SKID ROAD

This past week, I was in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, seeking a better understanding of its non-whitewashed history of displacement and systemic injustices, and how these histories reverberate today. I view this as a continuation of my Skid Road project, just based in Richmond instead of Seattle, where I currently live and work. This project will include oral history interviews, archival res...

Sharon Lee is the founding executive director of Seattle-based Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI). Celebrating its 35th year of operation, LIHI has established 4,500 affordable housing units in Washington State. These units include transitional housing, Housing First, and Tiny House villages. In addition, they run the essential Urban Rest Stops in Seattle to provide the too scarce hygiene resourc...

A few months before his retirement, I sat down with Congressman Jim McDermott to talk about his work, both as a child psychiatrist volunteer in the late 1960s at Seattle's Open Door Clinic (our first free clinic) and as a US Congressman for Washington's 7th District from 1989-2017. In this interview, he talks about his direct healthcare experience working with teens with behavioral health issues,...

I watched Ken Kraybill in action using de-escalation techniques — unscripted — in a public park in New Orleans during a National Health Care for the Homeless Annual Conference and Policy Symposium, less than a month before Hurricane Katrina. We were at a rally in the park for improved health care, housing, and behavioral health services. I knew of Kraybill's work in Seattle and nationally in motiv...

Working on my new narrative nonfiction book, tentatively titled Unbroken Ground: Surviving Displacement in Richmond, I plan to include stories of people and communities resisting erasure and displacement in my original hometown of Richmond, Virginia. This necessitates wrestling with 'how to tell the stories' of, or rather, how to amplify the stories of people and communities too often silenced and...

Here is my Skid Road project interview with Rev Rick Reynolds on March 6, 2017. 'Rev Rick' talks about how he became involved in street ministry and Operation Nightwatch, and what he has learned from his decades of work. One piece of wisdom he shares in this interview, included in my " Listening to Skid Road" 25-minute video (edited by Jill Freidberg in 2018), is this: The housing first model real...

I had the pleasure of talking with Tamara Bauman about her work on domestic violence and homelessness, and her advocacy for community-driven solutions. She talks about her lived experience and her insights into how much power struggles, egos, and politics get in the way of meaningful solutions. When I spoke with her in the spring of 2024, she was working at Solid Ground in Seattle. She is currentl...

As I continue with my Skid Road project and podcast, add more Seattle-based oral history interviews, and segue into the history of homelessness and displacement in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, I want to share this interview recording. Jack Straw Cultural Center' s sound engineer, Daniel Guenther, interviewed me about my project on April 10, 2024. Daniel was one of the main sound engineers wh...

Lois Thetford, PA, was one of the first people I met when I moved to Seattle from Baltimore in late 1994. She worked at the 45th Street Clinic, a longstanding community health clinic that she helped start. At the time I met her, she was running their women's clinic, and later on, I worked alongside her as a provider at their homeless youth clinic. And so much more. Homeless services advocacy, facu...

Of all the oral history interviews I've done with people over the years, my conversation back in November 2017 with Liz Rambus best highlights what community health nursing can be, what the work can do to make a difference in the lives of people marginalized by poverty and racism. In this interview, Liz talks about her personal path into community health nursing and her work as a community health...

Dr. Carlbom is the Medical Director, Harborview Respiratory Care Department, and Associate Professor, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine. One of his mentors was the late Dr. Michael Copass at the Emergency Department, Harborview Medical Center. Dr. Carlbom spoke with me about his medical work. I was struck by the depth of his compassion and insight into not only emergency/inte...

Lois Thetford began her work on health inequities, anti-poverty, and health care for the homeless work in Seattle in 1970. I talked with her about her life and work in Seattle and learned a lot from our conversation, especially about safety net health care in our city and county. I had the privilege of working with her at what then was the 45th Street Clinic's Homeless Youth Clinic (now part of th...

Happy end of National Nurses Week with this year's theme of "The Power of Nurses." Last year, I highlighted some of the nurses I have interviewed for my Skid Road project. Today, I highlight an interview with a stalwart nurse, Mary Pilgrim, who ran Harborview Medical Center's nurse clinic at the main homeless shelter at the Downtown Emergency Service Center in Pioneer Square, Seattle. When I inter...

"Where's the greatest need?" Frank Chopp said he constantly asked himself during his lifetime as a health, housing, and social care advocate, first in direct services in Seattle and then as our longest-term Speaker of the House in Olympia. From starting some of Seattle's earliest social housing programs, advocating for Apple Health for Kids , the Apple Health and Homes Initiative , behavioral heal...

"What is going on in our society, and what ways can we change what's happening?" Lois Thetford asked this in 1970 when she moved to Seattle and worked on grassroots community organizing--something she continues to do in her 80s. Questions that are as pertinent and urgent today as they were then. I've had the pleasure of working with Lois since 1995 when I met her when I began working at what was t...

Back to basics. Back to what we know works. That is my main takeaway from my interview with social worker Charlotte Tucker Sanders. I've had the privilege to work with her, first at Neighborcare's 45th Street Homeless Youth Clinic and then when I led the UW's Doorway Project. She said, "I feel like if we were to really think about this world which seems to be driven by money, and the costs and ben...

" 'The last thing you own when you're losing everything you own is probably your vehicle, so that becomes your home.' Jenn Adams knows this from six years living in her Seattle van starting in 2007. 'I've lived in three different vans and a doorway,' she said in a recent interview I had with her. She talked about her experience and current work as an advocate and peer outreach worker to vehicle re...

Anitra Freeman is a force of nature with an infectious laugh and a sense of humor. Freeman is a wise elder, a Raging Granny , a founding member of the Women in Black in Seattle, a housing/homelessness activist, a wife, and a computer wiz. Freeman also lives with a form of bipolar disorder and experienced homelessness in Seattle. She is now stably housed and continuously giving back to our communit...

Although only 1% of Seattle's population identifies as Indigenous, "hundreds of years of colonization, systemic racism, broken treaties, forced reservations, and more have resulted in native peoples making up a startling 15% of Seattle's homeless population," as well as 32% of people experiencing chronic homelessness (quote from the Chief Seattle website). Yet we have important Native-led organiza...