How Everything Has Changed Over the Last Six Months

April 28, 2018 · by · in Uncategorized

So many things have happened in the last few months (“When we last left our heroes…“)!  We’ve had the wonderful opportunity to welcome two amazing new co-leaders – Elspeth Tanguay-Koo and Zack Tewksbury – to our team, and almost everything we do each week has changed times and locations.  With everything in flux, we’re looking at some exciting new opportunities, but some new complications, as well.

Right to left : Student Volunteers Janika, in the back her brother Jesper, Bob our regular cook, Tosi and our newest staffers Zack and Elspeth

Late last year First Christian Church Portland (Disciples of Christ), a church that beautifully had been working with us to provide access to showers and laundry to some of our friends outside, offered the use of their building for The Underground, our once a week youth drop-in space. Between the growth of our youth drop-in community for the last 5 years, and bumping up against some of the recent programming changes and structural limitations of the building there at St Stephen’s Episcopal, making this shift wasn’t a hard choice.  It was time to stretch.  We continue to be thankful for their years of support, and look forward to partnering in new ways with them in the future.
The move to FCC was an exciting opportunity, not just because of access to things like laundry and showers, but because we’d also been feeling a little cramped in St Stephen’s cozier space. It’s been neat to develop new relationships with some of the folks from the FCC community, who haven’t hesitated to welcome us and become personally involved in our work within their walls.  We look forward to the many projects and partnerships we’ll have going forward.

Pop-up game of half-court basketball happened between a few of our folks and some of the folks from Oregon Food Bank on one of their more recent visits.

Now, with this move and new staff coming on, we have updated our wishlist with some new things we could use.  We’d also really love to get some new regular donors onboard, so that we can consistently pay our new staff Zack and Elspeth. Most importantly, we should take a moment to say special thanks to a few folks who have showed us tremendous commitment and support over the last 6 months:
To Paul Davis at Clay Street Table and our bridge to the Oregon Food Bank: Everything that we do would look very different without your creative vision, unbounded and loving enthusiasm, and the literal tons of food we receive from OFB each year.  Thank you for your friendship, Paul.
To Laura Moulton and her crew of librarians from Street Books, who’ve been bringing their mobile street library (and reading glasses!) to join us once a month at our Sunday gatherings.  Your presence has really brought a nice spark to plenty of cold winter afternoons.
To Elsa Johnson, the office manager at First Christian, who knows where all of the bodies are buried and has been such a huge help to us and a wonderful host to our friends since we started doing laundry and showers there over a year ago now.  We wish you all the best in your future endeavors as you move on.  You’ll be missed.
To Jim Edwards from the FCC Board, who was skeptical of what kind of monkey show we were hoping to run in his church but, once he caught our vision, has been one of our strongest champions.
And to Bill and Mary Jacobs, the interim pastors at FCC, who first invited us to come there and held our hands through the whole move.  It’s been so great being welcomed in by you and your community.

With the support of this group and many more people unnamed, we are giddy at thinking of the possibilities for enriching our beloved community with our friends outside.