Oregon Voices Podcast - Elevating Oregonians' Lived Experiences

Send us Fan Mail Sarah Duncan and Maria Hinojos Pressey are running together as a Democratic slate for the Marion County Board of Commissioners, in a county Republicans have held for more than forty years. Sarah is challenging Kevin Cameron for Position 1. Maria is challenging Colm Willis for Position 2. Win both seats, and the majority flips. Forty years, over. Sarah went to college to become a d...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Oregon Voices Podcast, we sit down with Denise Piza and Lisa Finkle, two women running to change the direction of SEIU 503, Oregon's largest public employee union. Denise came to this country from Guadalajara as a young child, learned English fast enough to become her family's interpreter by age eight, and built a path through advocacy that started in the on...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Oregon Voices Podcast, we sit with Juan Carlos Ordoñez, Communications Director for the Oregon Center for Public Policy and host of the syndicated radio show and podcast Policy for the People. Juan Carlos was born in Guatemala during the longest civil war in Central America, came to the United States with his family in the 1980s, went on to Harvard Law School, and pra...

Send us Fan Mail Toni Lopez came to this country at three years old, moved to Cornelius, Oregon at fourteen with a bag of clothes and no warning, dropped out of Forest Grove High School because the racism was relentless, became a mother young, spent eight years working inside the Washington County Sheriff's Office, and was told by every system she encountered that she was not going to make it...

Send us Fan Mail Before you can know where you stand, you have to know what was taken from you to get you here. John Lenssen has spent a lifetime studying how identity forms, deforms, and finds its way back to something true. In this second conversation, he walks through the frameworks that shaped his thinking, from Erik Erikson's Eurocentric model taught as universal truth, to William Cross&...

Send us Fan Mail There is a reason you were never taught this history. That reason is the history. John Lenssen has spent decades working at the intersection of civil rights, education, and multiracial solidarity across the Pacific Northwest. He did not arrive at this work through theory. He arrived through a locker assignment in 1960s Seattle, a basketball game that ended with a neighbor he respe...

Send us Fan Mail Dawn Rasmussen has driven nearly 9,600 miles through Oregon's 2nd Congressional District, the largest district in the state and one of the largest in the entire country, covering nearly two thirds of Oregon's landmass. She lives in The Dalles, runs a small business helping people negotiate their worth, and has spent 18 years watching what happens when the economy breaks...

Send us Fan Mail Evelyn Kocher grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, fled there with her family from political violence in Jakarta, Indonesia, and never stopped belonging to that city even when she spent years teaching English in China and living abroad. She came back during COVID, came out during quarantine in her family's Beaverton home, went $30,000 into debt to access the gender affirming care he...

Send us Fan Mail Teresa Alonso Leon was four years old when she was separated from her family at the border, placed in an orphanage until her father found her, and lost her voice completely in the silence between those two moments. She has spent the rest of her life finding it again, first as the oldest of six children interpreting for her parents through a home purchase at eleven, then as a farm...

Send us Fan Mail Geovanny Tolentino grew up between Salem and LA, ditched a political science degree because his mentors told him the real organizing happens in the working class, and became a teacher in the Hillsboro School District. He leads the Salem chapter of the DSA and he came into the studio ready to tell you exactly what that means and what it doesn't. This conversation goes places m...

Send us Fan Mail Tammy Carpenter has lived the American myth from the inside and came out the other side knowing exactly what it costs. She grew up poor, folding paper lunch bags to reuse them, moving every year and a half as a military kid, never knowing a single doctor. She became one anyway, not because of bootstraps, but because of teachers who whispered in her ear, government programs that ca...

Send us Fan Mail In Part 1, Robert Roosevelt Parker Jr. laid the foundation. In Part 2, the bottom falls out completely. Bob walks us through Senate Bill 664, a bill championed by Oregon's mom-and-pop gas station operators against the stranglehold of Major Oil. Two hundred private jets descended on Salem Municipal Airport. People crowded outside the Capitol. The bill passed out of committee,...

Send us Fan Mail Bob Parker Jr., an African American Muslim attorney, passed the Oregon State bar exam in 1990, but Oregon didn't let him practice until December 2021. Thirty-one years. The Department of Justice, Marion County, and the Oregon Government Ethics Commission all investigated him. Three separate grand juries declined to indict him. The legislature apologized in 2021, acknowledging...

Send us Fan Mail Lauren McCartney teaches at Meadow Park and Tumwater Middle Schools and chaired BEA's Racial and Social Justice Committee. Adam Oyster-Sands is a language arts teacher at Westview High School, a published poet, and the treasurer of the Beaverton Education Association. Together they ran as the BEA United Slate, challenging their own union's leadership from the inside. For...

Send us Fan Mail Claire Reneau is a French teacher at Westview High School in Beaverton. She's also one of the co-founders of BEAU (Beaverton Education Association United), a reform caucus that in its first year swept elections for union president, vice president, and executive board, but her story doesn't start there. She grew up in a home with an alcoholic father and an abusive grandfa...

Send us Fan Mail Lesly Munoz is the State Representative for House District 22, representing Woodburn, Gervais, Brooks, and North Salem in Marion County. She won her seat by 161 votes in November 2024, the single margin that gave Oregon Democrats the super majority in the House. One woman. One neighborhood. Everything changed. She grew up in LA County where she learned what it meant to work your h...

Send us Fan Mail Blayne Soleymani-Pearson is running for Washington County Commissioner in District 2. He's a domestic violence prosecutor and a father to kids who deserve to grow up in a county that fights for people who look like them. When he was three or four years old, he watched his mother get attacked. He shielded his little brother. He chased the man away. He couldn't save her, b...

Send us Fan Mail Myrna Munoz is running for State Senate District 15. She's an educator, a UC Berkeley graduate, and the daughter of farm workers and warriors. Her grandfathers came through the Bracero program to work the crops while American men fought in World War II. Her grandmother lived in a time when women weren't allowed to be educated. So she spied on a teacher, made a deal to do...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Melissa Bird is a congressional candidate challenging the incumbent in Oregon's 4th Congressional District Democratic primary. She holds a PhD in social work and brings years of experience writing and killing legislation at both state and federal levels as an advocate and lobbyist. A descendant of the Shivwitz band of Southern Paiutes, a bisexual woman, and someone who ha...

Send us Fan Mail John Wasilewski, affectionately known as Waz, is a middle school teacher and primary challenger in House District 38, running against incumbent Daniel Nguyen in one of Oregon's few competitive Democratic primary races. In this episode, Waz walks us through what drove a civics educator from the classroom to the campaign trail, why 2026 is a pivotal election, and what he's...

Send us Fan Mail This inaugural episode of Oregon Voices confronts the state's celebrated "blue state" identity, revealing the complex realities beneath its progressive facade. Co-hosts Eric McGuire and Katherine Watkins, seasoned Oregon educators, share their radically different lived experiences, from rural white upbringing to navigating mixed-race identity on a reservation, to ex...