Street roots
14
iiJJllE
Aug. 29, 2014
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Answering the big question: Why I’m here
BY A N D Y KO
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
T" "T Then the dust Settles following any
l / l / significant change in my life - a
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▼ ▼ new job, a new home, a birth, a
death — my mind starts asking me
questions. I blame my father for this. They
are mostly his questions. My mind
sometimes even poses them with his slight
Korean accent. “How did
you get here?” “Why are
you here?” “What are
you going to do?” “How
are you going to do it?”
“What then?” He was
one of those people who
believed that we are the
sum of our experiences
and that those experiences, are determined
by the choices we make. He could be a real
pain in the butt. More than 20 years after
his death, l am still asking his questions. |
I left Manhattan six weeks ago, with my
wife and daughter, to live in Oregon and
become executive director of Partnership
for Safety and Justice? For me, returning to ’
the Pacific Northwest and joining PSJ feels
like a homecoming. After law school, I
spent eight years representing homeless
families in NYC. Some of these families
*
were together — parents, children,
sometimes grandparents — seeking shelter
and spending days, or even weeks, sleeping
oh blankets and flattened cardboard boxes
in a 24 hour city welfare office. Other
families had already lost children to the
foster care system. They were trapped
between city bureaucracies: one agency
demanding that they have housing to get
their children back, the other requiring
them to already have their children back to
get into a shelter.
SAFETY and
■JUSTICE
~ A ndy Ko is the
Executive Director o f
Partnership fo r
Safety an d fustice.
PSJ is a statewide,
non-profit advocacy -
organization .
dedicated to m aking
Oregon’s approach to
crime and public
safety more effective
an d just.
From these hundreds of families I
learned that there is a “system.” It affects
how each of us goes through life by defining
our range of choices. Those choices — and?
what happens when we make the wrong
choice — widen or narrow based on where‘
we. were bom, who our parents were, the
color of our skin, the language we speak,
whether we were lucky or not at some key
point in our lives and who is deciding
whether to reward, punish or ignore us.
Some families were fleeing violence. Others
had suffered a catastrophic illness, mental
health crisis or addiction of a family
member that had thrown them deeper into
poverty. Sbme had lost a breadwinner to'
prison — usually for committing an illegal
act to put food on the table and pay rent.
The system had squeezed them until
homelessness was the only choice left —
and then the system treated them as if they
had chosen to be homeless. The system
intentionally made what one homeless »
services official called a “bed of nails” for
these families to force them off their
blankets and cardboard mats, back into the
street.
No one wanted this, not even the agency
that created the bed of nails. But the
system demanded it. I continued to see the
system at work while representing low-
income clients in Seattle and later doing
drug policy work at the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Open Society
Foundation. It is sustained by fear and our
collective unwillingness to confront
suffering and work toward a solution in
which we all share responsibility. I believe
that NYC homeless services workers chose
to implement policies that treated homeless
clients horribly, in part, because they knew
they were themselves just a paycheck away
from homelessness. Homeowners and local
businesses demanded the arrest of_______
neighborhood drug users and sellers
because they saw no other way to protect
their investments. Fear created the system;
fear maintains it.
,
/ That is one reason - t h e main reason ®
why my decision to return to the Pacific ’
Northwest was easy. Partnership for Safety
and Justice is a remarkable organization. It
is confronting the system by seeking
solutions that ensure public safety through
shared responsibility. PSJ recognizes that
accountability necessitates addressing the
needs of crime
survivors, resolving
the causes of crime
and restoring people
who commit crimes to Our goal is I® demand real .
eolattonsr not more ®l the'.
' full social, economic '
and political
same p o litica lly saotwatei
participation. Our
geMongli responses that fa il
crime survivor
fam ilies and damage
program raises the
communities^
■ .
voices of crimevictims
to demand that public
resources be used for
more than filling
prison cells. Our engagement with youth,;
people of color, and local communities
organizes the people most heavily impacted
both by crime and the criminal justice
system, Our goal is to demand real|
solutions, not more of the same politically
motivated get-tough responses that fail
families and damage communities.
So, at this point, I can answer one of the
questions: “Why are yeti here?” By coming
here and joining with PSJ’s staff and allies, I
will contribute to change that transforms.
the bed of nails criminal justice system that
we have created over the past four decades
and help to establish a public safety system
that makes us stronger and provides
solutions that are both effective and fair. I
am grateful for the opportunity and look
forward to the experience.
9th Annual Saint André Bessette
First Thursday Art Show
Thursday, September 4th, 5:00-7:30pm
join friends and neighbors at Saint
André Bessette Cath olic Church for
Genesis Redux
an evening in celebration o f the many
by Dharma Bum
creative gifts of our community Our .
The first man
? Urban and wild
The hum of traffic
The music of the city
Rivers of asphalt /
Canyons of concrete
This is the jungle
This is Eden
Under skies of wonder
We stand at the crossroads
With Infinity below our feet
As we wiggle our toes in a dream.
Order e-books and print copies a t
iamnotapoetorg or
streetroots.org/iamnotapoet
9th Annual First Thursday Art Show
will showcase work created by guests,
volunteers,,and visitors in our Morn
ing Hospitality Art Program - a safe
and supportive space for people to
express creatively through drawing,
painting writing, and other mixed
medium forms. Stop in to view our
2014 collection, enjoy some light re
freshments, and o f course, partake in
the warm fellowship o f our welcom
ing community. Please visit-
www.saintandrechurch.org/
FirsfThursday for more information.
We look forward to seeing youl