FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Portland and Seattle Volume XXXVIII No. 20
25
CENTS
News ..........................3,9-10,12 A & E .....................................6-7
Opinion ...................................2 Bids/Classifieds ....................11
Calendars ........................... 4-5 Somali Refugees............ 12
CHALLENGING PEOPLE TO SHAPE A BETTER FUTURE NOW
LEGISLATIVE DAY
Opal Tometi (left) and Alicia Garza, co-founders
of Black Lives Matter, spoke at PSU Tuesday.
Activists
Take Stage
at PSU
A
Tuesday night discussion fea-
turing two nationally prominent
activists remained somewhat ab-
stract until moments before the
scheduled question and answer session
— when a student activist was invited to
the stage to call for the disarmament of
Portland State University’s security.
Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, two of
the three women credited with creating
the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, who
have since founded a national organi-
zation bearing the same name, spoke at
PSU’s Peter Stott Center Tuesday night
at the annual Martin Luther King, Jr.
See PSU on page 3
Somali
Refugees
Former newcomers have
gained respect in Maine
community
page 12
Celebrity Interview:
Isaiah Washington
page 7
Verleen Jones and Kristen Wilder from the A. Philip Randolph Institute joined the Washington Christian Leaders Coalition, the Seattle All City Black
Student Union and the Black Law Students Association in chanting “Black Lives Matter” in the rotunda of the Legislative Building Feb. 15 on African
American Legislative Day.
NoAppFee Wins Technology Competition
Service seeks to streamline the process of applying for rental housing
By Arashi Young
Of The Skanner News
W
hile working as a
family advocate
in a homeless
shelter, Tyrone
Poole would help homeless
families find out if they
qualify for rent assistance.
He would find families
vouchers and write award
letters that would pay the
cost of rent for a year.
But again and again,
these families would leave
the shelter without hous-
ing, because they could not
find an apartment to rent.
They would blindly apply
to units to be disqualified
for credit histories, crim-
inal backgrounds or evic-
tion records. All the while
spending limited funds on
housing application fees.
Poole — who won this
summer’s Pitch Black
event for African Ameri-
can entrepreneurs in the
Portland area — said this
was devastating to those
who were trying to get
their lives in order.
“Housing is fundamen-
tal. You can’t do anything
before you are housed,” he
said. “If you are homeless,
that is like not having air,
it’s like not having water.”
One day, Poole had a rev-
elation to build a system
that would match renters
with qualified housing.
Out of this idea, NoAppFee
was born.
NoAppFee has grown
from a local creation into
a national database and
has been getting attention
from the tech industry. On
Feb. 4, NoAppFee won the
regional 1776 Challenge
Cup in San Francisco. The
Toxins Not Just Coming From Glass
Mary Peveto, founder of Neighbors for Clean Air,
says arsenic, chromium are in North Portland air
By Lisa Loving
Special To The Skanner
P
arents are turning out by the
hundreds at public hearings
about air toxics in Southeast
Portland.
But is that the whole story?
Both the Bullseye Glass and Urob-
oros Glass companies have stopped
using the toxic substances cadmium
and arsenic in response to recent re-
ports of neighborhood pollution pos-
sibly linked to their operations.
But not only have those chemicals
been tracked in Southeast Portland
since at least 2009, but arsenic and
chromium discharged into the air
are among an array of cancer-caus-
ing poisons in the air that have been
watched in North Portland for more
than a decade without any meaning-
ful action by state regulators.
Mary Peveto, founder of Neighbors
for Clean Air, has studied these is-
See AIR on page 3
1776 Challenge Cup seeks
out promising and trans-
formative technologies.
NoAppFee also won
the Portland Development
Commission’s 2014 Startup
PDX Challenge for diverse
entrepreneurs and the lo-
cal 1776 Challenge cup for
Portland.
The technology start-up
will now advance to 1776
Challenge Global Cup,
which will be decided in
June in Washington D.C.
The winner of the global
cup will receive $ 1 million,
See HOUSING on page 3
PHOTO COURTESY OF INTEL FREE PRESS (CC BY-SA2.0)
VIA FLICKR
Christen McCurdy
Of The Skanner News
PHOTO BY SUSAN FRIED
Scheduled Black Lives
Matter speakers give
stage to activist to
address campus issues
Mary Peveto, founder of Neighbors for Clean
Air, says arsenic and chromium discharged into
the air are among an array of cancer-causing
poisons in the air that have been watched in
North Portland for more than a decade without
any meaningful action by state regulators.