Street roots., November 11, 2011, Page 8, Image 8

8
street roots
1 i
N ot . 11, 2011
Teressa
Raiford
‘M ake the process
more efficient’
BY JAKE THOM AS
STAFF W R ITER
Street Roots is
conducting a
series of interviews
with the candidates
for City Council. If
you missed an
edition, you can
catch up at www.
streetroots.
wordpress.com
n 1996, 26-year-old Teressa Raiford left
Portland with two children in tow for
Dallas, Texas after her cousin died in a
shooting. “I didn’t want my children to think
that that was normal,” she recalls. Reiford
went on to pursue a career in business and
in 2006 started her own company, Intrinsic
Group, which helps businesses operate
more efficiently.
In August 2010, Raiford moved back to
Portland, the city she was born and raised
in, and has delved into the city’s civic life,
revealing what she characterizes as a deep
disconnect between City Hall and the
citizenry. She hopes that by getting elected
to City Council, She can apply her business
acumen to city government and improve
communications with the public. If elected,
she would be only the third black person to
hold a seat on City Council.
I
PHOTO COURTESY OF
Jake Thom as: W W made you want to
. run for City Council? **
J.T.: Wifozi are you going to do to make the
city more business-friendly and jumpstart
having that experience might shape, some
policies you’d bring to City Hall,
businesses?
T eressa Raiford: Having a business
consulting company, my job is to build
solutions. So when I came home and saw
that our community was changing and our
attitudes were changing, even toward each
other, I thought what is the problem? It
looks beautiful here, and there seems to be
a lot of opportunity, so why isn’t everybody
happy and taking advantage of what’s here?
And what I realized is that there is a lack of
communication. I was like, OK, the haves
are not promoting the information to the
have-nots.
J.T.: Both candidates for this position are
known quantities. People know who Amanda
Fritz is, they know who Mary Nolan is. Why
should voters pick you?
"Being from this community, I see the issues
and know the people and know what the
problems are and understand that they don't
know how to vocalize them. They don't trust
the system and it defeats them even more."
T.R.: Because I’m a businesswoman, and
we need a better business service in this
community. Evidently people are not happy,
and that has to do with customer service. c ,
You have to be more efficient. I know
Amanda is caring. She used to be a nurse.
She has a compassionate heart, but she’s
doing business in my neighborhood. Mary
Nolan, she knows geography and politics,
and that’s beautiful and everything else, but
we need business in the neighborhood, and
we need people who know the people in the
neighborhood to do business and to show
them how to get «iccess opportunities.
That’s what I’m going to do; that’s what I’ve
been doing.
T.R.: Entertain global opportunities. I
have a global business right now. So I want
to attract some of those opportunities to
come here and to do business with some of
the underdeveloped opportunities here. We
have a lot of minority money here that
nobody’s taking advantage of. We have a lot
of seed money that’s here that’s just sitting
and nobody knows how to plan enough to
use th a t I program people on how to do
that — training. I keep calling it programing
because you have to develop that mindset,
but basically you have to teach those skills.
You have to understand th e process and
rules of engagement That’s what I want to
teach the city. Let’s use our education
system; let’s use some of these
apprenticeships that the Portland
Development Commission has.
J.T.: What do you think about the new
Office of Equity and Human Rights?
T.R.: (Making a thumbs down gesture) I
believe that justice is equitable. I didn’t see
anything in there where we’re going to start
assessing fees and violations to people that
discriminate openly and blatantly. You can’t
legislate morality, so why would you create
an Equity Office that has no sustainable
justice? There’s nothing in there. It’s kind of
empty. We already have a Human Right
Commission. People complain and then we
give them two years to figure out how to
deal with it? You just apply a violation.
x J.T,: So you want something more concrete?
T.R.: No. Nothing that’s not already been
done with Human Rights Commission. (For
example) You go in and are discriminated
against and that company’s flourishing. Well,
they never have to hire you if they don’t
want to. How do we process things as they
come so we can document it and do
something about it? We don’t need training.
We all know how to be humans.
T.R.: I’m black. I’ve never been African.
I’m a black American. When I was 11 years
old, the Portland police did something
unreasonable to my family. We had the
“possum incident,” as they like to call i t
J.T.: The well-known one? (In 1981,
Portland police officers threw dead opposums
on the doorstep of a black-owned business,
which, in part, helped lead to the creation of
the city’s first police review board.)
T.R.: Yes, that was my grandmother’s
restaurant, and my dad had to call the
commissioner. When you’re a kid and happy-
go-lucky and something like that happens
before you’re a teenager, your mindset
changes. It doesn’t defeat you. It kind of
makes you powerful because you get to see
the world for what it is, and you become a
■resolver, and say, how can we make this
better? Because that hurts with that type of
pain. So in my life now, Pve always been a
philanthropist I’m giving. I’m like a teacher.
It turned me into a different type of person.
Being from this community, 1 see the
issues and know the people and know what
the problems are and understand that they
don’t know how to vocalize them. They don’t
trust the system and it defeats them even
more. I can communicate that sometimes
the city’s not being racist, it’s just that the
laws don’t make any sense. I’ll just go in and
make the process more efficient
You have a defeated community, and not
just blacks now. You see Occupy Portland.
Everybody’s upset and they don’t
understand that we’re the 99 percent What
they need to do is occupy City Hall. If you’re
a businesswoman, get a position in there so
that you can be on the inside and you can
help them make decisions that make sense.
J.T.: How has Northeast Portland changed
since you grew up there?
T.R.: That’s an honest question?
J.T.: Yeah.
J.T.: As an African American bom and
raised in Portland, I was wondering how
See RAIFORD, page 9
t e r e s s a r a if o r d