In rolling out the Portland Street Response pilot, the teams must keep going to continue to build trust with unhoused communities, and the city must not do this on the cheap. Those are my takeaways from talking this morning with program coordinator Ebony Morgan at CAHOOTS, the mobile crisis response program in Eugene.
Portland City Council is slated to vote on amendments to the city budget Thursday afternoon. According to information provided by her office, Commissioner Hardesty will propose budget amendments to allocate $4.6 million dollars to expand pilot citywide to six vans beginning next March.
That’s a lot more than the $978,000 Mayor Ted Wheeler allocated for the program in his proposed budget.
Wheeler and City Commissioners Mingus Mapps and Dan Ryan issued a joint statement that only supports a small expansion of the pilot in Lents. By withholding additional funding, they have described their approach as “methodical.” Commissioner Carmen Rubio has stated she supports funding a citywide expansion of the pilot, but Hardesty needs an additional vote tomorrow to amend the budget.
One issue at stake is how a “pilot” is defined. While Hardesty’s plan defines the pilot as making adjustments within the current framework while working toward a total of six vans – the size of a pilot that the Portland Police Bureau signed off on during their contract extension in 2020 – the description of “pilot” in the joint statement by Mapps, Ryan and Wheeler refers only to the Lents neighborhood.
In their statement, they refer to the cost of Portland Street Response and to the potential for outsourcing the work of the program to a nonprofit. In doing so, they pointed to the less-expensive CAHOOTS program run by Eugene’s White Bird Clinic.
After 31 years of caring for people in crisis, CAHOOTS was vaulted into the spotlight across the United States and Canada the past several years, first with the Wall Street Journal’s coverage in 2018, followed by coverage by National Public Radio, NBC News, The New York Times, CBC Radio Canada, NPR All Things Considered, CNN and other outlets. We ran our own coverage as part of our package putting forth Portland Street Response on March 15, 2019. White Bird and CAHOOTS staff have consulted with the city of Portland on the set up of the Portland Street Response pilot, as well as the cities of Denver, Olympia and Rochester on their respective projects. They've have given presentations across the United States and Canada.
And yet the success of CAHOOTS is transmogrified in ways that are unrecognizable through grandstanding politicians. It's success is based on responding to crisis based on care and not crime. But Mapps, Wheeler and Ryan all pointed to how much cheaper it is to run CAHOOTS than the pilot has been in its first months.
So I reached out to CAHOOTS Program Coordinator Ebony Morgan to see what she thought. She pointed out CAHOOTS itself is severely underfunded.
“If people are modeling off of us and their amount of funding versus output is going to be compared to ours, it is unethical for me to not say something about where we are,” she said, describing how difficult it is to retain workers who leave CAHOOTS for better paying jobs.
“If you’re trying to find the way to keep it as cheap as possible, crisis responders will not be able to find room for growth and advancement and financial security within their role, and will forever cycle through it.”
Her response was a wake-up for me. So many of us are pointing to CAHOOTS as a model, but I realized that as we build up programs across North America, we also need to support CAHOOTS's need to secure better public funding program. "I believe there’s no such thing as overfunding a crisis team because the function of it is to go out and be helpful, and do good, and harm reduction,” Morgan emphasized.
Trying to do it on the cheap, she explained, does a disservice to the crisis responders and people they serve who observe the better-funded first responders "with the fancy equipment and new things. They get what they need. For the people who are finally being offered a response that they may trust – for that to be held back by funding really just further drives home the message that their needs are not as important.”
And while Mapps, Ryan and Wheeler are emphasizing the importance of data in an evaluation, Morgan explains that the most important measure of crisis teams like CAHOOTS is that of community trust. And trust, she said, “ is not something that’s built overnight. Trust is something that’s earned, and in order to earn it, you need to show up and provide a high quality of work.”
For CAHOOTS, Morgan explains what trust-building looks like: “When people are protesting in the street about feeling unsafe in their communities and they see us go by, and they are excited to see us, that tells me that we are succeeding. That tells me that we have the trust of the community. When they are in a hard situation, they are going to be willing to call for help, which is exactly what we want all of our community members to do.”
That takes patience. That takes seeing the work through.
“You can’t just expect to come right out of the gates with numbers like CAHOOTS. That’s wild. We spent 31 years getting to this place.” Morgan said, explaining that, “It is an investment in the community’s wellness.”
A great deal about trust-building does not show up in numbers. It shows up when crisis workers visit a neighborhood day-in, day-out, so that when someone is in crisis, the crisis worker knows them by name. During these early months in Lents, that's what Portland Street Response has been doing: building relationships by showing up. That's not something that can be measured at the outset. And it's not something that council should be quick to abandon.
That's why it's so important that Portland city council values the slow work of building trust, making adjustments to the expanding pilot over the next year, including bringing in peer support specialists.
“It is offensive to the community members in need to tell the people that are going to respond to them with trauma-informed, client-centered care that they need to do it as cheaply as possible or they will be shut down,” Morgan said. “Imagine how well it would work if the city and the people who made decisions stood behind it and supported it to work instead of treating it as though it may fail.”