Eugene weekly., August 13, 2015, Page 10, Image 10

DANA WEAVER SORTS THROUGH A MOUNTAIN OF DONATED CLOTHING
AT ST. VINCENT DE PAUL OF LANE COUNTY
“There are places in the country where the tipping fee
is quite low, and it’s cheaper to put it in the landfill in the
short run than it is to pay us to divert it,” Palmer explains.
In those cases, the Cascade Alliance helps nonprofits
set up online book sales or thrift stores. Nonprofits from
New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New Jersey
have all pursued this alternative revenue stream with
advice and mentorship from St. Vincent de Paul of Lane
County.
Palmer says she thinks St. Vincent de Paul has core
values that guide its success in its mission to help,
including a mentality that “everybody works.” As program
manager, she answers high-level operating questions, but
she also cleans floors and helps organize books.
“If there’s a problem here, everybody’s on deck to
help,” she says. “I think it’s this mentality that makes St.
Vincent de Paul so special. Everybody shares in the burden
of making sure we’re successful.”
See www.svdp.us for more info.
The Teacher
While working as a math and computer science teacher
in a Santa Monica, California high school, UO education
studies professor Joanna Goode noticed a troubling trend:
Although the school was ethnically diverse, that diversity
did not translate to her computer science class.
“I realized this was getting at an issue much bigger than
my school and classroom,” Goode says. “Why is computer
science marked as a white and Asian male space? I
returned to graduate school to figure that out.”
Since then, Goode and her colleagues have developed
a curriculum called “Exploring Computer Science,” and it
deals with barriers to entry that students of color and girls
face when entering the world of computers.
School districts in Illinois, Utah, the Silicon Valley and
Massachusetts all use the curriculum, and Chicago Mayor
Rahm Emanuel has said that within three years all high
schools in the Chicago Public Schools system will offer
Goode’s curriculum.
Goode says that changing perceptions plays a role in
making computer science courses diverse.
“There’s this whole belief system of who computer
scientists are and what they do,” Goode explains. “Students
would describe computer scientists as geeky and wearing
lab coats, but the description over and over again was
white and male.”
Teachers and counselors also feed into this belief by
deciding that some students are suitable for computer
science and others are not, Goode says.
Her curriculum seeks to provide an introduction to
computer science, creating an entry point to the subject so
that even students who didn’t have early access to
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computers can still participate. Computer science should
be open to everyone, Goode says. It’s not only for geeks,
and it never really was.
Although Goode has a national presence, she says she’s
had a difficult time implementing her ideas locally.
“Eugene is a hard place to make changes,” she says, “but
a great lesson I’ve learned is to make collaborations with
like-minded individuals.”
She’s connected with Eugene’s Early College and Career
Options (ECCO) High School at Lane Community College
and delved into the Eugene Digital Dojo, a partnership
between LCC and the city of Eugene that encourages
students to learn computer science in a social environment.
The program was recently named Digital Equity Project of
the Year from the National Association of
Telecommunications Officers and Advisors.
“It helps to share knowledge and resources
and connect to other people who care about what
you do,” Goode says. “You don’t have to do it by
yourself and, really, you shouldn’t.”
project has cost under $100,000 in private donations to get
started.
It’s no surprise that cities around the country have
started noticing the success story happening right here in
Eugene. Previously known as Opportunity Village, the
nonprofit itself changed its name to SquareOne Villages in
June to accommodate its multiple projects.
“I always thought that there was potential for expanding
this, and that’s why a lot of people are interested, because
it’s providing a model that people can take and implement
in other places,” says Heben, who delivers his presentation
on tiny houses around North America, using Eugene as an
example.
He visited the Canadian city of Victoria, BC in May,
and the very next month the city approved a project similar
to Opportunity Village. Other cities that used the OVE
model as inspiration include Clear Lake and Eureka in
California, as well as Madison, Wisconsin.
Heben says that homeless advocates often travel up the
West Coast visiting villages in Portland, Seattle and
Eugene, drawing ideas and inspiration from the models
they observe. He’s quick to say that OVE drew from
Portland’s Dignity Village and Seattle’s Tent City 3 and 4.
Having a successful model like OVE is important,
Heben says. “The next hurdle is always siting the project
and getting people to accept it in their backyard. I think
that’s where we might be able to offer the most as an
example of something that has existed for two years.”
He adds, “People might say, ‘If you put this in my
neighborhood, it’s going to result in an increase in crime,’
and that’s simply not true based on the experience we have.”
All OVE documents are available online as examples
for other communities to use.
As Heben, SquareOne Villages Executive Director Dan
Bryant and volunteers move forward with Emerald Village,
their next tiny house project, Heben notes that part of
OVE’s success came from bringing ideas to life.
“Before the [Eugene] City Council approved finding a
site for us, we built a prototype of one of our microhousing
units,” Heben says. “It was on a trailer that we took
downtown, and it generated excitement because we
showed people what we wanted to do. If you show
people something they can see and touch, it’s more
likely to actually happen.”
Go to squareonevillages.org for more.
The Explorer
Check out exploringcs.org to learn more about the curriculum.
The Builder
Andrew Heben sits inside a wood-
paneled tiny house in Opportunity Village
Eugene (OVE), a transitional community
he helped create in west Eugene for the
unhoused. The house smells of newly cut
wood, crisp and fresh. The entire
community is only two years old, but in
that time, Heben and others have started
another tiny houses project, Emerald
Village Eugene, and communities around
the country are paying attention to
Eugene’s marvelous microhousing — the
newest tiny house to grace the village is a
donated 112-square-foot structure built in
Berkeley, California, by high school
students.
“In respect to traditional responses to
affordable housing, I think this is unique
mostly in that it just costs tremendously less,”
Heben says. “We have a pervasive homeless
population, even though we’ve had 10-year
plans to end the issue that have come and gone.
So I think Opportunity Village is a really good
model to get people off the street.”
The village houses 30 individuals or
couples who contribute $30 a month in
utilities, attend a weekly meeting and help
with maintenance. Low-income housing can
cost $150,000 per unit, but the entire OVE
ANDREW
HEBEN
As part of a medical team visiting
Guatemala about a decade ago, Nancy
Hughes was close to retirement age —
she had no idea that she was about to
found StoveTeam International, a
Eugene nonprofit that would help
more than 380,000 people.
“I was a mother and a
grandmother. I didn’t know anything
about nonprofits,” she says.
When she met a young woman in
Guatemala who couldn’t use her
hands because an open cooking fire
had burned them shut at the age of 2,
Hughes learned that cooking fires in
developing countries cause millions of
deaths each year through smoke
inhalation, with millions more suffering
serious burns.
“I think nobody knows about it because
it affects women and children,” Hughes
says.
Back in Eugene, she brought her
message to the Eugene Southtowne
Rotary Club, and together they wrote
matching grants to purchase and
distribute fuel-efficient stoves to
Guatemala. They delivered around 120
stoves per year, but the process took
time and it was difficult to transport the
heavy cement stoves.
“We did that for a few years, but
photos by todd cooper