Raven Drake and Sheltering the Unhoused
By: Matt Park
Tags: Housing, Covid 19, Homelessness, Portland

Raven Drake at the Street Roots office in Old Town Portland, OR. Photo courtesy: The Oregonian/OregonLive

After a day at the Street Roots office in Portland’s Old Town district, Former US Navy medic Raven Drake locks up her office and stows her keys in her bright jacket. Having an office and a peaceful walk home is a far cry from where she was a year ago, as she spent over 9 months living on the streets of Portland.

Raven is now an Ambassador Program Manager at Street Roots, where she spearheaded a coalition that established Portland’s three temporary homeless villages as a means of sheltering the city’s unhoused community during the COVID-19 pandemic. These villages called Creating Conscious Communities with People Outside, commonly known as C3P0 camps are located on both sides of the Willamette River and each house an estimated 120 residents.

Having served 3 tours in Iraq, Drake began openly identifying as a transgender woman over 5 years ago and made the decision to relocate to Portland; a city she knew would offer her resources and acceptance. In December of 2019 Drake hopped on a Greyhound bus in Indiana and arrived in Portland on Christmas Eve. Leaving behind a job and home, she arrived in the Rose City with $100 dollars in her pocket and knowing full well she would spend the foreseeable future living on the wet streets of the Pacific Northwest.

Not one month into her stay, she was exposed to some of the horrors unhoused Portlanders commonly face, when she lost all of her belongings in the middle of the night during a homeless sweep conducted by city officials. Almost a year later, the former medic still has clear memories of standing outside in the rain and watching a member of the city’s Rapid Response Biohazard team slash open her tent with a pocket knife and smile on his face, before confiscating and destroying all of her belongings.

“Here I am in the freezing cold on a rainy night in the middle of January and I don’t even have a winter jacket to use because it was in the tent,” recalls Drake in a recent interview. “Rapid Response wouldn’t even allow me to return into my tent to retrieve my belongings. I was here for just over two weeks and I lost many of my belongings.”

Raven detailing her experiencing being swept during her early weeks in Portland.

Raven may have lost many of her belongings on that cold night, but she fortunately had friends at Street Roots prior to moving to Portland. Tina Drake is a longtime friend of over 20 years to Raven, who spent the last 7 working as a Street Roots vendor.

It didn’t take long before Raven also began working as a vendor for Street Roots, where she was able to make an income selling weekly newspapers for a publication reporting on stories around the homeless community. In addition to vendor responsibilities Raven began leading outreach trips with Street Roots, which involved making visits and supply drops to unhoused neighbors.

“One of the points to outreach for me is to take care of people in the community and provide them support,” said Drake. “Another aspect for me is to go out and not just check up on folks, but to build relationships or further expand on previous relationships I’ve built.”

Between the two roles for Street Roots, Raven is keeping busy. However, the story most concerning her at the moment isn’t a story within the homeless community, it’s one that originated over 6,000 miles away in Wuhan, China. It’s February of 2020, just under one month before the World Health Organization would declare the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic.

“I started paying attention to the news out of Washington and China around early February,” said Drake referring to the COVID-19 outbreak in Kirkland, Washington. “I knew it was only a matter of time before the virus would cross the border.”

At the time Raven was living in a tent on the side of Interstate Avenue with two roommates, both of whom had weakened immune systems putting their group at high-risk for COVID-19. Tina Drake was one of these roommates, who despite being HIV-positive didn’t slow her efforts to provide support to outreach efforts. Although Tina did not physically go out for outreach trips during this time, she provided support through resource gathering and team coordination

Tina Drake (left) and Raven (right) at their Interstate campsite. Photo Courtesy: Kaia Sand Street Roots

“I may be immunocompromised, but that does not stop me in making sure that everyone was taken care of,” said Tina.

As the threat grew, Raven’s medic instincts kicked in as she was determined to do everything in her power to provide assistance to her neighbors. The risks of COVID weren’t enough to slow down Raven’s work and she would continue to participate in outreach and practicing the utmost precaution through face coverings and social distancing. 8 months into the pandemic and the outreach groups have remained relatively COVID-free with only one vendor testing positive.

“In combat you’re gambling with your life every time you go out and I treated this the exact same way.” said Raven. “I preached to my team every time we went out to use extreme caution and common sense, but at the end of the day we all understood that we were taking a gamble by going out there.”

The team at Street Roots still wanted to do more for the unhoused community. In early March Raven joined several of her colleagues at a Multnomah County Planning Meeting, and it soon became apparent that the county had no set plan for sheltering those living on the streets.

“I can’t say I was surprised but I was a little hurt,” said Raven. “At the same time, I don’t think some of them really understand exactly what unhoused individuals go through on a daily basis.”

Two days after this meeting Clackamas County saw its first COVID case and many community organizers like Raven decided it was time to take matters into their own hands in order to protect Portland’s unhoused population. Street Roots worked alongside several other non-profit organizations such as JOIN, Sisters of the Road, and Afro Village PDX in a coordinated effort to work with the city in providing a way for those living on the streets to safely shelter in place. Several days after the Multnomah County planning committee, Raven had drafted a one-page proposal for the construction of temporary sweep-free encampments on city land. An agreement was quickly reached between community organizers and city officials, and the first camp was constructed 16 days after the first draft of the proposal was written.

Three temporary campsites were built in the city, one in the Northwest neighborhood and two across the Willamette River near the Central Eastside district. Each campsite houses approximately 120 people, includes tents set up 10 feet apart, equipped with hand washing stations and showers, and are routinely staffed by volunteers. In addition the campsites are equipped with medical supplies and access to COVID testing, in an effort that was put together by Raven who acted as medical coordinator for the first four months of the campsites’ operation.

8 months into the pandemic and Raven says the establishment of the temporary camps have been a major positive for the unhoused community during the pandemic. The city has agreed to make these campsites exempt from sweeps through June of 2021, and there are plans to establish 7–8 more of these camps on city land between November 2020 and the next calendar year. Since the first three camps were built, Raven now counts over 40 organizations openly discussing the building of additional shelters compared to the handful that reached out to her in the pre-pandemic months of 2020.

“Through all the trauma of COVID, it has been a slight blessing in disguise,” said Raven. “It gave people enough of a shock to stop and think about some of the decisions made towards the unhoused community. It opened up a lot of conversations that have long been closed.”

Since that rainy January night where she lost all her possessions, Raven was able to secure an apartment in the Pearl District and moved into a home of her own in September. She’s since taken a step back as medical coordinator but still is active with the Street Roots outreach team and finds joy in improving the lives of both vendors and unhoused Portlanders.

“I think it worked,” Raven said of the camps. “The singular most incredible part of this event has been watching the spark for life come back with some of these people. It’s been great just watching them smile, laugh, and seeing the burden of survival leave them.”

To this day, Raven continues to lead outreach trips whether they be with interested members of the community or just by herself on her way back from work. Although Raven describes has since acquired housing and has been hired full-time by Street Roots in what she describes as her “dream job,” the desire to provide care for her unhoused neighbors hasn’t gone away.

“At the end of the day, the average person has more in common with someone living on the streets than they do a billionaire,” said Raven. “I think going out and striking up a conversation with one of our neighbors can really go a long way in making someone’s day.”