[caption id="attachment_4255" align="aligncenter" width="1024" caption="Customers gather for services at the Clackamas Service Center "][/caption]
Clackamas Service Center struggles to stay open as demand
in the community continues to rise
By Joanne Zuhl
Staff Writer
Drive too fast through the commercial din of Southeast 82nd Avenue, and you will miss the simple sign: Clackamas Service Center, this way. The faded former church building anchors the lot on this dead-end road, where people gather outside, the conversational and solitary, on this Tuesday morning. For many, it is a bittersweet destination.
“It’s not where I saw myself,” says Lisa, who didn’t want her real name used. She sits in the main hall of the center with a numbered tag, waiting for the call that her emergency food box has been assembled in the basement below. “But I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do for my family.”
For nearly four decades, the Clackamas Service Center has done what it had to do as well – for the people in need in its community, and for it to function as a distribution center of donated food, clothing, hot meals, health care and good will. But in its 38th year of operating a multi-purpose service center for the poor and homeless — in a county short on such provisions — the center’s operators are finding the demand now financially overwhelming to the point of closure. In the past three years, the center reported a 60 percent increase in the number of customers coming to its doors for assistance, and a 50 percent increase this year over last. The mobile clinic parked in its lot, provided by Outside In, is booked solid for three clinic sessions every week. Bread shelves are scoured daily by the unemployed, the elderly and the homeless. And the need for emergency food boxes, once a periodic cycle, is now at a sustained level nearly exceeding capacity.
“What really changed is that we used to see a lot of construction workers or seasonal workers who would come in when things were tight and off season,” says Executive Director Andrew Catts, the only full-time employee of the center. “That’s not the way it is anymore. Now we’re hearing, ‘I’ve lost my job. I’ve lost my home. I’m living out of my car. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never been in this situation before. I’ve never had to ask for help before.’”
In the past year, the center went from filling 270 food boxes per month to 350 to 370 per month. In April, it gave out 400 food boxes, the bulk of the contents provided through the Oregon Food Bank. “We’re at service capacity. In the past couple of weeks, more and more, we’re asking, are we going to have enough food to keep doing this?”
The center is seeing more people like Lisa. This was Lisa’s third time at the center, each time to pick up a food box for her family; canned goods, bread, nuts and, on good days, fruit. She’s married with three children, and while her husband works, her job at a day care center has been cut back to only two hours a week. (People who no longer have jobs can’t afford day care, she says.) Combined, she and her husband no longer make enough to cover the bills and feed the family with a mortgage still over their heads. Many of her friends, she says, are in the same situation. They exchange awkward encounters at the various churches and other charities that provide stopgap assistance for struggling families.
“It’s just kind of embarrassing,” Lisa says. “They’re embarrassed. You’re embarrassed. It’s a pride thing.”
But what’s distinctive about the Clackamas Service Center, this reporter having visited many service providers in the Portland area, is the energy of rebound, the message that with this bit of a springboard, however coarse it may be, I will be able to restore my life. The attitude here is that this isn’t an endgame.
“I have a goal,” says Lisa, who wants to go to school to be a dental hygienist. “I’m just hitting a little bit of a bottom right now.”
Unless you need its services, or know someone who does, you might not ever have heard of the center in the crook of SE Cornwell Street and 80th Avenue. Beyond the concentrated networks of Portland, Clackamas County at large is a bustle of commercial districts lapping into residential neighborhoods, with a rural community — including many Eastern European immigrants — peppered throughout.
The Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lists the area of Clackamas County as a health professional shortage area. Resources for health care and other services are far and few between — listed on a business-sized card that the center hands out to customers in need. The Clackamas Service Center is the largest independent social-services organization in the county, with Oregon City the nearest hub in the county for other resources.
According to the center’s statistics, the majority, more than 60 percent, of its customers live within the immediate area — within 10 miles. Most are from Milwaukie and Happy Valley, says Catts.
“A lot of people don’t know we’re here,” Catts says. “You may not need these services, but a lot of your friends and neighbors do. And hundreds of people rely on it to stay alive.”
[caption id="attachment_4257" align="alignleft" width="681" caption="Customers sign for their food boxes, assembled in the basement of the Clackamas Service Center. The boxes are compiled of donated goods and food from the Oregon Food Bank."][/caption]
The center itself is currently fighting for its survival as well. Operating on an annual $85,000 budget, the center is running out of resources to stay open. With one and a half staffers, it relies on volunteers, many of them with their own background in poverty and homelessness, to prepare food boxes, fix meals and distribute services. Clackamas County has pledged some support, but its also calling on the community to donate to the center. Catts says it takes about $450 a day to keep the center open and operating, and they’re looking for enough support to keep the doors open into 2011. For every $1 donated, according to Catts, the center produces $8 in food and services, with the help of donated time and goods.
But what people need most, and what the center’s volunteers work to provide, Catts says, is hope.
“What I hear a lot from most people is they have nothing else. Hope is all they have left and if you take that from them….” Catts says, with a pause. “We try to, as much as we can, to keep that hope alive and be that one part of the system that works.”
In the corner of the main hall, a woman watches her 4-year-old twin grandchildren while her daughter signs up for her first emergency food box. Her daughter returns with a ticket with a number on it. She’s buoyant and optimistic, despite having lost her job, having her gas cut off, and being on the verge of losing her housing at the end of the month. She’s 34 and raising the children on her own. Out of fear of the children’s father, she declined to give her name.
“I’m going to make something happen,” she says. “Something good is going to come out of this. Every arrow is pointing toward a new change.”
Her mother is supportive, and brought her daughter and grandchildren here to get assistance. “These people are going to help her,” she says.
[caption id="attachment_4258" align="alignright" width="473" caption="Michael Hansen, a recovering addict, finds friendship and community at the center."][/caption]
In 2005, Outside In launched its mobile medical van, and Clackamas Service Center was one of the first sites selected. The van now runs three clinic sessions per week in the center’s lot, each capable of accommodating 10 to 12 patients. Customers sign up inside the center when the doors open, and wait for their appointment with Dr. Tanya Page, a family physician who has worked in the van since 2006. The demand has forced the van to keep a limit on who they can see.
“There are people we turn away every day because we’re full,” she says.
“Right now, the only way a new patient can get in is if they’re totally homeless,” Page says. “The vast majority of them are homeless and the vast majority are uninsured.”
In the past 12 months, 600 patients visited the mobile van for health care. Many of the patients have chronic ailments, Page says, making them highly susceptible to respiratory problems, heart attacks and strokes. They are diseases that are preventable but are aggravated by homelessness, Page says, and many homeless in Clackamas County are extremely isolated, she says.
Over the past five years, the Outside In clinic services have tracked the people they know who were homeless and are now deceased, Page says, finding that the average age of death among the homelss is 47.
In the mobile van, Page hears more than perhaps the typical physician, which she credits to the resources of Outside In. From the view of the customers at the center, Dr. Page is a “saint” they say.
“There’s an idea that we can be trusted and I think people tell us a lot,” Page says. “I learn a lot about what’s going on in people’s lives. I feel like people are much more honest because they just have nothing to lose by the time they see me in a van.”
Page says she leaves the center at the end of most days with an appreciation for the people she sees and inspired by their will to keep going and work through their situations. But other days are more difficult. For a population so isolated from other resources, health care alone is not enough to change their lives, she says.
“I see a big difference when they’re engaged in health care, and then they get other services, disability assistance or into a housing program,” Page says. “If you can bring health and housing opportunities and potential job training or vocational training, rehabilitation — it can make a dramatic difference in their lives.”
If the center closed, Page says, the relationship built with her patients would be difficult to hold on to. The draw is the center, and that’s why the van is there.
“This is our most successful community partnership where we have a van, because there are a lot of things that draw people to that site and draw them there time and time again,” Page says.
“I’m not sure how we’d keep up with those patients we see there.”
A couple, waiting to see the doctor, sits on a bench outside. The woman, who used only her initial J., has her arm in a sling and has been homeless for two years. Her partner, Kevin, says they’re waiting on her Social Security disability insurance to be processed because she is unable to work. For now, they are sleeping out on the Springwater Corridor, trying to stay out of the way of police and gangs. But they say they are having to camp farther in the woods to stay out of sight. The center is their refuge, their doctor’s office, their living room and where they volunteer when opportunities allow.
“This place really helps us a lot,” Kevin says. “I come here to sit and rest, to get something to eat. It’s a place to sit during dinner.”
At the door to the building’s lower level, where the food boxes are picked up, several older men and women, dressed in suitcoats and skirts, wait for their boxes. They are immigrants from Central Europe, they speak little English, and they pack their food in suitcases to disguise their reliance from the community. Instead, they walk away looking like they just returned from a weekend wedding.
Inside, yet another woman, older than the others, is signing up for her first food box. Yamile (pronounced Yah-ma-lee) has been homeless for 15 years. She tells the volunteer interviewing her that she’s on food stamps and receives disability assistance, but by the end of the month she’s out of everything. But like so many others there, she wears a brave face. And she’s smiling. This is a leg up, a little assistance, during a bad period.
The volunteer, Tiffanie Cantua, sees new faces like Yamile every week. And they all say the same thing, she says. I’ve never had to do this before.
“This is something new for them.” Cantua says.
“I’ve seen people I’ve gone to school with,” Cantua says. “I didn’t know they were struggling like this.”
After 43 years of drug and alcohol abuse, Michael Hansen is still struggling, but now he’s sober. He points to the old church building and credits the center for helping him get clean a little over a year ago. He lives in a sober Oxford House, is in a program to stay sober, and he’s trying rebuild his life, he says. He still comes back to the center almost daily. When he first came back after being sober, he says he felt scared.
“I was afraid of failing,” he says. “I come down here to say ‘hi’ because I appreciate this place. I come down here whenever I can. It’s a good place to be.”
Only now, he says, he gets to be a good influence on people instead of a bad influence.
“I get to show that people can make it out,” Michael says. “This is a haven for me. Most of the folks here are just lost. They’re not bad people, they’re just lost. This place is a lifesaver for many people. It’s that little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Where you are somebody, there is still hope.”
[caption id="attachment_4261" align="aligncenter" width="579" caption="A man walks away from the Clackamas Service Center with his food box contents packed in suitcases. Eastern European immigrants, who use the center, work to hide the appearance of being in need."][/caption]