PDF: Read Street Roots' full 2018 annual report
WELCOME to the Street Roots 2018 annual report. I am honored to have completed my inaugural year as executive director of an organization valued by people across our region.
More than 700 people struggling with homelessness and poverty earned an income selling Street Roots this past year. We’ve welcomed several committed and talented new staff members while benefiting from the constancy and leadership of long-term staff and board members. We’ve worked with extraordinary freelance journalists and photographers. Volunteers logged hundreds of hours. And people all over this city bought 10,000 copies of our newspaper each week, forging relationships with our vendors. Throughout our state and even farther, supporters read our news online and follow our social media. In a year of transition, Street Roots is remarkably stable and strong, rooted deeply in our community.
The newspaper is the enterprise that joins us together, and Street Roots plays an increasingly large role in our local media landscape. Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl outlines some of the year’s reporting highlights in her letter. This year, Jobs with Justice honored Street Roots with the Lucinda Tate Award for reporting that consistently breaks new ground.
We were also honored by Janus Youth Programs with the John P. Zuercher Award for “transforming the lives of people experiencing homelessness and poverty.” Our vendors earn an income selling Street Roots by buying the paper for a quarter and selling it for a dollar, a low-barrier way to support their lives. Street Roots vendors sell on street corners around the city, as well in Washington and Clackamas counties. We’ve expanded partnerships to get vendors to new posts, including with a number of faith communities. Some customers support vendors in additional ways, providing bus tickets, coffee, sandwiches and even assistance finding housing. Not only are vendors earning an income with dignity, selling a newspaper they can be proud of, but they are also interacting with people for whom their lives matter. These relationships make our community stronger.
We provide additional support to vendors through community partnerships. More people have transportation to posts, thanks to our partnerships with Biketown, Uber and Trimet through Ride Connection. We’ve engaged in a pilot program with Mercy Corps Northwest where a handful of vendors set up Individual Development Accounts that match fivefold their savings toward housing expenses. Care Oregon hosts Go Mobile Clinics in our office, signing up vendors for healthcare. Foot care, a pop-up library, voter registration – it all happens in our office.
Community partnerships helped make our annual family breakfast in October the most successful to date. We honored Sandra Hahn as vendor of the year and awarded Art Garcia for his enduring and essential volunteerism at Street Roots. Home Forward executive director Michael Buonocore gave a moving keynote address, “Learn to See Each Other.”
Our vendor emergency health fund helps vendors dealing with crises, and our monthly health and wellness events connect vendors to the community, such as theater and zoo outings, a movie at Hollywood Theater, and a summer barbecue hosted by the Pearl District Rotary. Our vendors marched in the Veterans Day and Pride parades. Partnerships with the Portland Art Museum, PICA and Gather: Make: Shelter expanded creative opportunities for our vendors to make and show art. Business for a Better Portland transformed holiday parties of its members as opportunities to gather supplies for Street Roots vendors while also supporting our advocacy for deeply affordable and stable housing.
We’ve maintained a steady, high-profile public presence across media, advocating at events and forums – including the Lund Report Oregon Health Forum – for the poorest of our neighbors be centered in public policy. Our ongoing work with the Welcome Home Coalition was met with an extraordinary success — the passage of the $652.8 million Metro housing bond that will fund deeply affordable housing in the region. Some vendors took a prominent role in this advocacy, testifying before Metro council, handing out lawn signs and speaking to the media.
For the seventh year, we collaborated with Multnomah County, publishing the annual Domicile Unknown report to account for those who died homeless on the streets, insisting that those lost lives be remembered as we fight for housing as a health urgency. This year, Street Roots suffered a number of deaths among our community — we lost eight vendors as well as some of our Old Town neighbors decades before their time. At one point in late summer, we were holding memorials weekly in our office, grieving and supporting each other as a community.
People experiencing poverty continue to depend on the Rose City Resource guide for services. We printed more than ever before. More than 200,000 copies were distributed to neighbors in poverty. This year, we’ve expanded the guide to include Clackamas as well as Multnomah and Washington counties.
We are now moving into our 20th anniversary year, and will mark this milestone throughout the year, including a summertime community celebration. Looking forward, we will strive for increasing vendor sales and newspaper distribution, pursue important investigative journalism, dig deep as an organization into our equity work, cast our advocacy regionally and statewide, and pursue ways to expand our office space – now bustling and packed with vendors, staff and volunteers. There is much ahead.
Street Roots is beloved by so many in the community, and I love it, too. Onward we go!
— Kaia Sand, Executive Director
Editorial update
Friday mornings can be great wherever you work, but at Street Roots, they are something special. It’s the morning the new newspaper arrives, and the vendors fill the office to hear what’s heading our way from the printer.
It’s a meeting that’s at the heart of not just our vendor program and mission, but our newspaper as well. This is the time when the room fills with a sense of ownership in our publication, and a curiosity for learning something new – two elements essential to a community newspaper like Street Roots.
With each edition, readers see that Street Roots vendors contribute poetry, but they also take part in occassional interviews and provide ideas for stories from their own experiences. We love telling their stories, and our Vendor Profile section is rightfully among the most popular features of the newspaper.
Most recently, vendor experiences were the inspiration for our interview with Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw, and the stories of some of our female vendors gave readers an unsettling glimpse into what a woman on the streets experiences.
Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green has been a leader in local coverage on such issues as prison policy, forestry practices, climate change and our diverse community.
In advance of the 2018 primaries, Green’s reporting revealed the misleading messages of canvassers to Oregon voters around a petition to repeal our “sanctuary state” status, and as the November election approached, we gave you a full “fact or fiction” comparison of the arguments surrounding a petition seeking to carve out tax exemptions for corporate grocers.
Our pool of amazing reporters has brought you stories on the world of foster care youth, the environmental champions in our Native American communities, and profiles of incredible people who have escaped peril and tragedy and now call Portland home.
Looking beyond our Portland roots, we have been reporting on the housing crisis throughout the state in our Housing Rural Oregon series. We’ve looked at the particular dynamics that impact housing in Central Oregon, the coastal counties and the frontier region in Ontario. We will be continuing our coverage into the next year, looking at affordable-housing campaigns in the Southwest and the challenges facing towns in the Northeast. It’s remarkable the span of issues that have upset the market, from scarce development interest and resources, to the influence of the short-term-rental market.
The rural housing project was supported by a grant from Meyer Memorial Trust, which, like all of our journalism funding, comes with no strings attached. Street Roots at its core is independent media, and a firewall between funders and our journalistic integrity remains solid.
With our coverage, we strive to present an in-depth perspective, often through the lens of marginalized populations, providing a platform for the voices not commonly heard.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t recognize some familiar faces in our paper. We’re proud to bring you conversations with a diverse collection of politicians and popular celebrities, including Robert De Niro, Bill Murray, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rep. Maxine Waters, Sen. Cory Booker, former NBA star Etan Thomas, Black Lives Matter organizer Deray McKesson, environmentalist David Attenborough, Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards and musicians Stephen Malkmus and Portugal. The Man, among many, many others.
With your support, our journalism gets stronger every year. Thank you for reading our newspaper and supporting our vendors. We look forward to another Friday morning to bring you the news!
— Joanne Zuhl, Executive Editor