Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. For the Clackamas Service Center, which provides low-income and homeless services, necessity arrived unwelcome last year in the form of an early morning fire that gutted its Southeast Portland facility.
Staff rebounded from the July 2017 fire as quickly as possible. They worked out of a construction trailer for a year, and a large, temporary tent was set up, along with a food truck, so that warm meals could be served. But the center’s main building remained closed for more than a year, and many services had to be suspended.
In a lot of ways, the fire became a blessing in disguise. The Clackamas Service Center’s staff used the year for strategic thinking and planning about how the agency operated and what needed to change to better serve their clients. As a result, many aspects of the agency have changed, and there are now plans for creating new programs that not only help the agency’s homeless clients survive the day-to-day challenges of being homeless, but also help them toward eventually moving back into their own home.
“We re-envisioned everything,” executive director Debra Mason said. “It sounds like a really weird thing to say, but it was almost what we needed. I know that our members suffered and I’m not happy about that. But it was a massive luxury to be able to just create the space the way we wanted to and make the changes.”
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The Clackamas Service Center is the only social service agency in Southeast Portland near Southeast 82nd Avenue and the Springwater Corridor area, a place where hundreds of homeless people camp. JOIN, the outreach and housing agency, is five miles to the north, and My Father’s House, a Gresham-based agency, is eight miles to the east.
“It’s a huge resource desert out here,” said center Program Director Michael Boldt. “And there’s really not much shelter out here at all.”
The Clackamas Service Center is often the only agency that its homeless clients – many of whom camp along the Springwater Corridor – can rely on for warm meals, showers, clothing and other services.
In any given month, the center serves close to 700 people. The agency’s clients make up a slightly different demographic than the social-service agencies in central Portland: many are Russian or Asian immigrants, and a significant proportion are not homeless, but simply deeply impoverished.
Mason and her staff re-envisioned the Clackamas Service Center with an eye toward providing its clients more autonomy, more dignity and a sense of peace from the daily chaos of their lives.
The center historically was a day center, a place where people could come and spend any length of time. Mason said that is no longer allowed. Some clients, she and Boldt said, would become bored and agitated. Fights and arguments would break out. “It was an unhealthy environment,” Boldt said.
Physically, the Clackamas Service Center has undergone a dramatic facelift.
The former church has fresh coats of paint inside and out, new flooring, office space for staff, and a new commercial kitchen with appliances.
A desk near the entrance was installed, so clients coming into the center’s day space are now greeted by staff and checked in. Previously, Mason said, people came and went as they pleased, which made it difficult for staff to keep track of who was in the space and when.
A ramp was built at the front of the people, so people using wheelchairs and walkers can now enter through the front entrance. Previously, people used a ramp in the back to enter through the back door, which Mason said added to an atmosphere of chaos. “It was just a disaster,” she said. “Now, everyone comes through the front.”
Some of the biggest changes concern how the center helps its homeless clients access food, both through the meals the agency serves on site and through its food pantry.
Meals are served six days a week, up from four days a week. Before the fire, the Clackamas Service Center’s kitchen was too small to cook meals. Instead, volunteers would bring in meals that had already been cooked and prepared. People would line up with paper plates and cutlery, serve themselves, sit down and, if they wanted seconds, return to the counter.
The new kitchen is larger, with commercial appliances and a dishwasher. Meals are now cooked on site, and because the kitchen now has a dishwasher, real plates and silverware are used instead of paper plates and cups.
Clients are served by volunteers who deliver food from the kitchen to seven round tables set up in the day space. It’s more café than soup kitchen.
The general atmosphere during mealtimes was chaotic, and, depending on how much food volunteers brought, could run out. “We would have to scramble to make something else,” she said.
Alajmi, who oversaw the changes to how the meals are provided, said that she and her volunteers now have more control over meal preparation, balancing dietary needs, portion sizes, and ensuring that there is enough food to serve everyone who shows up.
Now, she said, “we get the plate right the first time. (They’ll) get a fully balanced meal and it’s enough of a portion.”
Mason said the atmosphere during mealtimes has noticeably changed. “It creates much more of a calm,” she said.
“All you’ll hear are forks clinking on plates,” Alajmi said. “People get to slow down.”
The Clackamas Service Center’s food pantry, which serves about 300 people each month, was also redesigned.
Previously, clients would fill out a slip of paper detailing what kind of food they wanted – beans, rice, yogurt and so on. The slip would be electronically sent to the pantry, which is in the basement of the service center. Volunteers would fill the boxes with the requested food, then the client would take the food box away.
It presented a variety of problems, Alajmi said. First, the boxes would sometimes weigh close to 40 pounds, which made it difficult for homeless people on foot or on bike to carry the boxes away. And clients did not necessarily have a lot of choice in the quantity of food they received.
Now, the Clackamas Service Center uses an “open distribution” model for its pantry. Still located in the basement, all the food – canned food, rice, grains, frozen meat and prepared dinners, fresh vegetables – are openly stocked on shelves and coolers. Clients pick out the food they want, and they also choose how much.
“This is obviously much more dignified,” Mason said. “It’s like when you and I go shopping. The intent was to make it as close as possible (to that).”
All in all, Mason said, the changes are having a palpable effect on the service center’s clients. “The level of stress in our members is so much lower,” she said. “You can tell just by the look on their faces that they feel safer.”
Ric Simpson, 75, a volunteer, agreed. He noted, at the end of a meal, how people bring their plates and cups to bus tubs near the kitchen to be washed. “We didn’t ask for that,” he said, adding that it’s one example of how the center’s clientele seems to be treating each other with a little bit more patience and kindness.
Boldt said more new programs and changes will be added in the coming months. Clackamas Community College has offered to hold classes in the agency’s day space, and he hopes to offer art therapy and cooking classes. Clackamas Service Center still owns the food cart it bought to serve meals while the center’s main building was under construction, and he hopes to offer a job training program for clients who might go on to work in food carts.
He also wants the agency to start offering more robust programs related to getting its homeless clients off the streets, including workshops on getting subsidized housing and getting onto waitlists. “A lot of our population has nothing going for them,” he said. “They aren’t on any lists.”
Very few of the center’s clients talked about the fire and the center’s year-long closure in any detail, as if it is a fact they wish to put behind them. Many of them, however, uniformly share stories of being welcomed at the Clackamas Service Center, no matter their circumstance.
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Cory Elia, 29, grew up in outer Southeast Portland and knew about the Clackamas Service Center well before he would need the agency’s services himself. Just out of high school, he dated a girl whose family was “impoverished,” he said, and he often joined them during visits to the Clackamas Service Center to get clothes, food, and a hot meal.
Elia said he worked for Fed Ex when, a few years ago, he injured his back. He refused to take the opiate medication he was prescribed, choosing instead to self-medicate with marijuana. The drug was not yet legal in Oregon. A co-worker told Elia’s boss.
Elia was fired. Unable to get another job due to what showed up on a background check, he became homeless. He started using methamphetamine, developing what he describes as “a horrible addiction.”
Camping near a MAX station, he remembered the visits to the Clackamas Service Center with his girlfriend.
“I came right up here,” he said. “I was a known criminal and drug addict in this neighborhood. They never turned me away, for anything.”
He started coming to the center every day. Dinnertime, he said, “was a block of time set aside to come in, grab dinner, catch up with everybody.”
Elia was homeless for three years before getting back into housing and entering recovery. He is now a junior at Portland State University. Much of his coursework completed, he still comes out to the center nearly every day to volunteer in the agency’s clothing closet. “I still see people who come here that I used to see on the streets. They’re still friends of mine,” he said. “There’s nowhere else I would rather be.”
Richard Pruiett, 48, has been homeless on and off for much of his life, and, like Elia, was drawn to the Clackamas Service Center even when he had housing. “Even when I had a place, I would come down and have coffee and doughnuts in the morning with the people,” he said. “It would welcome people who had places to live or people were homeless. It didn’t matter. They were helping everybody.”
He now camps near Reedway and 104th. But he’s trying not to call it that. “Living,” he said, instead. “Staying alive.” He said he is “greeted every morning” by coyotes. He walks three miles from where he camps to the Clackamas Service Center.
He does not like all the changes Mason and the rest of her staff have made. He said the day space now echoes, and that the new offices make the space smaller. But he still comes every day.
He carries the schedule of the service center’s hours of operation and services with him wherever he goes. The creases are nearly worn, the edges of the orange and yellow half-sheets of paper worn. And, despite how much the former church space has physically changed, he sometimes still sees people he first met on the street years ago.
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