Farewell, Street Roots

After seven years, Kaia Sand closes her tenure at Street Roots, turns focus to writing

(photo credit: Kat Berbari)

I have ended my seven-year tenure leading Street Roots, the street newspaper in Portland, Oregon. I began as executive director on Dec. 6, 2017, and ended Dec. 6, 2024, seven years to the day.

Our Street Roots community accomplished a lot in these years, centering people experiencing homelessness and their collective knowledge, passions and aptitudes that are all too often disregarded by much of society. We helped create Portland Street Response, pivoted in the pandemic to meet people’s needs, and purchased a new building at the heart of the city.

Over the past seven years, I wrote 260 columns, more than 200,000 words focused on the changes I’d like to see and the solutions I see possible. I will write that weekly column now as “Unwanted Persons” accessed online through Substack. I’ll delve into a homelessness in Trump’s America to make sense of our current moment, write explainer columns on systems and issues around homelessness, housing and the criminal legal system (please send requests!) and solutions columns focused on good models and ideas.

I’m proud of the big-change work we accomplished these past seven years at Street Roots. We launched the idea for Portland Street Response in a special issue, led a campaign, created a special report (“Believe our Stories and Listen”) and never let up. I will continue to advocate for a fully realized Portland Street Response system, while also turning my attention nationwide to creating first-responder systems that meet the needs of people in crises.

I am proud to have led Street Roots’ pandemic pivot, turning to the talents of people experiencing homelessness to get the organization through. Street Roots vendors helped run the office, build programs to support people – the ambassador program, MoJo (which became Community Media), the gratitude brigade – and make sure hundreds of thousands of dollars reached people on the streets through federal stimulus payments and the goodwill of our community. We partnered extensively with Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative so that people on the streets could lead research and inform public policy. We insisted on carving out spaces for people experiencing homelessness to be in the civic sphere.

I am proud of leading Street Roots to buy and renovate a building in the heart of Portland so that Street Roots is, in fact, rooted in the streets. Working with an extraordinary team, I was able to realize my design concept that represents a holistic view of relating to people – each floor represents a level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from a basement where people could get foundational needs met through showers and laundry to a rooftop “School in the Sky” where people can learn and dream. I also centered climate justice and resilience, making sure the building runs on renewable energy and filtered air to serve as shelter from forest-fire air. Importantly, too, the building began and ended with Street Roots vendors – from envisioning what our program should be to doing the final touches on our design work as “The Flight Crew.”

But, of course, my energy is finite, wish as I may it weren’t. The past seven years I never felt “off duty” and carried in my heart the responsibility for the organization at all times. It felt at times like I was straining to hold a thousand shards of my brain together because my attention needed to go everywhere.

My health has taken a toll. That came to acute focus this past September 5 when, rushing on my bike to work with my mind clearly already there, I crashed, lost consciousness and ended up in the trauma ward at Legacy Emanuel Hospital. Still covered in blood with a broken nose and my face split open, I called and texted to make arrangements at work. I couldn’t stop worrying about the organization, even as my own body was struggling.

Goodness knows, while I recognize now I need to step aside to preserve my own health, I underscore that people survive the streets are assaulted by a health crisis shocking in our land of plenty. People die, on average, in their late 40s. They keep dying for want of foundational needs, and loneliness and unbearable suffering that blazes so intensely that people’s minds fracture, or people blunt the flame with whatever they can ingest to feel a little less terrible. We lost so many people on the streets these last seven years. We’d hold memorials and people’s grief would unzip into other grief.

That is why I need to be strong enough to continue this fight.

Make no mistake, I’m still in this work. Nonprofits are hard work, and so much is fundraising to keep programs running and staff paid. A great deal of my time went to this, and I am proud that I have left Street Roots on firm financial footing. Now, my depleted body needs to narrow my scope of work to, for the immediate future, my column and a book.

“Unwanted Persons” is not only the title of this column, but also the working title of a book I am writing. I’m dedicating myself fully to this now. “Unwanted Person” is a 911 call type routed to the police; some of those calls now go to Portland Street Response. Some of the police shootings that rippled through our Street Roots community during my tenure were “unwanted person” calls. This dispatch code is used frequently against people who are homeless. This is, indeed, a country in which some people – through our laws and systems and too many values – are unwanted.

My book, then, will look at the United States through a refracted lens. What does it mean to build a country in which people are written out of its laws, rights, and well-being? How much poorer is this nation by excluding its poor? What potential could we locate should our nation’s heart beat not to the rhythm of wealth but to the rhythm of inherent worth. An arrhythmia perhaps – wild, inclusive, rich in democracy.

This perspective has driven my work. It’s been messy, loving and grief-ridden. So many people’s agony — and their jokes and gifts and love.

This work has become harder to do in these unsettled times. My commitment has been to lead with a concern for equity – centering as much as possible the people disproportionately impacted by homelessness. This includes people who are Black, Indigenous, veterans, trans, disabled, formerly incarcerated. It’s the north star of this work, and you surely are witnessing a widespread backlash against DEI work. Inequities persist through every system, including who ends up on the street. Please join me in keeping this front and center.

But my goodness, what a privilege it was to serve as the Street Roots executive director for seven years. What a beautiful job. I will look at the edifice in the heart of Portland, with the golden light of “Street Roots” sign warming up dusky Portland evenings, and feel proud. Street Roots isn’t going anywhere.

When in 2019 Jo Ann Hardesty awarded me the Spirit of Portland award for my work on Portland Street Response, I explained on the award video that it was because I was a poet that “whatever seems impossible or limiting, I always see that, just beyond, there’s something that’s very possible.”

That is, in fact, who I am – a poet who sees beyond limits, or knows at least we have to when confronting seemingly intractable societal problems. I’ve hit my limit leading Street Roots, but I see so much that’s possible ahead – for Street Roots, and for the work I have yet to do alongside, I hope, many of you.