Think Out Loud

More than a decade ago, Linn-Benton Community College in Albany took a look at its data for students enrolled in career and technical education programs. What they found was that many students were able to progress through their degree program, but one course in many cases stopped them from completion: math. The school’s math department then began to design courses tailored to specific degre...

For the past five years, Oregon’s Lines for Life has been running a youth program called Safe Social Spaces. Now an OHSU study published in the journal Psychiatric Services suggests the program may have prevented more than 160 suicide attempts since it began. The program uses social media to find youth struggling with suicidal ideation and provide support through the social media’s dir...

It’s been just over a year since Oregon’s first regulated service centers began providing therapeutic psilocybin trips to clients. There are now 29 licensed service centers across the state, as well as 12 manufacturers, two testing labs and more than 300 facilitators who supervise clients during sessions. Angie Allbee is the manager of the Psilocybin Services Section at the Oregon Heal...

Chain stores like Dollar General and Family Dollar have been popping up in eastern Oregon. An opposition group known as No Dollar General has formed to stop the spread of such stores. While Dollar General successfully opened a store in the city of Wallowa recently, the opposition group is still fighting to keep the chain from expanding in the region. Last month, the Joseph City Council passed an o...

The Bike Index was started in 2013 and allows people to register bicycles for free and report them when they have been stolen. The nonprofit has helped recover more than 14,000 bikes. Most recently, the group has been tracking an elaborate bike-theft pipeline that leads back to Mexico. It estimates from 2020 to 2024, the theft ring has sold an estimated 654 bikes worth more than $1 million. Bryan...

Oregon is known as the “Grass Seed Capital of the World.” With nearly 1,500 farms in the state, Oregon is a major world producer. But pollen -- including from grass -- in the Willamette Valley leads to Oregonians suffering from allergies through the summer. We dig into the details of this year’s allergy season with Shyam Joshi, an assistant professor of medicine and head of aller...

The downtown district in Dallas, Oregon was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. Dallas has also worked with Oregon Main Street, a program that helps cities across the state with revitalization efforts in their communities. We learn more about the work Dallas and other cities have been doing from Brian Dalton, a former Dallas mayor and Sheri Stuart, Oregon Main Street coordi...

With the Olympic trials wrapping up and the Paris competition on the horizon, sports are top of mind for many people this summer. The pressures of athletic performance will once again be on full display for the world, sparking conversations about athletes’ physical – and mental – prowess. The conversation around athletes and mental well-being has only grown over the past few year...

Necroarchivos de las Americas: An Unrelenting Search for Justice is a group exhibition on display at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The exhibition features art that examines political violence. We learn more about the exhibit and the artists behind the work from Adriana Miramontes Olivas, curator of academic programs and Latin American and Caribbean art a...

Author Nicole Chung was born to Korean immigrants in Seattle and later adopted by a white couple in Southern Oregon. The 2018 memoir “All You Can Ever Know” follows Chung’s exploration of her identity as a transracial adoptee as she searches for her birth family. Her second memoir, released earlier this month, covers the untimely deaths of her adoptive parents — first her f...

The Cedar Grove apartments in Beaverton were created by Community Partners for Affordable Housing, or CPAH. The nonprofit has been working to create homes that Oregonians can actually afford to live in for 30 years now. This is part of a series of conversations we’re having this year about some of the biggest problems Oregon is facing, along with possible solutions. More than half of renters...

 "On The Road" is "Think Out Loud's" radio road trip series: conversations with wanderers, tourists and residents along Oregon's back roads and highways. In this trip, we traveled through the sparsely populated corner of Southeast Oregon from Fruitland, Idaho, to McDermitt, Nevada. We met rodeo riders, rafters, ranchers, and rock hounds – among others.  

Ann Patchett’s novel "Tom Lake," is set during the pandemic, but it is also set in the past. The main character, a mother of three adult daughters, tells her children the story of her own youthful romance with a man who is now a famous movie star. The story is told over long days picking cherries on their family farm, where everyone has gathered together for the lockdown. Though the central...

Doctor Carlos Sanchez has an unusual and challenging caseload of patients. For one thing, they have scales, feathers, horns and fur, and can’t really say where it hurts. But it’s his job to oversee the medical care and treatment of more than a thousand animals as the head veterinarian at Portland’s Oregon Zoo. In our latest installment in our series on professions, we accompany D...

For the fourth year in a row, nonprofit theater Kickstand Comedy is hosting a series of free stand-up comedy nights in Portland’s Laurelhurst Park Friday evenings for the entire summer. The first outdoor event was held by necessity in the pandemic and began with a small crowd of less than 100 people. But word has spread, and as pandemic has subsided, crowds have grown and shows now typically...

There are roughly 500 Southern Baptist churches in the Pacific Northwest, accounting for more than 44,000 members. At its annual meeting last month, the Southern Baptist Convention considered an amendment to ban women from being pastors. It ultimately didn’t meet the two-thirds majority it needed to pass, but it still had support from more than 60% of delegates. At the same meeting, delegate...

On Thursday morning, a semi-truck hauling an excavator caused severe damage to the Hood River-White Salmon bridge when an excavator it was hauling struck the lift span above the traffic lanes. The Port of Hood River immediately closed the nearly mile-long bridge spanning the Columbia River until “further notice.” No  injuries were reported at the time of the accident. Engineering...

In April, United States Supreme Court Justices heard arguments in one of the most widely watched cases out of Oregon in recent memory. The question at the heart of Grants Pass v Johnson was whether cities can regulate where and when people can sleep outside, especially if there isn’t shelter space available.  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had held that the city’s ordinance was...

A population of gray whales that feed off the Oregon coast have been shrinking in size over the last 20 years. New research from Oregon State University shows that whales born in 2020 grew to be more than 13% shorter than whales born before 2000. The shrinkage could bring significant reproductive health challenges for the whales, and could also be a warning sign about the health of the broader eco...

Oregon’s foster care class action lawsuit against the state's Department of Human Services was settled in May after five years. But the improvements to the foster care system agreed in the settlement couldn’t move forward until a “neutral” was chosen to oversee the system. This week the court picked outside expert Kevin Ryan to oversee the changes. He previously played a si...

In November 2016, Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved Measure 98, also known as the High School Success fund. It provides targeted state funds in three core areas: dropout prevention, career and technical education and college readiness. High schools across the state can apply to access Measure 98 funds by developing individual plans on how those dollars will get used to boost graduation rates a...

Hayward Field is once again hosting the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in Eugene which end on Sunday. The nation’s best sprinters, hurdlers, javelin throwers and more are competing for a shot to qualify for the summer games which kick off next month in Paris. Among those who’ve already punched their tickets is Ryan Crouser, an Oregonian and two-time gold medalist who finished firs...

Summer is here, and people are kicking it off by getting out into nature. But those in communities of color can often feel excluded from natural spaces and from participating in activities like hiking and camping. People of Color Outdoors (POCO) is a local nonprofit that works to build community in the Portland area through outdoor excursions. It’s recently received multiple grants to contin...

Washington is just one of many states that makes an assault on a health care worker a felony offense, but recent reporting from the Marshall Project and the Seattle Times found that this law is disproportionately affecting those in a mental crisis. From 2018 to 2022, there were 151 cases of felony assault on a health care worker in King County. A little more than three-quarters of those cases invo...

Although the City of Portland passed a fireworks ban in March of 2022, Portland Fire & Rescue is preparing for a potential increase in fires started by personal fireworks this Fourth of July. Reporting by Willamette Week found that although the number of fires caused by fireworks dipped during the year the ban was enacted, the number of fireworks-related fires increased by 33% in 2023 compared...