Monday Mailing - April 12, 2021

RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 30 12 April 2021 1.

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“Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.”

- Willie Nelson

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COVID-19 Vaccine Will Be Available to All Oregonians 16 and Up Beginning April 19 (Katie McFall) Fire Victim Housing: A Progress Report Local Alliances Put Some Cities on the Fast Track to Recovery Oregon’s Rural Communities Use Vans for Mobile COVID19 Vaccine Clinics The Comeback of the Bottom Half The Principles of Community CoDesign PPP and Me ‘Why Do We Only Have 100 People Planning to Come?’

Some Rural Oregon Counties Battle Vaccine Hesitancy Rural Queer History: Hidden in Plain Sight Love Oregon’s Hiking Trails? You Can Thank a Volunteer Trail Crew for That PODCAST: A Brief History of How Racism Shaped Interstate Highways (Katie McFall)

COVID-19 Vaccine Will be Available to All Oregonians 16 and Up Beginning April 19 Oregon Public Broadcasting Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is once again speeding up the state’s timeline for COVID-19 vaccines.

Oregon Fast Fact The world’s tallest barber pole stands at 72 feet tall in Forest Grove, Oregon. It was built in 1973 to celebrate barbershop quartet singing.

Learn more.

In a press release early Tuesday, Brown announced that all Oregonians 16 and up will become eligible for vaccines as of April 19, nearly two weeks earlier than the May 1 date state officials had previously announced.

“Today, Oregon will pass the threshold of 2 million vaccine doses administered. And yet, in communities across Oregon, COVID-19 is spreading at concerning rates,” Brown said in a statement. “We must move as quickly as possible to get more shots in arms.”

Read the full story.

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2. Fire Victim Housing: A Progress Report

Southern Oregon Business Journal It has been nearly seven months since the wildfires of 2020 devastated Oregon with over 2,500 homes lost just in Southern Oregon. I noticed that the FEMA trailers that were parked at the Jackson County Expo, that have been there for months waiting for spots to be deployed, were gone one day as I drove by on the way to visit my mother in Roseburg.

My brain told me that was good news. People were getting homes for the long rebuild process but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if that were true.

The fires burned out all the underbrush along both sides of the freeway between Ashland and Medford and you can now see scores of camps setup by the homeless. We see them, but we don’t see the fire victims living in a motel, waiting.

Read the full story.

3. Local Alliances Put Some Cities on the Fast Track to Recovery The New York Times As vaccination rates increase and businesses start to reopen, cities across the country are cautiously moving forward with economic recovery plans to coax workers back into offices and revive real estate markets pummeled by the pandemic.

Some midsize cities — like Austin, Texas; Boise, Idaho; and Portland, Ore. — may be poised to rebound faster than others because they have developed strong relationships with their local economic development groups. These partnerships have established comeback plans that incorporate a number of common goals, like access to affordable loans, relief for small businesses and a focus on downtown areas.

Read the full story.

4. Oregon’s Rural Communities Use Vans for Mobile COVID-19 Vaccine Clinics KGW8 Away from Oregon’s big cities, getting COVID shots to people often involves travel and persistence.

"We need to go out and have people show up at different events," said Shellie Campbell, interim public health director for North Central Public Health.

"We go to the school, we go to the senior center, we go to the clinics, we go wherever the people will come to so they can get the vaccine."

North Central Public Health oversees the health of everyone living in Wasco, Sherman and Gilliam counties, which butt up against the Columbia River and stretch far to the south and east. It’s a huge swath of land with only 31,400 residents.

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Like many health departments this year, the agency has struggled to get enough vaccine.

“But also following the guidelines and meeting those populations or those groups instead of just going out and doing a whole vaccination on everyone and bringing everyone into one space,” said Campbell.

The agency put together a vaccination team that will go where they are needed.

Read the full story.

5. The Comeback of the Bottom Half Bloomberg Opinion Which part of the U.S. wealth distribution saw its net worth rise the fastest over the past year, five years and decade? No, not the top 1%, according to the distributional financial accounts published last month by the Federal Reserve.

The rich had a great run, but they didn’t even come close to the percentage gains in real wealth seen by the bottom 50%. These amounted to 21.9% over the past year, 125.6% over five years and 526.2% over 10 years, compared with the one-percenters’ 10.3%, 33.8% and 83.9%.

This is partly a reflection of how awful the 2007-2009 recession and its aftermath were for the less-affluent half of Americans. Even after the gains of the past decade, the bottom 50% control only 2% of U.S. household wealth, lower than at any time on record before 2007.

Read the full story.

6. The Principles of Community CoDesign Common\Edge We live in divided times. Extreme forces of pandemic and political polarization are challenging not only essential interactions between individuals and institutions, but the very relationship with the ecosystems through which our lives are sustained. These conflicts cannot continue without dire consequences for future generations. Through our capacity to organize and construct solutions to complex problems, and our skills with engaging a wide range of stakeholders, designers and planners can have an important role to play in helping to heal these divisions. It is these skills that can lead to a place of unity, where the people who will be most impacted by planning and design decisions are honestly and authentically engaged in determining the outcomes. That place is called Community CoDesign.

Most cultures have an expression that illustrates our collective yearning for unity. For centuries, native Hawaiians have used the term Kuliana, which refers to the reciprocal relationship between the person who is responsible and the thing which they are RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 3 of 6

responsible for. The tribes of West Africa use another term, ubuntu, which means “I am because we are.” In America, there’s a similar word that expresses these fundamental principles of harmony and equity. That word is democracy. It is an elusive term, and after almost two and a half centuries of trial and error, the thing itself remains an imperfect work in progress.

Read the full story.

7. PPP and Me Oregon Business Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans offered a desperately needed helping hand to Mitch and Cathy Teal, owners of BREW Coffee and Taphouse in Independence and West Salem. Their business, like all service providers — restaurants, salons, medical offices and the like — was hurting from restrictions imposed to stop the spread of COVID-19.

The cash infusion (basically free money from the federal government if you followed the rules) promised some relief. Securing the loan, however, was messy and stressful from the start.

“Our regular bank, Maps Credit Union, did not offer the program,” says Cathy Teal, “so we had to find another.”

Teal heard that a larger bank, Washington Federal, was offering the loans to noncustomers.

Even better, Teal had a personal connection with an employee at a nearby branch. “Our kids go to school together,” she says. Teal’s friend introduced her to the right person at Washington Federal who “held my hand through the process.”

And what a process.

Read the full story.

8. ‘Why Do We Only Have 100 People Planning to Come?’ Some Rural Oregon Counties Battle Vaccine Hesitancy The Bend Bulletin Nearly a month ago, Joseph P. Fiumara Jr. started noticing a worrisome trend at COVID-19 vaccine clinics run by his health department in Eastern Oregon: more and more appointments for first doses went unclaimed.

Even as additional Umatilla County residents became eligible, doses sat unused. In stark contrast to the Portland area, where appointments can be gone in a flash, even walk-in clinics hadn’t filled up.

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The county kept accruing a surplus of doses. Enough to start raising questions.

“Why do we only have 100 people planning to come?” Fiumara wondered last week in advance of a two-day clinic where 800 first doses would be made available. It’s not an easy question to answer.

Read the full story.

9. Rural Queer History: Hidden in Plain Sight The Daily Yonder For decades, the majority of people studying, recording, and even living queer lives believed that “rural queer life” was virtually nonexistent.

“We take for granted that rural areas and small towns are inhospitable to queer life, and always have been,” said Dr. Colin Johnson, a professor of Gender Studies and History at Indiana University, Bloomington. “And so the assumption is that queer history begins at the city gates.”

This theory is disproved daily by millions of people’s lived experiences and a rapidly growing body of documented historical evidence. A report by the LGBT Movement Advancement Project (MAP) estimates that between 3-5% of rural adults, and around 10% of rural youth, identify as LGBT, totaling approximately 3.8 million people.

Read the full story.

10. Love Oregon’s Hiking Trails? You Can Thank a Volunteer Trail Crew for That The Oregonian Leif Hoven can walk down a trail he hasn’t visited in years and immediately recognize all the spots that he’s worked on, hours of effort that remain invisible to nearly everyone else.

The logs he helped cut that were blocking the trail, the water crossings he helped hikers navigate and the muddy hillsides he helped stabilize are vital to keeping trails safe and accessible to the public, but his work is also meant to be hidden, to make human interference appear as natural as possible.

“You don’t want to have it look like it’s just been completely mowed and shaven and barren,” Hoven said. “All of a sudden you come to a spot that’s been touched up and cleaned up, you do tend to notice it.”

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Hoven is one of hundreds of volunteer trail crew members who spend their time making Oregon’s hiking trails safer and more accessible. Their work ranges from clearing brush along trails on the coast, clearing landslides in the Columbia River Gorge and cutting burned trees from the many places where wildfire has swept through in recent years.

Read the full story.

11. PODCAST: A Brief History of How Racism Shaped Interstate Highways Oregon Public Broadcasting In his $2 trillion plan to improve America’s infrastructure, President Biden is promising to address the racism ingrained in historical transportation and urban planning.

Biden's plan includes $20 billion for a program that would "reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments," according to the White House. It also looks to target "40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities."

Planners of the interstate highway system, which began to take shape after the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, routed some highways directly, and sometimes purposefully, through Black and brown communities. In some instances, the government took homes by eminent domain.

Read the full story.

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