As our city seeks solutions to livability concerns, including the enforcement of homeless camping bans, we must remember that the real challenges we’re trying to address are poverty and trauma.
Poverty and trauma are inextricably linked, the cause and the effect of one another. Poverty creates trauma. The stress of not knowing where your next meal will come from, how you’ll pay rent, or whether you can afford to see a doctor is traumatizing. And trauma makes it harder to escape poverty, eroding health, opportunity, and hope. Trauma can cause someone to lose stability and fall into poverty.
Together, they form the roots of nearly every social and personal challenge we face as communities, such as homelessness and housing insecurity, hunger, substance use and addiction, unemployment and underemployment, incarceration, domestic and sexual violence, and mental illness.
When basic human aid and services are reduced or eliminated, we re-engage and reinforce cycles of poverty and trauma. The added economic pressure placed on families and individuals becomes its own form of harm, pushing more people closer to and over the edge into crisis.
Civil actions should reflect empathy and an understanding of the poverty and trauma that often underlie them. For example, when people experiencing poverty are fined for sleeping outside, the penalties only make their situation worse. This cycle of debt and punishment has a long, harmful history in our nation. It serves to entrench a person in poverty by throwing insurmountable obstacles in their path, making it more difficult for them to improve their situation.
Public safety and shared enjoyment of our city are important priorities, but our efforts to achieve them should focus on repairing harm rather than deepening hardship
Blanchet House serves to alleviate suffering and promote hope for people burdened by poverty and trauma. Lately, we have been operating under tremendous headwinds, and there is every indication that the months ahead will bring even greater challenges and even fewer resources.
We continue our work without judgment, knowing that suffering does not define a person. Each guest carries the weight of poverty and trauma that reach far beyond individual circumstance.
With this in mind, we have extended our hand to the City of Portland to partner with their outreach teams, as well as teams managed by our colleague providers. Blanchet House is experienced at connecting our meal guests to shelter, treatment, health care, and recovery. We pioneered “inreach” programs that embed peer support specialists within services, literally meeting people in need where they are at. Establishing concrete connections between outreach and inreach providers will be essential to helping people progress toward more stable and healthier outcomes.
Poverty and trauma. Two sides of the same coin. Keep that coin close to you as you consider what our community needs to do and how you can support people who are suffering. Those in need are deserving of dignity, compassion, and care. Everything flows from there.
As a 100% privately funded organization, we rely on you to keep our doors open. Please help if you can by donating here.
