community
Where Are They Now? Katy Stevens continued from front page
invested in. When I moved in with the
Millers they sat me down and told me,
‘You can’t just go through the motions
anymore. If you’re going to stay with
us you have to care about your edu-
cation, go to all your classes, do your
homework, get straight As and apply for
college.’ That was the first time anyone
had told me I could go to college. And
I was just blown away by that idea. So
that’s what I did.”
As a student at VHS Stevens
was successful academically. She ran
cross country and was a star track ath-
lete who finished sixth in the state in the
400 meters. For her senior project she
worked with Miss Oregon as her mentor
who she met at a side job she had doing
modeling for a dress shop in Scappoose.
She also took an active role in
the fundraising campaign to build a new
campus. “I was asked by the organizers
to share my story with a few groups of
potential donors,” explains Stevens. “I
told them what it was like living without
a school, without books, without lock-
ers, without the things we needed to
get a real education, and personally for
me, what it like to not have a house or
a home for my family to live in. It was
really scary to get up and talk, but it just
came very naturally for me.”
Betsy Miller calls Stevens “a
delightful human being, terribly funny
and extremely hard working.” Miller re-
members Stevens working at the Sentry
Market for three years while attending
school and participating in extracurricu-
lar activities. “She has always had such
amazing capabilities,” says Miller.
Stevens graduated from VHS
in 2010 having spent almost her entire
high school in modular classrooms.
“It’s such a beautiful facility,” says Ste-
vens about the new Vernonia campus.
“It looks like schools we would visit
during track meets and cross country
meets where I would look around and
think, ‘Why don’t we have this?’ At-
tending school in the mods was such a
frustrating scholastic experience. There
was such a disconnect with the teachers
and no common areas for the students.”
Despite the educational obsta-
cles Stevens applied to the University
of Portland where she received an aca-
demic scholarship for 75% of her tuition
along with several grants. In her last
two years she earned the Brian Doyle
Humor Scholarship and directed com-
edy projects to enrich campus life while
earning all her tuition.
“All of that wouldn’t have hap-
pened without the help, during my se-
nior year at VHS, of Betsy Miller who
sat down with me and went over schol-
arships and grants and figuring out how
to pay for my college,” says Stevens. “I
graduated with no debt, which is pretty
much unheard of these days.”
When asked if she felt ready
to go to college, Stevens had this to
say about her time at VHS, “I felt rel-
atively prepared, I really did. We had
Advanced Placement (AP) and Honors
classes available before the flood. I was
taking AP History and then it turned out
the school district couldn’t afford the
testing for us to get the college credit
for the course work we did. The same
thing happened with biology and litera-
ture, we could do the course work but
not get the college credit because they
were working on raising money for the
new campus. But I still went to college
with the same education as most of my
peers and did rather well and feel like I
got an advanced education at Vernonia
High School.”
Stevens graduated from the
University of Portland in 2014 with a
degree in Psychology and Neurosci-
ence. She was the President of the Neu-
roscience Club for two years where she
coordinated events and guest speakers
and researchers. “It was the most popu-
lar academic club on campus,” says Ste-
vens. She also participated in other ac-
tivist events including a fair trade group,
and worked for a women’s crisis group.
During her senior year she worked at
Oregon Health Sciences University
(OHSU) doing neuroscience and dietary
research with primates.
After working with primates
for several years, Stevens realized she
was missing the human component. “I
really wanted to help people... imme-
diately,” says Stevens. “Research is
wonderful and necessary but I felt like I
was working on things that wouldn’t be
available for 10 years and it wasn’t very
fulfilling.”
Stevens quit her “high status”
research job at OHSU and started work-
ing at a homeless shelter for women in
Portland. “I loved it! It was the best
job I’ve ever had!” says Stevens. “It
was chaotic and crazy and terrifying
and unsafe. And so wonderful! Once
I started working there I realized this is
the population I wanted to work with.
It was a population I had a lot in com-
mon with and I understood a lot of their
sentiments and their frustrations. And I
really did a good job relating to them.”
One of the challenges Stevens
faced while working with homeless pop-
ulations was a lack of resources. “The
nonprofit world is such a hard place to
work because, much like the Vernonia
School when I was there, there is only
so much you can do with limited re-
sources. You have to find ways to make
things work, and it’s really hard to work
in that kind of environment. There was
never enough assistance for the people,
there was never enough shelter space
and most of the resources have stipula-
tions about who can access them”
Stevens says she got really frus-
trated with her nonprofit work and de-
cided she wanted to do something dif-
ferent, but couldn’t find anything that fit
her ideas. At the time she says she was
also doing some self-examination and
considering how she had been able to
attend college, thanks in a large part to
the support she received from the Miller
family. “I just couldn’t conceive of a
way to thank them for what they did for
me and articulate how important that
was for me,” says Stevens.
Stevens finally decided on an
answer to her career dilemma, as well
as a way to say thank you to the Miller
family. “I decided I would start my own
nonprofit and name it after the Millers,”
says Stevens.
After months of research, writ-
ing business plans, and applying for
nonprofit status, The Miller Scholar-
ship Foundation (TMSF) was launched
this past June. “It’s primarily a schol-
arship organization for people who are
currently or previously were houseless,
continued on page 8
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