Opinion | A new section in the guide lists services for people exiting incarceration
GET YOUR ROSE CITY RESOURCE GUIDES
Pick up Rose City Resource guides by visiting our office at 211 NW Davis St. in Old Town.
Three counties. Twice a year. 100,000 booklets per printing. 162 pages. 3 inches by 3 inches.
The summer edition of the Street Roots Rose City Resource is out , this time in pink that syncs up with Barbie outfits now the rage, and quickly moving out of our office to community partners for distribution.
Street Roots prints the booklet twice yearly in the summer and winter to keep entries updated for the changing seasons of extreme weather.
The Rose City Resource guide is about connectedness, explains Sophie Maziraga, who manages the process — from updates to editing to design. Her focus is on “community connectedness.” The booklet is designed to fit into the pockets of people who use the services it describes. The objective is for people to find the services they need.
When Maziraga updates the guide twice a year, she tests each phone number to make sure it’s the most direct one to reach the service, which needs to be free for people. She also looks at how accessible the service is. Is it reachable on transit? Will this service be around for at least six months? Do people have a good experience with this particular organization? Is the service available during the hours they proclaim?
She aims for people to “actually hear a voice” — and not just “ringing nonstop,” which is too often the case for people who spend much of their days just trying to survive.
Her goal, she tells me, is for people to hear less of the word ‘no,’ or ‘I don't know how to help,’ and more of ‘let's check into things.’”
Rose City Resource is about reducing barriers for people experiencing poverty.
The guide is older than Street Roots. It began in 1995 in the pages of the Burnside Cadillac, the predecessor to the Street Roots newspaper, as listings of shelters, legal and job service, clothing resources and tuberculosis testing. The last issue of the Burnside Cadillac was published November 1998; the following month, it emerged as Street Roots. For the first few years of Street Roots, the listings were described as the “Poor People’s Guide to the City of Roses.” By 2001, the listing was permanently renamed “Rose City Resource.”
These old listings function like a fossil record of services for people in poverty. Soon the public will be able to look back on this information when the University of Oregon completes a digitization project of Street Roots archives for its Historic Newspapers database.
In 2007, Street Roots pulled these resources and began publishing the guide as a separate booklet, and by 2010, moved from printing once to twice a year to make sure resources were as current as possible.
Maziraga began leading the Rose City Resource effort in 2020, attuned to communities and resources that the guide needs to better serve. One such community, she determined, was people exiting incarceration. Street Roots frequently receives mail from people in prisons who seek the guides before their release.
“This is the first round that we even have the word ‘prison’ in the guide,” Maziraga said. “I'm happy this is the case because people coming out of such predicaments like that oftentimes have no social connections or safe places to sleep or even know where to get clean underwear.”
Re-entry services is a new listing alongside the staples — such as shelter, housing, clothing, counseling, employment, health care, pet care, meals, legal services, various kinds of testing, recovery services, rent assistance and more.
“The beautiful aspect to the guide,” Maziraga said, is “just being able to connect people to what they want and what they need.”
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. 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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