Street roots., November 23, 2018, Page 9, Image 9

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Community
PHO TO COURTESY OF C O M M O N W A Y INSTITUTE
Shariff Abdullah
The Commonway Institute director talks about the
intersection between homelessness and waste management
BY JARED PABEN
STAFF WRITER
hariff Abdullah asked the crowd if
they’d ever heard the expression “poor
white trash.” Hands raised throughout
the hotel ballroom.
“What you are talking about is a human
being,” he said. “What you’re talking about is
as much a spark of the divine as you are.
The only difference is money.”
Society doesn’t just think of discarded
materials as trash, it allows people to be
labeled as such, according to Abdullah.
Addressing the issues of both homelessness
and waste requires a change in our
consciousness, as well as the culture and
behaviors that underlie that consciousness,
he said.
Abdullah was presenting to a crowd of
public and private garbage and recycling
industry professionals at an event organized
by the Association of Oregon Recyclers.
Abdullah, director of Portland nonprofit
Commonway Institute, was the keynote
speaker for the Nov. 13 gathering at the
Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel. Focused
on the intersection of homelessness and
solid waste, the event drew local experts
from the public, nonprofit and for-profit
sectors to discuss programs that provide
housing, medical services, needle
exchanges, garbage cleanups, environmental
remediation services and more.
Data presented at the gathering help
point to the scale of the problem. The city of
Portland’s Homelessness/Urban Camping
Impact Reduction Program coordinated
3,122 clean-ups during the 2017-18 fiscal
year, removing more than 1,300 tons of
garbage. Metro’s Regional Illegal Dumping
(RID) Patrol, which fills the gaps in the
three-county region’s clean-up services, has
cleared 391 tons of solid waste from more
than 3,460 dump sites so far this year. An
estimated 27 percent are Caused by
unhoused people, and the rest are attributed
to dumping by businesses and housed
residents.
In his speech, Abdullah, a consultant,
speaker, author and advocate for societal
transformation, pointed out that we’re all
aware of the problem: piles on the
sidewalks, streets and other rights of way.
We also know refuse collection costs money.
“The system is built for people who have
money,” he said. “We don’t think about
anybody elsfe.”
But there’s a deeper problem, he noted.
Especially in Portland, it’s easy for people to
get caught up in the belief that “my bleeding
heart is bleeding the way it should be
bleeding” and fail to recognize the fact that
varied populations are living on the streets,
some of whom exhibit asocial or anti-social
behaviors, he said. Some want to be
responsible with their refuse disposal but
can’t afford it, and some “don’t give a rip
about your system and don’t give a rip about
where that trash winds up.”
As a result, there are no one-size-fits-all
solutions to the issue. “If you’re thinking in
your mind about X person, you also have to
think about Y and Z,” Abdullah said.
He returned a number of times to the
concept of changing our collective
consciousness about garbage generation and
human poverty.
Abdullah has visited dozens of countries,
and he sprinkled anecdotes from his travels
throughout his speech. In one, he recalled
working in cliffside slums outside of Rio de
Janeiro to help provide sanitation facilities.
Because residents lacked toilets, they’d
defecate in plastic bags and throw them -
“they call these ‘flying toilets’,” he said -
and the bags would end up on hillsides or in
streams.
The organization he worked with provided
latrines that relied on a series of lagoons to
purify the wastewater. The residents used
the lagoons and natural fertilizer to grow
bananas and harvest duck eggs and fish for
sale. “Instead of looking at the problem as a
problem, what happens if you choose to look
at the problem as a solution?” Abdullah
asked.
H e also called for a reframing of society’s
view of what ‘poor’ means. A r e s id e n t of
Portland for the past three decades,
Abdullah, 67, grew up in a “proverbial
broken home” in the worst parts of Camden,
N.J., living in public housing supported by
welfare. Despite scoring in the
95th-percentile range on standardized tests,
he was told by a guidance counselor in ninth
grade he had no aptitude for college and his
options were to work as an auto mechanic or
in food service.
“He couldn’t even look at the numbers
that were sitting in front of him. His view of
me was colored by these glasses he had on,
and the glasses said ‘poor black kid, not
going to college,’” Abdullah said.
In eleventh grade, he saw a different
counselor, who looked at his file and asked
where he was applying to college. After he
told her he had no aptitude for college, she
uttered a one-word expletive that changed
his life: bullshit! The first counselor was
black and the second was white, said
Abdullah, who went on to earn a law degree
from Boston University.
“I don’t think color has anything to do
with it,” he said. “I think people who are
adjusted to seeing poverty will see it across
the board.”
When it comes to developing local
solutions to homelessness and dumped
garbage, he urged forum attendees to
convene a broad group of interested parties.
“The more stakeholders you get in the
room, th e deeper your solution is going to
be, the juicier your solution is going to be,
the more connected your solution is going to
be,” he said. “You’ll have to constantly ask
the question, ‘Is everybody here? Is
everybody here?’ And, hopefully, you’ll never
get to answer, ‘Yeah, everybody’s here.’”
Street Roots • Nov. 23-29, 2018
Untitled
by J. Juno
If I was m y own maker,
I don’t know what I would say.
Maybe I would ask
why you gave me the ability
to recognize apathy
or evil in another person,
but without any real power
to instigate change
And why give me th e ability
to draw, paint, or write
but not grant any opportunities
where my abilities could be used?
Why give me so much potential
that goes unused?
Gravity
by Aaron Chandler
Life arranges complexity with
Bonds of electricity,
hydrogen bonds, atomic bonds.
Death disorients.
Destroys us to build again.
The Cycles of pain and relief
create an enjoyable contrast,
That can be unendurable
throughout the troughs.
But if you make it through,
the rewards that your body grants
are a relative
Paradise.
The city is toxic,
but its rewards are knowledge.
Loneliness can be tragic
and then death waits
And apparently the universe
will end in absolute entropy.
A mere hint of tem peratures
increase across the entire universe,
But we will never see this.
For now we play, work and eat.
We think.
We do as much as we want
and then are n o t