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Colleen Sinsky

Articles by Colleen Sinsky

  • Border diary: A moral imperative to save lives

    by Colleen Sinsky | 29 Dec 2016
    COMMENTARY | No More Deaths provides direct aid to desert travelers along the Mexico border, often operating outside of the official system — because ‘humanitarian aid is never a crime’
    Mexico-Arizona border

    The first time I came across vandalized humanitarian supplies in a remote part of the Sonoran Desert, I felt devastated. We’d been hiking all day to place lifesaving caches of water and beans in a corridor along the Arizona-Mexico border where hundreds of migrants die of dehydration and exposure each year.

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  • Witnessing the tragic fallout of our immigration policies

    by Colleen Sinsky | 3 Nov 2016
    COMMENTARY | Death and desperation on the border
    Nogales, Mexico

    The main street of downtown Nogales, Ariz., ends abruptly in a steel wall towering 20 feet above the colorful junk shops cluttering Morley Avenue. Historically, Nogales straddled the international border. Today, the town is bisected by one of the most militarized borders in the world.

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  • Hope & heartbreak: Syrian refugee crisis through eyes of a volunteer

    by Colleen Sinsky | 10 Dec 2015
    COMMENTARY | Colleen Sinsky is helping rescue refugees on the island of Lesvos
    Young refugee from Afghanistan

    I was driving my small rental car, full of fellow volunteers and supplies, during a beach patrol shift when we got the call about a nearby boat in trouble. The engine of the small wooden boat that 5-year-old “Sara” and her family were on had given out while crossing the 4-mile stretch of the Aegean Sea between Turkey and the Greek island of Lesvos, leaving the Syrian refugees on board to drift helplessly toward a dangerous coastline.

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  • The responsibility to speak up belongs to all of us who can

    by Colleen Sinsky | 19 Mar 2015
    Colleen Sinsky reflects on the 2015 Housing Opportunity Day at the state Capitol in Salem, Oregon
    Colleen Sinsky is a retention worker at JOIN, which works to help people experiencing homelessness secure and maintain stable housing.

    Most homeless people don’t care about politics. They just think that everything is "how it’s going to be.” 

    This was my friend Mike, a grizzled veteran of Vietnam, and years on the streets, talking. “They’re too busy or something, you know.”

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  • Interrupting Isolation

    by Colleen Sinsky | 16 Aug 2014

    My heart breaks each time I am listed as the sole “emergency contact” above a blank “next of kin” line on an apartment application. It is sadly not uncommon for people who have been homeless to lack even that basic human need: a reliable person to call when things go wrong. Of course I am honored and humbled to be the emergency contact for the folks I work with, but the fact that I am in that role as a housing advocate points to a larger issue of isolation among homeless individuals.

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Showing items 1 of 5 of 5.

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