Brent Snyder wants to help people bridge the gap.
“How do we transcend the gap between homeless and poor and an opportunity for a better life?” he asked. “Where do we find that ladder?
“If we look at the leadership that’s running every program, they’re people with college educations, who are empowered, from non-poverty backgrounds. If we only empower people who already have power, then things are never going to change.
“I don’t want to create a revolt. What I want to do is wake people up. We can have human-centered capitalism instead of corporate and class structures. The answer is to create unique opportunities to kind of circumvent the system.”
Brent has lots of ideas about how to help people up the ladder. Many of them start with Street Roots. The paper has helped him maintain his housing and even go on to college.
Brent is one of the original Street Roots vendors. He was with Street Roots from its origin as a fledgling newspaper called the Burnside Cadillac, published to help raise awareness and funding for a Portland organization called the Bridge School. For seven years in the 1990s, the Bridge School taught homeless people reading and life skills to help them get off the streets.
Brent got his GED from the Bridge School. He was one of the final graduates. When the Bridge School closed, the Burnside Cadillac continued. Brent was asked to serve on the Board of Directors.
Back then, the paper was run almost totally by volunteers, and it was far from the professionally published weekly that Street Roots is today. Vendors ran the office and then closed up shop at 3 p.m. to go out and sell papers.
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And Brent saw people change their lives. While he was serving as vendor coordinator, he recalls having to suspend a vendor who was drinking on the job. That vendor got clean and sober, started selling papers again, reestablished relationships with his family, and moved to the coast, where he is living happily now.
“That’s worth more than a million dollars,” Brent said.
“You gotta realize, when we first started, people told us we’d never go anywhere. But I told the board we didn’t realize how special we were. We talked about hunger and homelessness, and people were like, ‘Oh, that’s too big. We’ll never solve that.’ And I said, ‘No, we can solve it, by empowering, by giving them opportunities and options.’
“We developed a vision – everyone from the lowliest vendor to the managing director in the same room. What was so important to me was we put in the vision the concept of creating opportunities and empowering them to change their lives.”
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It’s created opportunities for Brent. After bouncing around in foster care for years in his youth, working at numerous minimum-wage jobs and being homeless three times, today Brent is finishing up an associate degree in computer information systems at Portland Community College.
School’s been humbling, he said. At 48 years old, he’s working hard to keep up with technology-savvy kids in their 20s.
“It takes me eight hours to do something they’re doing in two hours,” he said.
Diabetes has affected his eyesight, certainly a hurdle with a course of study that requires staring at computer screens. Yet he’s still maintaining a 3.0 grade-point average.
A degree creates more opportunities, he said. Someday he might want to travel, have a family.
But what’s also inspiring him is the many ways his degree might enable him to help homeless and poor people who don’t have a college degree.
“There’s so many different avenues that are not traditional, not like 9 to 5, having a phone number and an address,” he said.
“Portland Cable Access is free, and you can be certified for running the cameras. We could do a news program. Or what if we were to teach people to do video editing? Could we turn around and do a video blog, a day in the life of a homeless person, put it on YouTube, get enough views, bring in money. Or teach a guy to program so he could create a video game or an app.
“If someone comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Brent, I’d like to get off the streets’ or ‘I want to be the next managing director of Street Roots,’ I want to make sure that there’s steps in place to meet that goal.”
Once he graduates this fall, Brent dreams of using some of his new skills to create those opportunities. When he’s not busy with schoolwork, you can find him selling Street Roots by the Whole Foods at Northwest 13th Avenue and Couch Street.