Episode 6: Transcript
Marisa Zapata:
Hi y'all. I'm Marisa Zapata, and this is the podcast where we examine homelessness by talking to researchers and experts, who of course include people with lived experience of homelessness, to understand what we're missing in the headlines and soundbites. In each episode, we will help clear up misconceptions about homelessness and to answer what it would take to prevent and end homelessness in Portland and beyond. Who am I? I'm an Associate Professor of Land-Use Planning at Portland State University and Director of PSU's Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, a research center dedicated to reducing and preventing homelessness, where we lift up the experiences and perspectives of people of color.
Stefanie Knowlton:
In this episode, we talk with Raven Drake. She leads the Street Roots Ambassador Program, which builds on the talents and expertise of people on the streets, to do public health outreach, surveys and training. She also developed and helped create C3PO, a collection of three alternative shelter communities built during the pandemic.
Marisa Zapata:
All right. I just want to start off with some high level stuff about you, starting out with tell us your name and how you got to Portland. If you're from Portland and if not, what brought you here?
Raven Michelle Drake:
Well, my name is Raven Michelle Drake. I actually came here and arrived here on Christmas Eve, 2019, knowing I would be homeless when I got here. For me, coming from Ohio where there is very disparative laws against the trans community, it was a path forward in my transition. Giving up everything and coming to live on the streets and starting over here was a pathway forward. And so, I left a really good, paying job and closed out the place I was living with a friend, and got on the bus with what limited funds I had and came out here, determined to figure it out.
Marisa Zapata:
I think your story is really important because one of the things that we hear a lot from people is this idea that everyone is coming here to receive good services. And of course, we know for people who are choosing to come to Portland or the other more liberal cities, it's more complicated than that, right? And so, it is this question about the hope that you can find a place where your identity can be validated and you can be accepted. And so, I don't know if you know other people who have been in that situation.
Raven Michelle Drake:
Oh, lots. I have a lot of them who we housed at the C3PO camps. I have a lot of them who I continue to support and help, with the helps of people like Rose Haven and Brave Space and my friends over at [Trans PDX 00:02:45]. We all kind of chip in to try to make it a better situation for everyone.
Marisa Zapata:
People aren't moving here so they can take more showers.
Raven Michelle Drake:
Yeah.
Marisa Zapata:
They're moving here for a different reason.
Raven Michelle Drake:
For people out on the street, the three most common narratives that we have for somebody reaching the street are people who lost a job and ran into financial hardship and ended up on the street. The other one is people fleeing domestic violence, which is a very common way that someone ends up out here. And then the third and I think the most heartbreaking for me is that a lot of the LGBTQI community end up on the streets because they came out to their friends and their family and they were turned away, and they lost everything with their own depression, dysphoria, whatever might happen. And then mixed in there are people like me who knew what they were giving up but knew what they might gain, and so they did it.
Marisa Zapata:
And when I talk to people who will be angry about youth, and we'll talk about young people, and they're just like, "Well, they just want to run away and not work." And I'm like, "No. A lot of them are from the LGBTQI community and they're here because their families said no to them." And it's heartbreaking.
Raven Michelle Drake:
Yeah. I mean, I've just gotten over, in the last two weeks gotten great news of my first group of ambassadors. By mid July, I'll have zero ambassadors because they are all moving into full-time jobs between Greater Good Northwest and [crosstalk 00:04:21]. And so, one of the distinct ways at which, even with the plethora of resources that we have of homeless services, one distinct way that we have never developed here in Portland became kind of my marching orders, my mission, was a distinct pathway off. There are pathways to housing, there are pathways to rehabs and even mental health has some services, but there is a zero pathway from any organization that provides some kind of grounding and support and a stage for people to stand on, to train them, to teach them, to help them reach for that next chapter in their life. And so, we took it upon ourselves to start to try to build it around the guise of outreach and advocacy at Street Roots.
Raven Michelle Drake:
And so, what people see with the ambassador program is that front facing 20%. They don't see the 80% of the time where we're not doing outreach and I am working with the ambassadors every single day, and we're training on new things and we're exploring new options they might have in their life. Some of my ambassadors got really excited and involved in peer support work and they're going off to work in the shelter system. Others got really inundated in the outreach and advocacy. We have found them spots with partners on outreach teams to take that knowledge and that lived experience they have onto the next level.
Marisa Zapata:
Can you talk a little bit about what the structure of the ambassadors' program is?
Raven Michelle Drake:
Yeah. So, all of our ambassadors are active vendors of Street Roots, who we invited to join this first batch of this program. The structure of it is very democratic and every decision the ambassadors have made; who we partner with, what surveys we've taken on, what work we've done, where we've worked, what civic engagement we've done, even what advocacy that we're going after, all of this has been decided by those ambassadors' majority vote. And so, that has been the power structure, where every step of the way they have made these decisions about the program with me. They have refined trainings with me that I originally gave them. They've continued education, continued seeking knowledge, and it's led all of them to where exactly I told them it would, which was an opportunity. If they were willing to put in the time and dedication, those opportunities exist. What didn't exist all these years was the connection, the bridge, between houselessness and those opportunities.
Marisa Zapata:
So, what is the goal of the ambassador program?
Raven Michelle Drake:
The goal of the ambassador program is kind of a twofold goal. First half is to effect change in the communities where we work. So much of houselessness is perpetrated by this disparative narrative of who it is that lives out there. And then the same part, the unhouse community holds the same kind of disparative narrative against the house community of who's out there, that these people who are housed just want to see us gone, just want to see these sayings. So, the biggest mission is communication. Each pathway that defeats these things in our life, whether it be systemic racism or homelessness or extreme poverty, lack of education; all of these start at one central point at the hub, which is communication, is the starting point for every pathway. And so, we focused on communication. We love to go into neighborhoods and host civic events, where we bring both sides of the community together and foster communication between them. We sit them down. They are more alike than they will ever be apart.
Raven Michelle Drake:
For the most part, just like the house community, unhoused are looking for safety and peace. They want to rest their heads somewhere where they feel comfortable. They want to have access to basic resources that most of us just take for granted. When we are sitting at home and we need to go use the restroom, we don't think about having to go to the restroom, we just go. But when I lived on the street, I lived on the side of the I-5, in the height of the pandemic last year, before I got into housing, I was living out there and the nearest bathroom to me that was open was two miles away.
Marisa Zapata:
That has been one of the most humbling things that I hear in interviews. I have to, when I do interviews for research projects for people who have been recently housed, I ask, what's different? What's helpful? What's meaningful? And to have another person look at me and say, "I have my own bathroom. I can go to the bathroom inside," and it's... You're right. I don't think housed people understand not to be able to walk into any coffee shop I want and use the bathroom if I'm out.
Raven Michelle Drake:
Exactly. I have a woman who we got into housing, finally, last month, who had been living on the streets of Portland since 1977. She had spent 50 years on the streets, and she has spent her entire adult life living on the streets. She became homeless with her mother when she was 10 and spent her an entire life living out here forgotten. And when we got her the place it made me cry because we got her a place and we got her furniture, and when she came in she started to cry and told me that this was the first bed she had ever owned.
Marisa Zapata:
Oh, my God.
Raven Michelle Drake:
She'd never had a bed. And it was just that bed. That bed was everything to her. It was the realization of a dream that one day she would have it, and it's the simplest things. And it's also weird; through this pandemic I've noticed something that is unique, and it is when everything shut down and everybody went and sheltered inside, and for the most part the unhoused community was left out there to their own devices, we watched a community that historically had just been separate little pockets of kind of street families who looked after each other, come together street after street as a community. They would eat together and they would look after each other and they would take care of each other. And I watched more humbling kindness and community in those unhoused individuals who had nothing than I had seen in multitudes of the community who are housed beforehand.
Raven Michelle Drake:
And it was a challenge to me to figure out, how do we bridge that gap? How do we make it so that everybody in the city could feel comfortable enough to walk up to each other and say hello and start a conversation? How do we make communities understand that together is the pathway out of here and not separately?
Marisa Zapata:
Well, speaking of bringing people together to do some exciting work, last summer, of course we saw in light of the pandemic, the creation of new city-sanctioned camps that were a bit different than the tiny pod villages that have been going up. Can you talk about the creation of these camps and what their goal was initially?
Raven Michelle Drake:
The original proposal for C3PO was actually written by myself and our executive director, Kaia Sand, and we very quickly brought in JOIN. Then JOIN of course opened up the door and we brought in volunteers and other organizations. We brought in Trans PDX. We brought in Gather:Make:Shelter and Hygiene4All was formed from people who were working and living at the camp last summer. And so, we had multitudes of organizations working towards this goal. It was a frantic pace. So, we flew at the light speed building this program out of nothing, and the biggest thing was we really relied on Victory LaFara, who manages Dignity Village, was my counterpart as the high admin. There was just, we all put everything we had into this. And we built it as a village. We built it around the model that every one of these villages needed to have self-determination. That village, the community living there, needed to determine what that space was, what their roles were within reason. We set core rules and a core guideline of what this space could be, and then every one of the villages were allowed to grow and expand.
Raven Michelle Drake:
And slowly, we were able to pull away a paid staff that we were doing initially with funding from the city, and phase those people out to actually turning over those roles to the villagers who were living there, to get the ability and the authority to manage themselves.
Marisa Zapata:
So this is I think really important for listeners. There's concerns by some advocates and some people who are experiencing homelessness that when the city is funding the camps there are often rules that must go with that. And how do you balance that? Or, well, first of all, was that true in this case? And then, how do you balance that with trying to meet the goals and desires for self-determination that we all know are important and essential?
Raven Michelle Drake:
Well, I mean, it became easy for us. There were rules that we had to agree to, but most of them were not demanded upon us by the city but rather by Prosper Portland, who gave up these lots for us to use. And their basic rules were no fires and no this and no that. The basic things of don't burn it down, don't trash it. So, when I say core rules, I mean those basic, common sense rules were what we started with. The actual rules of how the camp was going to operate and run, how services would be provided, all of that; we started off with a very narrow view of because we wanted those villagers who were living there to come together. We brought them together into a weekly council of campers who all had a voice, all had a vote, and help mold each camp. And so to this day, I mean, you walk into each one of the camps; you'll walk into the Queer Affinity Camp, the LGBTQI. It's this beautiful green, lush space. They put in a garden. There's so much artwork. It's very colorful, very bright and vibrant.
Raven Michelle Drake:
You walk across the street to the BIPOC and it's equally bright and vibrant but with the distinct cultural flare that everyone there has and has brought in. And its roles are completely different from the way the Queer Affinity operates. A good example is we turned over all admissions for new people to the camps themselves, so the camps formed the council of people who were living there who would review applications, kind of interview people, and then bring forward people that they thought were good fits for that community so that the rest of the campers could vote, and they would bring in the people who fit the best. That's the way it operates over at the Queer Affinity.
Raven Michelle Drake:
On the BIPOC side, it's the same kind of concept where it's a council, but instead of bringing it back, these people, who are all very well thought of in their community and a staple of the leadership, have been given authority by that same community that they don't have to bring it back to the council. They have their own unilateral where they can make a decision right there and say, "We like this person. Let's move them in." In the BIPOC, the use of racial slurs has given much more attention than over at Queer Affinity, while Queer Affinity has a much bigger emphasis on the correction of pronouns. Both of them have similar roles but for two very different things. And so, each one of the camps were given that, and that's the point. That is the problem I have with some of the projects being proposed, is that they're very regimented and as much as I would love to see that succeed so that there would be more space for people, I would not live in there and I can't think of anybody out there who would live in a situation like that.
Raven Michelle Drake:
But all of the moguls who have really taken to heart this ideal of self-determination, to allow that village to start small, start basic, and to grow and develop and become a community; all of those, I have really high hopes that they will succeed. And here's the thing. I had this conversation the other day where people are like, "Well, we spent all that money funding Metro." Yes, and those projects are going to come but the likelihood is we'll not see the full fruition of that money, the use of it and those projects that we funded, for the next decade. It will take time for all those projects to come online; to build, to rehab buildings, to organize. They're not going to be overnight. It's not like Metro spent all this money and we were paying them back to instantly launch them. This is a long-term project that will take a decade or more to see the fruition of.
Raven Michelle Drake:
And then in the meantime, that is the beauty, with our lack of space within shelters, even with new shelters starting to be opened by other organizations; even if 10 more shelters were be open, it still means that we would only, at best, only have enough shelter space to house a quarter of the population here in Portland. The numbers that the JOIN office reports are woefully low, and I've told them repeatedly. Their comment of 2,000 and 2,500 houseless individuals is extremely inaccurate.
Marisa Zapata:
And I would say that they know that, right?
Raven Michelle Drake:
Yeah. And it's something we've discussed because I said, "When you count tents, you're not including people who sleep in doorways. People who might not be in that area that night when you count. People who living in their cars, RVs. This discounts all the people living off the grid out in the woods, in the parks, that you're not going to then count." I said, "We have spent a year over at Street Roots through the outreach we've done trying to count and get an ideal, a grasp of the numbers. And so far where we are, it might be closer but not accurate, is about 4,500 to 5,000 individuals on a nightly basis."
Marisa Zapata:
That does not surprise me. And that would be consistent with some of the research around the country in terms of what we call extrapolation factors, to say that, particularly when we get into this one night count versus repeated counts over a year, you're going to have a higher number to start with. One of my arguments has been around these differences in counts, is that when we're talking about the amount of affordable housing we need for our region to provide for people who are doubled up, people who are on the cusp of homelessness, people who are living unsheltered, we're looking at numbers that are in the tens of thousands. So, we did an estimate in 2017 that got us up to 40,000. And so at that point, as a researcher and someone who's thinking about policy, it actually doesn't matter if it's 2,500 or 5,000 because I'm already into the 40,000, 50,000 range. Providing just a few more units... but it does, I think, help the public understand and make sense of what they're seeing, because they're like, "We know that we're seeing more than this really is, or we're hearing about more."
Raven Michelle Drake:
Yeah. Well, I mean, and another thing is the public will say there are more houseless individuals now than there was a year ago or a year and a half ago.
Marisa Zapata:
Do you agree with that?
Raven Michelle Drake:
No, absolutely not. Here's the difference. Prior to the pandemic, prior to the stay-at-home order, we were a very mobile population out there. We had to be mobile between sweeps and cleans, between people, even in our own community, damaging or losing our stuff. Most of us carried everything we owned on our back, and we would pack up every day and we'd move to new locations. We migrated around looking for somewhere that was home, somewhere that felt safe enough to stay. And so, it was not uncommon for people to sleep all night and then pack up everything they owned and go to the library, charge devices, check their email, go to the park, go down to the waterfront, go get services that they needed, all of these things. And so, when people would come downtown in the morning and the afternoon and see half of what they see now, that was their assumption of how many houseless individuals, and it wasn't a massive problem to them. They didn't want to push for a solution.
Raven Michelle Drake:
And now that there's a whole bunch, coupled with the fact that a great many of these people who are now joining the conversation went through their own bit of uncertainty over the last year and a half as most of them lost work, could not work, shelter their home, had those same, unsure feelings, those desperation feelings of, "God, will I be able to survive this?" A lot of people are still fighting tooth and nail to abate the eviction moratorium ending and everything that can happen on that. And that for me is the biggest fear, because if something is not fully in place, if people do not get the help they need, conservative estimates is at least 10,000 people in Portland could join this houseless group. And we struggle now with what we have. We would be swamped with that.
Marisa Zapata:
The eviction stuff is what keeps me up at night. So, I want to just pause and acknowledge that you talked about moving here in 2019 and that you had this whole other career before getting here. So, you've learned all of this in two and a half years, all the way of framing this?
Raven Michelle Drake:
Yeah. I mean, I haven't been here a full two years yet. It's a little over a year and a half that I've been here. Before reaching Portland, I never did outreach work, I never did advocacy. None of these things were part of my life, and I started to learn them out of necessity. And as I did, I unlocked something in myself. The joke that me and Kaia have with each other is that I came here to Portland to just do my transition to become myself, and I wanted to do it quietly and I've done everything but. And so-
Marisa Zapata:
I've got to so agree with that.
Raven Michelle Drake:
It all started from, I was really horribly bad at selling the paper. Just, I was a dismal vendor. I was so depressed and didn't talk to people, didn't engage back then, that I found it... I mean, if you stand there quietly on a street corner, you might sell one every once in a while, but most people will walk past you. And so, I didn't really sell the paper, and I gave up. And in early February, I saw what was happening in Washington already with their first few cases, and I knew it was coming. I knew it was a matter of time. And both of the individuals I camped with both had compromised immune systems. And so, I was worried about them, and so I defaulted to what is always going to be a part of me. I spent three combat tours with the 1st Marine Division as a corpsman. I will always be a medic at my core. Medicine will always be a passion of mine. I just defaulted to what I knew, and I assembled a medical kit and I started walking up and down the I-5 corridor doing outreach to people.
Raven Michelle Drake:
I got a hold of an 8-man tent that I set up outside of my encampment as an emergency hospital, and I filled it with supplies. And then I would go and do outreach to people and check on them. I wanted it to be like a radar for me so that I would know, and I could get my friends out of there if the virus appeared. It's just something safer. Luckily, one got into C3PO camps eventually and the other one, she got into housing. But in the process, Kaia Sand and Joanne Zuhl, executive editor, heard about this and came out to run a story on it. And a few days later, Kaia and DeVon Pouncey, our vendor program director, asked me to come to the Multnomah County's meeting on what they would do with the unhoused and shelter population with this virus. And after an hour and 45 minutes of talking about the shelters, the meeting concluded without any real discussion of what happened on the street.
Raven Michelle Drake:
And so, on the walk back to the office, me and Kaia started to talk and had made this determination that maybe we should try. That's where we left it. Of course, the first case comes into Clackamas and Kaia calls my cell phone and says, "Can we do this?" And so, myself and my friend, Tina Drake, we wrote the entirety of the action team, what I like to call the Ambassador Program 1.0. We wrote it in two hours and rolled it out the next morning, in this frantic fanfare being filmed by KGW through the whole process. And I was really worried in the beginning about doing interviews, about talking to media. I was a very private person. And one day, Kaia pulled me aside and we had this conversation and she made me realize that to walk away from the opportunity to speak to media people, I'm closing the door on an opportunity to work at that disparative narrative; to pose the tough questions to people and the tough conversations, to say, "Let's take a look at this. Let's find a way that works for everyone."
Marisa Zapata:
And we only have a few more minutes. I want to respect your time. And there were a couple of very specific questions I wanted to get into. So, there are three camps that were ended up being created, and each camp serves a different population. Can you talk about that decision and which populations?
Raven Michelle Drake:
So, given how much the BIPOC and LGBTQI communities are representative, so unproportionally, to the rest of the community; how many more there are, we knew right up front that we wanted to have those two cultural spaces. Both of those groups historically have issues with other people out here on the streets, and they find a lot of comfort and solace living together. We offered that as an option to both of those groups. And so, we have both the LGBTQI and the BIPOC, and then we have a blended camp where it's a mixture of everybody who is out on the streets. And even then, it's not limited because of say the BIPOC. There were a few White individuals who were invited by that community to live there; people who were allies, people who were friends. There were multiple people who were straight, not even on the spectrum of the LGBTQI, who were invited to live with them because they were respectful, they were allies. And so, we allowed them to form this community together, allowing them each to have their own space.
Marisa Zapata:
The other question I've been wondering is, what does it look like inside the camps? And you talked earlier very vividly about what it looks like in terms of the lushness, of the expression of culture, but what about in terms of the structures, in terms of, do people have bathrooms? What does it actually look like?
Raven Michelle Drake:
From the very beginning, we first started out with tents. We started out very low. We built a 12 foot by 12 foot platform for each camper that belonged to them. That was their area to utilize the entirety of the platform or as low as they want it. And each one of the camps has a minimum of five Porta Potties, which are serviced every other day. They also all have their own shower trailer, which they get to run. Unfortunately, it's just shower trailers on the east side of the river, so we brokered the deal with a local laundromat so that everybody in the camps could take their laundry and wash them. The one at the blended camp, which was built for us by Cascadia Clusters, is two shower stalls and then two sets of washer and dryers. They are built into this trailer that that community gets to use.
Raven Michelle Drake:
We provide three meals a day. We provided, inevitably, as we got funded in September before I left the project and went back to Street Roots... we had finally funded, through a grant OHA, a full medical program. So, there's a community health worker assigned to each camp that just works with that community, and then an overall nurse case manager. And yeah, we were able to provide wraparound services; mental health, and planning for housing. I still go in on a regular basis as much as possible and check in with people and see how they're moving forward and see if there's a way that I can assist them. I saw people from C3PO who show up at Street Roots and specifically ask for me, and I sit down with them and find the time to talk them through maybe a... they got a housing letter and they don't understand what it's saying, or they're informed that their number whatever on a new list and they don't understand what this means. Helping them get their IDs. The ultimate goal is to continue those wraparound services, because those are so essential to people succeeding.
Marisa Zapata:
Right. So, right now there is a proposal that would create $10 million in resources to expand... Well, it's not entirely clear what the expansion would be exactly, but some sort of combination I think of pod villages, the kind of camps like C3PO, maybe rest sites more like R2D2. What do you think of this plan, the amount of money? And what do you think are the opportunities and the concerns that might come up?
Raven Michelle Drake:
Well, I think $10 million is a good start. I think it will take a lot more than that to effectively beat this, but I think it's a good step forward, especially when the original proposal from the county was that they would be willing to put $3 million. So, this is a much bigger step forward. I like it, but I caution them against some of their plans of having these regimented camps. You have to give each one the ability to self-determine and to evolve. The good example I like to give people is, do you live somewhere you picked or did you just take the first house that came available? All right? And people go, "Oh, I picked my house," because you had self-determination. You got to pick where you are comfortable, where you wanted to live, what your house would look like, how your house would function, what your family dynamic is. All of these things you get to determine, but we're asking people who have already not had that power to continue to give it up to have an opportunity to live with us. And that's why when we approach it in that vein and we survey them, we have so many people that say, "No, thank you. I'm okay. I'll just stay out here."
Raven Michelle Drake:
But in the same respect, when we approach them with the ideal of the shelter motels, of finally having actual housing of their own, we see better results. When we approach them with the ideal of a model, of a pod camp or a village or a tent city that allows them as a community to determine who and what they are, we see 100%, most of the time across the board in these surveys that we've done internally at Street Roots, and the talks that we've had in the ambassador program with people, of people who would go, "Well, if that was the case, I would go." And that is the linchpin. That's the key that I keep... that we have a lot of these projects who have reached out to us for our experience of living on the street. And that's what we like to tell them; you have to have the flexibility and the foresight to give that community the ability to determine who and what they are.
Marisa Zapata:
And it's mind boggling that that argument continues to have to be made, because the idea that people know what to do for themselves and how to do it is fundamental for most of us. And if that was challenged, we'd be like, "Wait, what are you talking about? Back off."
Raven Michelle Drake:
Yeah. And the thing I tell them is, for everybody who says, "Oh, no, they just need to be given..." like we're mindless monkeys or something and we can't function, like that we need to be given these rules and everything, I look at them and I say, "That's all fine and good. And I hope that the day never comes, but if the day comes that you end up out here on the streets, then I hope you get to live in the same model you're proposing. I hope you get stripped of all your rights and your ability to choose, and you understand the desperation and the solitude that becomes that life of indifference, where you don't get a choice in what's happening. All right? You don't get to choose where you live or where you go. Your choices become shelter and some resources, even though it's not completely what you want, or no shelter and no resources and struggling to survive. You don't get an in-between. There is no medium ground."
Marisa Zapata:
So, the last question I have for you is, at the beginning of the interview, and I just think this is really important in the context of what you just said a moment ago, about how this is going to cost a lot more than $10 million to support people. You had put in a time horizon that I don't think most people are willing to talk about; that we're not going to really see their fruition of these financial investments from the city bonds and the Metro supportive housing measure, for potentially years. I think we're both saying this is not happening tomorrow.
Raven Michelle Drake:
Yeah. And it's in the same respect of, I laugh when people go, "Oh, God. When the virus is over, we'll just get back to normal." Well, first off, there will be a new normal. Too much has changed for there not to be. And secondly, whatever time it took us to get into where we are in this pandemic, it will take the equal amount of time for us to get out. So, if it ended tomorrow and magically the entire virus disappeared and was no longer a thing, it would still take us a year and a half, two years, as a city and a state and a nation to climb back out, back to where we were. Okay? Back to some semblance of where we were. But even then, it will be a whole different direction because too much has gone on, too much has changed. With how horrible that the pandemic was, it was a blessing to the people living on the street because it really showed the cracks and the holes within the system they'd had to navigate.
Raven Michelle Drake:
It showed all the ways it didn't work, when people who had historically never had to use these resources had to call 211 and try to find rental assistance and all these things. Their frustration of a system that doesn't actually work and doesn't go anywhere, it just loops on itself; that right there drove them all to be irate about this system. And the unhoused community looked at them and said, "Yeah, that's the best we've had." And it opened people's eyes to what's been happening and restarted elements of the conversation that for some of these conversations, for a decade or more here in the city had been closed off.
Marisa Zapata:
Do you have anything else you want to share with us?
Raven Michelle Drake:
No. I just absolutely appreciate being here today. I very much appreciate the partnership that we've had with HRAC and looking forward to a long and fruitful partnership for many years to come.
Marisa Zapata:
All right. We've been talking to Raven Michelle Drake from Street Roots. And I just want to say personally that while it breaks my heart that you had to leave where you were from to be out here to be able to live your full self, it is definitely our gift and we're thrilled that you're here.
Raven Michelle Drake:
Well, thank you. For way too long in my life, my story was my tragedy that I hid from the world, and now it's become my power. And I can share it to show people that even in the darkest of days, there is a pathway forward.
Stefanie Knowlton:
That was Raven Michelle Drake, who manages the Street Roots Ambassador Program. If you'd like to learn more about the program, check out the Street Roots website at streetroots.org. If you'd like to learn more about our guests and browse the suggested reading list for each episode, check out our website: understandinghomelessness.org. Thanks for listening.