Debut documentary highlights Portlanders working to end the homelessness crisis
Kelly Clendenon’s “Helpers” tells stories of homelessness, addiction, and struggle, including his own experience — and those who helped him along the way
Kelly Clendenon and co-director Joshua J. Kirby (above) filming “Helpers” at locations around Portland. Credit: Courtesy Photo by Kelly Clendenon
Editor’s note: This story discusses drug use.
A 13-year-old Kelly Clendenon sat in his room, the air thick with the scent of teen angst and weed.
It was noon on a Tuesday, and Clendenon was supposed to be in school.
Clendenon slipped a tablet of LSD he got from some local kids under his tongue and pulled out his sketchbook.
“Leaves are falling all around,” Led Zeppelin lyrics floated through the air. “For now, I smell the rain, and with it, pain.”
A warmth spread through his body, and he began tripping.
Years later, finding himself in Portland, Clendenon was 20 years deep into addiction.
“It’s a visceral kind of need,” Clendenon said. “Your entire life ends up being revolved around feeding that craving.”
Drenched, hungry and hollow, Clendenon broke into a nearby house. In five or 10 minutes, he changed his clothes, raided the medicine cabinet, and closed the door on his way out.
Little did he know, he left a sock with his DNA behind.
That sock would follow Clendenon to sobriety in his home state of Maryland, and force him back to Portland to serve a year in prison for burglary charges and three years of parole.
Clendenon’s experience with addiction is the subject of his debut documentary, “Helpers.” Released earlier this year, it won best social documentary and best student documentary at the 2025 Oregon Independent Film Festival, and was accepted into the Texas Short Film Festival.
The documentary is named for the organizations that help people experiencing addiction and homelessness in Portland, such as First Unitarian Church and Portland Street Medicine.
“What I’ve learned is that healing happens on the community level,” Clendenon narrates in “Helpers.” “We need compassionate neighbors that realize addiction isn’t a moral failing, it’s a disease that requires proper treatment and support.”
Clendenon was born in 1971 and raised in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland.
Clendenon’s mother, Jo, worked as a features editor before becoming director of public relations at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Her roles with journalism and creativity instilled in Clendenon a love for movies and the journalistic process.
Five years after Clendenon’s biological father left, Jo remarried. Clendenon’s stepfather is a Vietnam War veteran who was raised in Virginia by his coal-mining father. According to Clendenon, it was a classic case of “there’s a new guy in the house telling me what to do,” which caused Clendenon to start lashing out.
“Ironic, because fast-forward when I was an adult, and my stepfather is the one who ended up oftentimes coming to pick me up and bail me out of jail or take me to rehab,” Clendenon said.
His new stepfather was also Black, and Clendenon remembers hearing a lot of racist comments from neighborhood kids and getting stares in public.
At age 14, Clendenon’s mother sent him to rehab for the first time.
“It was honestly traumatic,” Clendenon said. “I was like, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why am I being sent away for six months? By my family?’”
Clendenon attended Frostburg State University in Maryland from 1992 to 1994.
After deciding college wasn’t the right decision, he moved to Los Angeles.
Jo had some connections in the public relations industry in Los Angeles, and Clendenon worked as a personal assistant to names such as Dick Clark, Dr. Dre and Brooke Shields.
After brief stints as a videographer in Washington D.C. and a jet ski tour guide in Key West, Clendenon moved back to Baltimore in 2011.
Clendenon coaxed his psychiatrist into prescribing him a multitude of painkillers and benzodiazepines — Dexedrine, Klonopin, Xanax and Suboxone — which Clendenon began abusing.
The addiction led to Clendenon being kicked out from his family home, taking a few hundred dollars, some pills and himself on an Amtrak from Baltimore to Seattle. There, he became homeless for the first time.
“I sometimes feel kind of guilty,” Clendenon said. “Because when I was on the streets, I developed a bond with people, and a lot of them that I met didn’t have the family support that I had.”
Growing up, Clendenon had family in West Linn. And the show “Portlandia” painted a utopian-like picture to him.
At the end of 2012, Clendenon drifted down to Portland.
In Portland, he didn’t have a phone or any money and remembers walking around the Pearl District and into Old Town. He frequented the Bud Clark Commons, where he could stay inside for a few days at a time.
During the rainy season, he checked in at the Union Gospel Mission or Central City Concern. He went to Hooper Detox over six times between 2012 and 2015.
Clendenon remembers getting Suboxone for detoxing, a prescription medication that dissolves under the tongue and blocks the effects of opioids. According to Clendenon, it’s crucial to the detoxing process. He could stay at Hooper for up to a week, charge his batteries, eat and sleep.
“I’ve been to countless detoxes, from Maryland to Florida to LA to Seattle to Portland,” Clendenon said. “It’s pretty embarrassing, but it was always necessary. I was a hard case.”
When Clendenon stayed at temporary shelters due to weather or exhaustion, he would check in at 8 or 9 p.m. and have to get up at 5 or 6 a.m. to vacate. It gives him a unique perspective when criticizing the city’s current homelessness response.
“I know it is a big issue right now because the mayor’s sweeping excessively and really focused heavily on temporary shelters, which really provides a barrier,“ Clendenon said. “It kind of pisses me off, because we need more permanent housing.”
On a sticky day in the summer of 2015, Clendenon found himself on a broken down bus in Redding, California, high on “goofballs” (injected heroin and meth). He begged his mom, Jo, for some money for the ticket and was on his way to San Francisco to “rinse and repeat.”
Wheezing and aching, Clendenon collapsed off the broken bus. He remembers the cops on the side of the road laughing because he couldn’t get a word out.
Clendenon had a collapsed lung, pneumonia, Hepatitis C and a multitude of other conditions. He strained against five nurses trying to hold him down. He was such a difficult patient, emergency room personnel called Jo and asked her to fly out immediately.
Jo flew out from Maryland, and the two of them took an Amtrak back to Baltimore. Clendenon couldn’t fly with the state of his lungs. He went to rehab again in Baltimore.
“And it stuck,” Clendenon said. “I basically lost 20 years of my life.”
Two years later, sober and living with a girlfriend, Clendenon got a call from a Portland detective. He was asked to turn himself in for burglary charges. He left a wet sock with his DNA in the house he broke into all that time ago.
Portland Police Bureau had U.S. Marshals fly him out on the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System, nicknamed“Con Air.” Clendenon did a year in prison. He had to stay in Portland for three years on parole. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Clendenon found himself stuck in Portland, sober, with nothing but time.
That’s how “Helpers” started.
After deciding to go back to school, Clendenon transferred his credits from Frostburg State to Portland Community College and then to Portland State University.
At the time, Clendenon began volunteering at First Unitarian Church. There, he met the social justice director Dana Buhl, who suggested they had space to start a project dedicated to providing showers and other hygiene care to homeless people in Portland.
He documented the start of 13 Salmon Shower Project and wrote a thesis on it.
Clendenon graduated from PSU summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history in spring of 2023. He then started a master’s in multimedia journalism at the University of Oregon in Portland.
Clendenon continued to work as the on-site coordinator of the 13 Salmon Shower Project while in grad school. Buhl had a connection at OPB’s Think Out Loud, where they invited Clendenon on as a guest to discuss his experience and the shower project.
Clendenon got everyone in his grad school cohort on board to film his appearance, and then they started filming interviews with other “helpers” around the city, including The Haven and Outside/In. Wes Pope, the head of the multimedia department at UO PDX and Fred Joe, the equipment room manager, helped with the gear and filming.
Kelly Clendenon (right) filming an interview with his mother, Jo, featured in “Helpers.” Reflecting on her experience with her son overdosing, Jo said the fact that his brain and body still worked, “is a message that you better do something with it.”
Joshua J. Kirby, co-director of “Helpers,” had the idea to film reenactments of pivotal times in Clendenon’s life.
“I had trepidations, but he handled it with such care, and he got one of our fellow students to play me — play a younger version of me — in the reenactment,” Clendenon said.“I trust Tracy, so I ended up letting him, and we ended up including it in the film.”
One focus of the film is the rise of the fentanyl crisis.
In an interview with Haven Wheelock, program supervisor for Outside/In, Wheelock said people often use heroin maybe three or four times a day, while those using fentanyl will use up to 25 times a day.
“Addiction isn’t a moral failing; it’s a disease that requires proper treatment and support,” Clendenon said.
With the momentum from “Helpers,” Clendenon stepped away from the 13 Shower Project and started working on his nonprofit, Common Lens Films. He hopes to continue telling stories about homelessness and addiction, informed by his own personal experience.
“Sometimes addiction ruins families, sometimes families come together to create survivors,” Jo Clendenon said in “Helpers.”
Upcoming screenings of “Helpers” are being held at the Portland Pearl Rotary Club on Nov. 11 and at Willamette View on Nov. 18. Visit commonlensfilms.org for more information.
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