“It is only by feeling your love that the poor will forgive you for the gifts of bread.”
That quote, attributed to St. Vincent DePaul, is a favorite of Genevieve “Genny” Nelson. It means to recognize that the act of charity without love can be demeaning, but when the act is done out of love for the other person, then dignity is preserved and the charity accepted. It is the philosophy of a hand up, not a hand out, and a guiding force behind Sisters Of The Road Café, where bread is broken five days a week for the sake of community, not pity.
This year, Sisters celebrates its 40th anniversary, a major milestone for a grassroots nonprofit these days, particularly one borne of the streets.
The origins of Sisters Of The Road has been told many times. But to describe it simply, it started because social workers Genny Nelson and Sandy Gooch asked people what they wanted.
An alternative to the soup lines, people told them. A place where they can dine with dignity. A place where they can barter their labor instead of their souls. A place that recognizes them as human beings.
Nelson and Gooch knew what they were talking about. They had both spent their formative years doing social work in a hierarchical structure: charity in the top-down model where power isn’t shared. They worked for an organization serving Portland’s Old Town/Chinatown Neighborhood in the 1970s when it was known better as skid row.
“We were really aware, for one, that the ability of the staff to make change was limited,” Nelson said. “And secondly, the willingness to include the clients in decision-making was basically nonexistent.”
Sisters Of The Road would be different. It would be a place to gather and create community – one not dictated by services, health issues or religion. It would be a philosophy-based organization. The philosophy was in service to systemic change and recognizing that the best people to eradicate oppressive systems were the oppressed. The philosophy was anchored in nonviolence, in treating people with dignity and love, and the incalculable value of getting to know one another to better take care of one another.
“We are not here to support poverty,” said Nelson, who served as the Sisters executive director from 1990 to 2009. “We are here to address it with concerns that the community identified, and obviously that first year was probably the hardest manual labor I’ve ever done in my life up to that point – and then it just continued.”
FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE, Sisters is most immediately identified as a café, a lunch spot where people can get a healthy, fresh meal for $1.50, or barter labor for meal tickets if they don’t have cash. But the lunch is not a direct service, said Sisters Executive Director Danielle Klock. People are earning and paying for their meals, she said. They are customers. Sisters doesn’t give handouts.
“We offer an invitation to participate in being a part of something, and to help care for and run the café,” Klock said. “We consider ourselves as a social-justice organization first and foremost.”
It’s telling that after asking several Sisters customers about why they go there, the food is seldom mentioned. And that’s not because the food isn’t really good – it’s freshly made on site. But the community and empowerment customers receive there is equally vital, and much more difficult to find than food.
Soon after opening its doors in 1979, Sisters gravitated to the forefront of Portland’s movement to create systemic change around homelessness. Nelson recalls it was a time when people were questioning a capitalist system that kept people struggling in poverty. As a gathering space, Sisters was where the conversation shifted from enduring to overcoming – to view homelessness and poverty not as moral inferiority but as economic realities with social responsibilities. Looking back on her early years doing social work, Nelson described a time when people on the street were treated like cattle.
“For me,” she said, “the '80s is when people started to be treated like human beings.”
People literally began taking to the streets, marching in the annual Hobo Parade, a response to the round-ups and displacement of homeless people in advance of the Rose Festival. (“It clearly was, ‘We are here, we’re visible, we’re Portland too,’” Nelson recalled.)
Sisters campaigned for the use of food stamps in nonprofit dining facilities for people experiencing homelessness. In 1987, Congress passed the law clearing the way for it to happen, and Sisters became the first in the nation to put it into practice.
By 1990, the café was serving more than 33,000 meals and seeing an increasing number of customers each week. That figure would nearly double within the next decade. They created a meal ticket program so police, businessmen and others that interfaced with people in need could offer a meal and conversation in place of anger or intimidation. They would expand their space and create the Community Organizing Project, which archived interviews with more than 600 people experiencing homelessness. The narratives eventually formed the book “Voices from the Street: Truths about Homelessness from Sisters Of The Road.”
“When I walked through the door of Sisters Of The Road, it was a life changing experience,” said Barbie Weber. “I had done a lot of political activism throughout my life, but I all of a sudden felt like I had a purpose again.”
Weber has known years of homelessness and the isolation it generates. She was living in a van when she first went to Sisters in 2017.
“No matter what struggle I’ve been through – I’ve suffered domestic, violence, alcoholism, my mom died, life happens – but when you’re homeless, it’s intensified. Because there’s also the struggle for resources every day – just to get a shower, just to get your laundry done, just to get something to eat, everything takes 10 times more effort than it normally does.
“But there was never a day when I felt like I couldn’t walk into that café and have somebody there for me – to give me a meal, to give me a cup of tea. That’s their heart.”
At Sisters, Weber engaged in campaigns to improve access to hygiene and advocate for social justice. She became a member of the organization’s Roadies, which serve as educators on homelessness and ambassadors for the organization, and she’s on the coordinating committee for the revival of The Poor People’s Campaign. She has even started a new organization, Ground Score, that employs people experiencing homelessness to pick up trash and recyclables around the city.
GROUND SCORE: Putting homeless Portlanders to work for a fair wage
“I went to everything – anytime the door was open,” she said, recalling her early days. “This was the first time I felt like I had any support.”
Sister’s cache reached political heights, too. It has consistently elevated the street point of view when City Hall targeted people on sidewalks and in tents. In 1981, Sisters and the Burnside Community Council successfully sued the city to overturn sit-lie bans on public sidewalks.
Organizing people on the streets around issues and policy naturally meant spin-offs, including Right to Survive, which later became the genesis for Right 2 Dream Too, now a sanctioned camp. Community members who have engaged in Sisters’ organizing have become regular speakers at City Hall and some have served on government advisory committees.
Food justice isn’t forgotten in all this: Sisters community members can now use barter cards earned by working at the café at farmer’s markets, and in the summer, Sisters hosts a pop-up farmer’s stand to provide fresh produce.
Eric “Sarge” Wilson is a customer and volunteer at Sisters.
“One of the hardest things about being on the streets is being humble,” he said. “Because you’re always in a state of aggression. You’re in a state of aggression against homeless people, against cops, against sometimes your friend who might have upset you for not being around for three days,” he said. “And the lack of sleep – two hours here, and then you’re up for an hour, you get another hour and a half and you’re up for two hours, and by then it’s daytime and you have to be off the streets. You can’t have your tent up after 7 a.m. When you go to Sisters, you know you’re going to be safe.”
Sarge has been coming to Sisters for four years now, and is a regular volunteer today. Some people, he said, have been coming to Sisters for decades.
“When you’re on the streets, your depression has to be dealt with, or you just spiral. A lot of people spiral. Sisters gives all these people something they can do. They come in and they serve somebody else and feel better about themselves – make somebody smile, tell a joke, clean the bathrooms. Make it safe for little kids to come in. They take pride in those jobs.”
Klock sees it too. She recalled the story of one former customer who credits Sisters with their recovery. They felt seen and valued there, and it helped them change their life, she said. They still come in and volunteer. There are others, Klock noted, who have been coming for decades, first as customers, then as volunteers.
“It does change people – that’s part of the systemic change,” said Klock. “When we start to see people as more than their circumstances and relate to people as being whole and valuable, we start changing how we respond to oppression and violence that we carry those conversations, we carry those philosophies out in the world with us. I’ve seen customers who used to be a little more rowdy, and now they’ve softened and they say, ‘I come here because you all are so good to me and it’s helped me be better to other people.’ And I think that makes a difference out in the world.”
FROM ITS VANTAGE at the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Davis Street, Sisters has witnessed the Old Town Chinatown Neighborhood’s slog toward a promise of economic and social prosperity. The former warehouse district, where people in poverty could find affordable rooms and where the homeless were left alone, has given way to the upscaled Pearl District. Old Town Chinatown yearns to follow suit and spin its gritty skid row roots into another piece of colorful history.
OLD TOWN: Celebrating the grit and humanity of Portland's oldest neighborhood
Monica Beemer joined Sisters in 2001, and served as its executive director between 2006 and 2013. She saw the neighborhood changing around them, and said it was hard to see property values – and violent rhetoric against the homeless – increase.
“Old Town became more money,” Beemer said. “Old Town became more gentrified, of course, and people who were homeless became less and less welcome and more of a problem to profit.”
Beemer said Sisters will always stand up for each other’s rights, but the challenge is in the enormous need, and balancing limited resources between basic healthy needs such as food, and work to address the root causes of homelessness.
“People used to always ask me, are you going to be opening more Sisters Of The Roads,” Beemer said. “And I would say we could open 100 Sisters Of The Roads and the need would just continue to grow. We could be open 24/7.”
There’s no doubt that organizations like Sisters will be facing higher rents and greater pressure to conform to sustain economic support – to hew toward more easily fundable direct services instead of more complex work in community organizing and systemic change.
“I can’t tell you how many times that was beginning to happen,” said Nelson, “and how important it was for us to say we are not going to lose our purpose, which is building relationships. We are not going to lose our philosophy, which is nonviolence. And if people can’t feel something different walking in the door, we’re doing something wrong and we need to take responsibility and change that. It is so easy for grassroots organizations to become institutions. The real truth is it’s hard work, and you can get so enmeshed in it that you forget who you are and why you’re doing this and you stop talking to your community and you stop building leadership in that community that you listen to.”
Beemer said Sisters is different because the philosophy is everything. “It’s how we do what we do. It’s more important than what we do,” she said.
Early next year, the organization is going to start the strategic planning process and return to its own roots: surveying people living outside what they want and what they need. Forty years ago it was a café. The answers next year will decide where Sisters goes from here.
“It isn’t just about offering a meal. You need to address heart, mind, body and soul,” Nelson said. “We’re talking about human beings. And if you don’t, you’ll never solve homelessness. And I still believe that.”
Email Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl at joanne@streetroots.org.