several people have died in the area recently as a result of drug overdoses. Others have been revived by naloxone, lives thankfully extended.
Vendor program coordinator Haley Grieco-Page revived one person, kneeling down to press the medicine to the person’s nose in the manner previously demonstrated to her. They lived. When I saw her only minutes later, her pupils were wide with adrenaline, and her body transformed in order to respond to an emergency.
“You just saved a life,” I said to her. Many of us have been saying this to her, feeling a bit of awe at the sacredness of humanity when it’s just so fragile.
That Good Friday morning, I walked with the man as he blessed buildings and blessed the channel of air through which we walked. We walked all around Old Town. First, I wanted to walk with him far enough that he wouldn’t turn back to the construction site as they tossed rocky chunks of concrete into a dumpster.
But I kept walking through the neighborhood as he blessed it. He walked with me wherever I turned, never really acknowledging me, the skies brightening with dawn. I thought of all the people suffering, the cruelty of fentanyl that dosed people into a brutal endurance of daily suffering and moved them closer to death too. It was a quiet morning, some people still asleep in their sleeping bags, some standing in torqued positions.
We walked until I turned one way and he another, continuing to bless this neighborhood and all its people
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