Cobbling together a safety net of resources: ‘It’s coming, we’re building it’
By Morgan Rothborne, Ashland.news
Tiana Gilliland leaned on her perspective as a young college student and her ongoing education in healthcare administration to help broaden the offerings and perspectives offered at the Ashland Housing & Human Services Advisory Committee’s annual resource fair.
Previously the event was billed as the Housing Resource Fair, but Gilliland requested the name change to Community Resource Fair. Attendees at Wednesday night’s fair could find information at various tables piled with printed information and staffed by representatives from such organizations as ACCESS, Opportunities for Housing, Resources & Assistance, the Sunstone Housing Collaborative, 211 Eviction Prevention Program, the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT).
“I wanted to make it more of a holistic perspective,” she said.
Gilliland’s naturally soft voice was hard to hear over the din in the room. She said she joined the committee in March of last year and couldn’t help but notice the gap in age and perspective between herself and her fellow members. With a master’s degree in healthcare administration in her near future and the experience of successfully finding housing in Ashland as a student, she lobbied for the inclusion of agencies such as Jackson Care Connect and the Ashland Community Food Bank. Without resources such as food and medical care in place, a person can’t gain or keep housing, she said.
Asked what motivates her to volunteer her time on the city’s committee, Gilliland said she felt inspired to help make a difference. Representatives of other agencies reflected a similarly collaborative, optimistic and cooperative approach to the problem of housing and resource scarcity.
At a table for CERT, Reggie Windam said renters can benefit from the city’s free wildfire risk assessments. Asked if tenants might be concerned how their landlord would feel about an assessment, she smiled.
“The property owner doesn’t have to know.”
At the NAMI table, Victoria Sage was listening as an attendee finished telling her a story about instability at home. Sage pressed her to use the contact information on her business card.
“Don’t get home and get shy,” she said.
Asked what she might want to say to anyone unfamiliar with mental health problems or its intersection with instability, Sage leaned over her table a little and looked around the room.
“There are about 14 of us in this room. That means about 3.5 of us have some kind of mental health problem or illness,” she said.
The national rate is 1 in 5, but Oregon specifically sits at 1 in 4. Diagnosis later in life can make finding or maintaining stability difficult.
“Imagine someone’s dream is to be a police officer and they’re diagnosed with schizophrenia and on medication. What if they’re already serving and get a diagnosis and need medication?” she said.
NAMI offers hybrid peer support sessions and sessions for family members seeking help supporting their loved ones. Ashland residents can attend in person at 6 p.m. every first and third Wednesday the Peace House, 543 S. Mountain Ave., Ashland.
At the table for the Jackson County Continuum of Care (COC), Noah Werthaiser was answering a question from Ashland.news about whether these events are useful for those representing organizations to better collaborate together. But he paused to listen to a question from Sage, offering to connect ACCESS with a monthly meeting to better strategize working together. She walked away with his business card. He was then asked if social services organizations have begun to work together more closely after the pandemic and the fires of 2020.
“There is no one cause of homelessness, so there’s no one solution either. … Siloing is counter productive to solving social problems. Rarely does my little solution solve all of it,” he said.
Organizations within and working with the COC — such as Veterans Affairs or 211 — are working together to create a streamlined way to offer help.
Anyone with housing instability likely has more than one problem and needs help from more than one agency. Traditionally those individuals would have to seek out each agency, answering the same battery of questions each time. Creating a coordinated entry process would inflict those in need with one session of answering questions, leading them to a case conferencing process that would connect them with all agencies relevant to their needs.
“It’s coming, we’re building it,” he said of the more streamlined process.
At a table against the wall, Linda Peterson-Adams said she was wearing a few hats that evening. The chair of the city’s Transportation Advisory Committee was sitting at the table for the Trusted Homes Community Land Trust.
Through communal ownership of the land, the trust assists in maintaining it and keeps the homes on it affordable for good, Peterson-Adams said. Habitat for Humanity and other affordable housing programs offer a couple decades before the home is expected to climb into competitive market value.
At the table beside her, Barbara Featherstone said the type of housing a land trust creates is the elusive “middle housing” or “workforce housing.”
“That’s housing for someone with some income but can’t do market rate,” she said.
The land trust is working with both city staff and other organizations such as Edlan & Co. — a member of the development team for the housing complex planned on North Mountain Avenue, as previously reported by Ashland.news, Peterson-Adams said.
Peterson-Adams was asked if she was the one who organized monthly meetings of the chairs of all the city committees. She said the meetings keep committees from becoming siloed and creating the potential for duplicating efforts in some things and leaving others undone.
When asked what motivates her to donate her time, Peterson-Adams first said, simply, “because it makes me feel good.” Then she looked into the corner of the room for a while.
“I’m giving back, I care about this community and I care about the common good. And that’s what the community land trust does,” she said. “This is not just giving someone a place to live — you’re building community.”
Email Ashland.news reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected].
Related stories:Ashland residents seek help and hope at housing resources fair (Nov. 13, 2023)
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