Show notes
From our live interview at the Jade Lounge in August 2019. In August 2019, Mayoral Candidate Teressa Raiford joined me, Christian Burke, and the My Real Portland Jade Lounge audience. That recording disappeared, so I asked Teressa to join me for a follow up interview and that audio wasn’t listenable. because I am an amateur. What I lack in experience I have generous and supportive friends including My Real Portland Patron Arin who transcribed the salvaged audio from that interview. If you’re interested in the current 2020 Portland Mayoral race, I hope you’ll appreciate this interview. JOE: (We began talking the moment we saw each other. Transcribed interview joins us in progress.) Relationship with SUN Schools, tell me about that?TERESSA: It’s part of the Community Health Initiative and Community Justice Initiative that with we have through Multnomah County and it’s under-supported by LPSCC (Local Public Safety Coordinating Committee) which is this agency around juvenile justice, they have kind of have these meetings “” and there’s funding like from the STRYVE grant (Striving to Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere) there’s support for like the Gang Task Force which is now Community Gun Initiative or Peace Collaborative whatever. But the issue with gun violence being a community health issue in Portland we prioritize that circumstance to the black community and so because of the black community’s disadvantages or marginalization or being at risk because you're black in a community where you might become violent based on their data. That money is to help them focus on that and when you're sitting at the table and your like, wow, why are you building like pilots and initiatives just based on less than 3% of the population and why are you building these pilots and initiatives on supporting them without a parental outreach plan like what are you doing to support the family if you see these issues happening with hunger or housing or bad attitudes or aggressive behavior. How are you initiating contact with the family and helping support them with the causes, help outreach and whatever, they’re not. They get so much money for referrals out of the family, there are so many agencies that because they provide services to children they add community engagement or family liaison and they think that it’s a benefit to families to kind of deescalate before it becomes a problem that the family has to tend to. But what that means is that the family has no awareness that the child is having issues at school so when a child gets killed in the street or when they become engaged in juvenile justice and it's like the parent had no awareness, the parent had no contact, and it's easy for the district attorney and his agencies to sit at a table and say we didn’t have parent engagement and because of lack of support for this family or lack of support for these children that we were not able to provide them the resources that they needed and so we can't recommend that they go back to their family so let’s recommend that they get an ankle bracelet and they have oversight by our probation system. Which creates even more circumstances because these are children and so children aren’t going correct their behavior just because you create a circumstance to identify them as bad or juvenile or criminal that’s going to create some type of emotional disadvantage which also is going to cause a social disadvantage for them and that’s what we see, that’s what I see in the data that what I see when we talk about gang violence or community violence or you know just the behavior of children. It's just like oh what a minute we've already mandated they’re bad, we told them they were at risk, we let them know they are marginalized and all our systems adopt that opportunity they don’t build them out of that they don’t have liaisons to support the family.JOE: Something very basic about marginalizing communities, when I was I kid we had lunch ticket programs that were different for those of us were lower-income and there were times when my family was lower-income and so I had a different lunch ticket color than everybody else had and I’m shocked to find that it’s still a problem in our community.TERESSA: They threaten children for not paying their fees for lunch and breakfast.JOE: And not only that my peers would recognize that I had a different ticket. Little kids would also see that as different and find it as a way to approach me. I can’t imagine being an African American child having an ankle bracelet and going to school or trying to have some kind of normal life because of the situation. I’ve known people worked in the SUN School system and they’re frustrated with lack of resources and the inability to do the work that they think is important. So what all is standing in the way? Is it just a funding issue?TERESSA: It’s a police and partnership issue if the educators and supporters of children and families were given the opportunity to do that without the initiation what is labor on your “” rights? And why are we waving the “” rights, why do I have to refer to this agency without having a conversation with a family member. Like if they have had the resources I have a cake for so many teachers, contractors, family members and even people that work for the administration in these agencies and they're like we, the word is unfortunate, it's so unfortunate that we don't have this, it's so unfortunate that we can't do this, it's so unfortunate that we are not able to provide this. And I’m like why aren't they listening to you? You are the first line agencies, you’re the first people that are standing right there on the ground with the families with the children if you're identifying opportunities to support them through your agency. Why aren't they listening to you and how do we effectively advocate for the families so that we can force them to listen to them because it will give them a better outcome and opportunity to get funding because of their agency of poverty is not a better outcome than them graduating from that impoverished situation and getting support with housing and legitimate educational resources or resources for food and you know not the bullying that we use because of bureaucracy but the initiation of anonymous support systems. You know not humiliating a child with a wrong ticket or calling them bad and giving them timeout or you know preparing the family to be humiliated because of the lack of resources through the administration system support for teachers or providers of care. We constantly through our let’s say patriarchy system have an opportunity to lower the level of value for people that are actually doing the work, based on the lack of courage from those at the top that should be able to listen to them and initiate innovative processes.JOE: So right there, this goes into my next question running for mayor next year, what steps would you take as mayor based on this one issue of providing services for those in the schools' systems to get that kind of support? To enable all of those systems to the kind of support that you and I might feel they need.TERESSA: Well for the mayoral position we know that SUN School is run out of the Health Department but they do have a lot of support from the city and what I’ve seen through our last budget with 52% of the money going into policing. What I would do is I would change the measure of how we are using that money in that budget for our education systems and turn into something that enhances the safety and health of those families rather than the policing and use of our bureau to investigate a initiative referrals because I think at some point with the labor of federal education right to privacy to receive services that puts us in a position to authorize inclusion for invasion of family without it being a direct necessity for them to receive those services. It's like wow why are we using that anchor to get into their business when all we are doing is referring to the service so let's remove that anchor and let's provide more services in an effective distribution of those services with that extra money that we would be using to police and monitor. It's really an invasion of privacy that leads to detrimental outcomes. Because when looking at family from the lens of police officer and it's the child in the education system your still in the position like I was talking to Kate Brown a couple, I mean not Kate Brown, it's Kate um I forgot her name but she works at Multnomah County Health Department but she had told me one time that our job is not to raise the children, our job is to arrest criminals and so when you have this agency that is in partnership with education systems and transportation systems and health distribution systems and housing systems its meant to identify criminals its not mean to provide a public service. So you remove that and create a safety and health lens and that creates that link.JOE: My hunch is that same philosophy would work and I don't want to call it just a philosophy, a practice that will be “”TERESSA: We are not using it in every community so when decided to segregate and use it on marginalized communities that legislative dollars that call marginalized so that they can compete for the funding. Then it's kind of like, ok how do we do this in Hillsboro or how do we providing public safety in schools in Lake Oswego and why aren't we using that type of lens and how are we supporting those families that are not economically sound in those communities are we humiliating them are we broadening our basic outreach and public service components so that we're supporting them.JOE: Right.TERESSA: You know, like we literally criminalize people and those audits in city hall proved that.JOE: Right, I'm just talking about you know young children in the school system but it also seems that would be the same philosophy that would have used to fix the homeless issue, the drug use issue, we should enforce all three of those “” connections as well as people who are in the criminal corrections system. All of those people are going to be looked at if there's plenty of folks in the police in front of that lens.TERESSA: And that lens for those services.JOE: Right. Rather than full “” as if we were maybe as if we were policing the “”.TERESSA: Look what we're doing to our houseless community rather than building innovative ways to restore inhabitable buildings in our communities we're housing them in policing stations. Where they are going from the hospital, police and back to the street and we are wondering why there are so many injuries and attacks that are happening on everyday people. I just read a headline before I came in on my twitter where someone was talking this past weekend when Mayor Wheeler suggested that everybody have free parking and come downtown and someone said hey I watching someone urinate in downtown in full you know of our entire public what are you doing about this mess and then the trash downtown and I'm like wow that's jobs thats an opportunity why aren't we utilizing the opportunity to create jobs for what we see is our houseless community on the data and the audits that the houseless community is the same community that's coming through our public education system and public health system. These are our marginalized vulnerable community members and as an agency we should be prepared to provide healthy resources for them and to make sure that as they come through these systems that they don’t become more vulnerable by putting them on the streets. And our systems are building that infrastructure when they take children away from their families and our education system and then the families deemed a risk of harm on the record those children don't get to return back to those homes and communities when they graduate out of high school they usually do graduate onto the streets and its whether a through a drug connection for survival mode because we are not properly preparing them as wards or guardians of them why the ward of the state after we kind of inherited them through the referral system and you know we have a really big issue with foster care here where we over represent the same children of color, the same children that are prone to mental health physical health issues, sexual violence and all this domesticated violence that is perpetrated on children and we're the caregivers but those children are the numbers of houseless people in our community and we don't have safety net that is in place to build for them. Our safety net is our food scene we need someone who's has those type of experiences to work with the bureaus that actual manage these resources and start building innovation and the distribution and we need to clean our act up but I think if you've been homeless if you've never had domesticated violence to you systemically then you don't see people as a priority and we don't see cleaning of those issues for their betterment as a priority they are going to continue to see it as a capital effect like oh I have to clean the streets so that the street looks great rather than so that people don't die on them. You know, so, that’s going to be a physical and experienced person to come in and combat that issue with building leadership in the city that already exists but is not listened to. You know I'm an activist so I advocate for the people taking care of us you know.JOE: So that, that's a great answer.JOE: Great question or lead into this question, you've been an activist for a long time you know and have been one of the people making changes happen and you've been part of the community of the people that are saying that we don't have enough resources we don't have the right structure, we don't have the right number of things, in addition to being the patriarchal society and “ society. are there systems in place that with you being the mayor that you can get the emphasis towards meeting the needs of those organizations have been asking for or is there more that needs to come from the business community or more that needs to come from the people in order support those organizations “” TERESSA: I believe that the mayor builds the leadership that becomes accountable for it and I believe that we are all accountable for it I believe the business community is accountable for it I believe that Universities that are building business districts in our downtown areas are accountable for it I believe the developers that are building industry here and even small businesses that are trying to struggle and survive here, that we’re all accountable for it, but we’re not at the table. the way that we set up our system of government in this city we divide and conquer our issues and we build it with the biggest in the most elite factors as the authority as the pointed appointed stakeholders for our voices and that has been to the detriment of us because if your opinion is and what my opinion is doesn't matter unless we get it to be reflected in an audit or an indictment so knowing that for the last 9 years since my nephew was killed in gun violence I've audited several different systems and I've recently opened up legal clinic through the organization that I started to combat gun violence but I opened up legal referral system so that people can use information as evidence the information in these audits that applies to them to seek legal recourse so that we can force the change through court systems to mandate changes in policies because I don't see it becoming conscious effort and I know that even as an elected official there's only so much you can do within the system that you represent. 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