CONFIRMED CONFERENCE SESSIONS
Keynote Lunch Speaker
Ed Blackburn – former CEO Central City Concern
Ed Blackburn spent 25 years serving Central City Concern (CCC) and the needs of people experiencing homelessness in Portland. In 1992, he was Director of Hooper Detoxification Center where thousands of people begin their recovery from drugs/alcohol every year. He also served as Director of Health and Addiction Services for the agency, as well as CCC’s Deputy Director prior to assuming the Executive Director role in 2008.
During Ed’s time as Executive Director, CCC’s staff grew from 471 to more than 876 individuals. Total annual revenue has grown from $32.3 million to $90.5 million today.
Ed will be introduced by Jonathan Radmacher, McEwen Gisvold LLP
Building Millions of Homes
Denny Heck – US House of Representatives
The only way to solve our national housing crisis will be to dramatically increase the construction of new homes. That means addressing how developers and builders can secure the land, lumber, labor, and loans that they’ll need to boost construction.
Each of these areas presents unique challenges, and a successful plan will address them specifically while at the same time tackling the problem holistically.
Rep. Denny Heck represents Washington state’s 10th Congressional District. In addition to serving on the House Intelligence Committee and Financial Services Committee, he co-chairs the New Democrat Coalition’s Housing Task Force, where he works with other members of Congress on addressing the national housing crisis.
Rep. Heck grew up in Vancouver, Washington, and now resides in Olympia.
Morning Conference Welcome
Tawna Sanchez – Oregon State Representative
Tawna Sanchez has spent her life working to strengthen our community. Born of Shoshone-Bannock, Ute, and Carrizo descent, Tawna grew up in Portland, and for many years has been a leader fighting for the rights of women, indigenous people, and the most vulnerable. As the Director of Family Services at the Native American Youth and Family Center, Tawna helped create the Early College Academy, expanded early childhood services, affordable housing development, elder support, and assisted in building a nationally recognized domestic violence wrap-around service model.
Over time, Tawna has helped raise 18 foster kids, and has been active in state policy making – serving on the Family Services Review Commission and the Child Welfare Advisory Committee.
As a state representative, Tawna remains committed to standing up for social justice on the side of the oppressed, and pushing to make our systems more equitable.
Report on Low income Housing from the Oregon Coast
Claire Hall – Lincoln County Commission, Chair
Claire Hall was elected as a County Commissioner in 2004 and re-elected in 2008, 2012 and 2016. She serves as county chair.
She was president of the Association of Oregon Counties in 2016-17 and remains on the organization’s executive committee, and serves on AOC’s Veterans Services Committee, the National Association of Counties’ Military and Veterans Committee, and NACO’s Health Policy Committee.
Claire is a member of the Oregon Housing Stability Council, and previously served on the Governor’s Council on Alcohol and Drug Programs and was its final chair. She was co-chair of the Oregon Ending Homelessness Advisory Council. She co-chairs the Linn-Benton-Lincoln Early Learning HUB and is a member of the board of the IHN-CCO, the Coordinated Care organization for the three-county region. She is a member of the executive committee of the Community Services Consortium, the regional Community Action Agency; she is the county’s representative on the board of the Cascades West Council of Governments and is currently the treasurer of that board. She is the county commission liaison to the Local Public Safety Coordinating Council.
How development of affordable housing helps people with disabilities
Andrew Jakabovics – Enterprise Community Partners, Inc.
Andrew is vice president, policy development at Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit organization that creates opportunity for low- and moderate-income people through fit, affordable housing in diverse, thriving communities. Andrew oversees the Policy Development & Research team, researching issues related to affordable housing, housing and community development, housing finance, foreclosures and neighborhood stabilization, and broader housing supply and demand concerns.
Prior to joining Enterprise, he served as senior policy advisor to the assistant secretary for policy development and research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. His primary focus was on housing finance reform, with a particular eye toward issues of access and affordability. In addition, he devoted attention to foreclosure prevention through improving opportunities for modifications and to mitigating foreclosure impacts on neighborhoods and communities.
Andrew holds degrees from Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rural homelessness in Oregon
Emily Green – Street Roots
Amanda Waldroupe – Oregon Society of Professional Journalists, President
Amanda Waldroupe and Emily Green – Journalists for Street Roots Newspaper
Street Roots reporters recently traveled across Oregon to see what housing issues rural communities face. They found a crisis that reaches every community and every corner of the state. Not only are housing shortages and costs often exacerbated, but rural communities must also contend with their own challenges, such as aging populations, declining economies, corrupt politicians and increasingly out-of-reach building costs.
Emily Green is the senior staff reporter at Street Roots, a nonprofit weekly newspaper in Portland that creates income opportunities for people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty.
Emily’s articles have won numerous awards, including seven awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. Her work has appeared in street papers spanning the globe, including in Greece, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, Canada, Japan and across the United States.
Amanda Waldroupe is an award-winning freelance reporter and writer whose work has appeared in local, national and international newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The New York Times, Crosscut.com, and The Oregonian. She is a long-time contributor to Street Roots.
Amanda’s writing and reporting focuses on telling the stories of vulnerable and marginalized people. She also serves as the president of the Oregon Society of Professional Journalists.
Kid Cities Mechanism: Innovative Arrangements in Healthy Communities
Joe Lambke – Animate Architecture
Animate designs places and buildings with attention to the frequency of activities. Finding patterns then form structured environments, where people find ways to contribute to a community. A building’s layout becomes the framework for interactions, and a means to instigate repetitive ways of living which generate cooperative behaviors. Joe will present sample layouts from diverse projects to illustrate how designing for human interaction contributes to the success of an organization’s mission.
Joe Lambke is an urbanologist, architect and founder of Animate Architecture, a full-service architecture firm in Chicago and Portland. His focus on the client’s organizational success both drives Animate’s design as well as emerges from Joe’s diverse background and expertise. He has designed and built projects ranging from knitting shops to supercomputing laboratories, and residential high-rises to cultural workshops.
Medicaid and Supported Housing: How Does It Work and What Are Other States Doing
Josh Crites – Washington County Housing Services
In this session, Josh Crites will look at how Medicaid has approved agencies across the country to utilize Medicaid dollars for supported housing. He will also examine what other states have done and what the implications are for the future of healthcare and housing.
Josh is Assistant Director for Washington County’s Housing Services. He has worked in various policy and advising roles for the Seattle and Tacoma Housing Authorities. He also worked with the German and Dutch governments around their social housing and homeless programs. In 2018, he ran a supported housing program for the State of Arizona’s Medicaid program. He continues to be active with Medicaid and supported housing and is focused on partnering with other agencies around the State of Oregon and the Portland Metro region.
An Advocate’s View: How NAMI Pursues Housing and General Behavioral Health Policy Initiatives
Chris Bouneff – NAMI Oregon
NAMI Oregon has enjoyed legislative successes in recent sessions (and a few failures) around new housing development for individuals living with serious mental illness and several other system reforms that promise to improve the care experience for individuals and families. Learn how NAMI as a grassroots organization conceives its proposals, the strategies we employ to advocate for them, and what we’re contemplating for the future.
Chris Bouneff is executive director of the Oregon chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and oversees NAMI’s statewide public policy and education efforts, among his other duties. Chris has spent a career in communications, marketing and advocacy with various agencies, including Trillium Family Services, one of Oregon’s largest children’s mental health care providers. Prior to that, Chris worked as a reporter covering public policy and enterprise stories for various newspapers and magazines across the West.
Screening of Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in Portland, Oregon
What does the word gentrification make you feel? “Pain.”
In the 1990s, Nikki Williams embraced the idea of gentrification. Fifteen years later she blamed it for “obliterating” her neighborhood. The documentary film Priced Out is an emotional and investigative look at how rising home prices have displaced Portland’s African-American community and reshaped the entire city.
Priced Out explores the complexities and contradictions of gentrification and life after the era of “the ghetto.” It powerfully illustrates how government policies and market forces combine to destroy and rebuild neighborhoods. Some embrace new investment at first, but few are left standing when new money moves in and old residents find themselves priced out.
A Question and Answer session with Filmmaker Cornelius Swart will happen after the film.
CAHOOTS! – Street Outreach to Homeless Persons in Eugene & Springfield
Laurel Lisovskis, MSW, CSWA, QMHP – White Bird Clinic
Manning Walker, EMT, QMHA – White Bird Clinic
For 30 years CAHOOTS, Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, has been assisting our community in Eugene, Oregon, de-escalating people with mental health crises and providing alternatives and care. Almost half of the calls they take are for houseless community members. CAHOOTS helps to address what help looks like in our community, working in tandem with police and fire/EMS, and consists of crisis workers and medical professionals. The vans are dispatched through the police-fire-ambulance call centers. Come and learn about how Cahoots serves in public safety, providing an efficient and effective collaboration with police and EMS.
Laurel Lisovskis is the Clinical Manager and a Crisis Worker for CAHOOTS. With over fifteen years of expertise in counseling in both health care and public school domains, she lends a unique perspective, with an emphasis on both crisis de escalation and prevention within a wide scope of practice. Experience in mental
health care includes crisis de escalation, suicide risk assessments and prevention, and grief and loss counseling. Laurel’s therapeutic emphasis is on helping people access their own self-management tools, drawing on internal and external supports. Experience with community outreach and education includes crisis de escalation trainings and mental wellness/suicide prevention and postvention trainings community-wide, as well as paneling for various agencies and collaboration partners such as Lane County Mental Health and Human Services, the National Alliance for Mental Illness, and the CIT program.
Manning Walker is a medic and crisis worker with five years at CAHOOTS. For nine years he’s been an EMT and BLS Instructor, volunteer fire fighter and worked in private security.
Financing Supportive Housing Service
Kenny LaPoint – Oregon Housing and Community Services
Lori Coyner – Oregon Medicaid Commissioner
With Permanent Supportive Housing a top priority during the 2019 Legislative Session and lots of opportunities for expanding this very important resource, it is critical to have funding to support service provision. Come learn from the Oregon Health Authority along with Oregon Housing and Community Services on some key tools they have been working to develop to support Oregon’s most vulnerable community members.
Kenny LaPoint is Assistant Director of Public Affairs for Oregon Housing and Community Services. He has over 13 years of housing and community development experience.
Prior to his service with the State of Oregon, Mr. LaPoint spent six years as the Housing and Resident Services Director for Housing Works in Central Oregon. Other prior service includes Co-Chair of Central Oregon’s Homeless Leadership Coalition, the regional Continuum of Care; Neighborhood Partnership’s Board of Directors, Community Advisory Council member for Central Oregon’s Coordinated Care Organization and a founding member of Icon City, a Central Oregon non-profit organization.
Lori Coyner is Oregon’s Medicaid Director. She played a pivotal role in securing federal renewal of Oregon’s Medicaid waiver. She also oversaw the resetting of actuarially sound and federally approved Care Coordinating Organization rates and helped address the Oregon Health Plan’s budget shortfall for the 2017-2019 biennium.
Before she was Oregon’s Medicaid director, Coyner was OHA’s director of Health Analytics, where she developed an incentive program to pay Care Coordinating Organizations for value and quality instead of volume. Most recently Coyner was a managing principal for the Portland-based Health Management Associates.
Fair Housing Rights for People Living with Mental Illness and Addiction
Shyle Ruder – Fair Housing Council of Oregon
This session will help people living with disabilities have equal access and enjoyment to housing. Disabilities like addiction and mental illness can make it difficult for a person to qualify for housing because of housing barriers created in the past. Sometimes a person living with a disability also finds it difficult to stay stable in housing or enjoy their housing because of current symptoms. In this workshop we will review basic fair housing rights related to disability and review the process for how to ask for reasonable accommodations related to disability.
Prior to her work as Education and Outreach Director for the Fair Housing Council of Oregon, Shyle Ruder worked in HIV/AIDS Services for 18 years with 14 of those years focused on housing services and tenant education. She served on the Renters Education Alliance Committee for seven years and helped develop the Rent Well tenant education series, an intensive 15 hour course designed to teach individuals their rights and responsibilities as renters. She holds a Master’s Degree in Postsecondary Adult Continuing Education from PSU.
Supportive Housing; So Many Plans, How Do We Implement?
Heather Lyons – Corporation for Supportive Housing
Rachael Duke – Community Partners for Affordable Housing
Many communities have created supportive housing plans and are now into implementation. Implementation and action requires partnerships between policymakers, funders, providers and tenants. This session will explore how to develop those relationships and use them to create high quality, supportive housing. It will also focus on measuring outcomes and impact of plans. This will be an interactive workshop that will take advantage of the talent, experience and knowledge of participants as well as the trainers.
Heather Lyons is the Director of the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii for Corporation for Supportive Housing. She has significant experience with homeless programs and policy, including expertise in analyzing community needs across the full continuum of housing types, serving frequent users of public systems, and understanding the intersection of health, homelessness and housing. Heather also has training and experience in Applied Improvisation, which takes the proven tools and techniques used by theater and musical improvisers into organizations and communities to improve adaptability and responsiveness, increase collaboration and innovation, and foster creativity.
Rachael Duke started as the executive director at Community Partners for Affordable Housing in 2015 with a long history working in the affordable housing sector, including 15 years 
Rachael has served on numerous boards including Jewish Family Child Services and Peninsula Children’s Center. She is currently on the board of Housing Oregon. She is a trained mediator and facilitator and holds a Masters of Urban Studies from Portland State University and a BA from Oberlin College.