Sunnyside Neighborhood Association

Happy May, Sunnyside! I hope you are enjoying the freshness of spring. The first couple of rounds of flowers may be gone, but there are so many more to come. (Just don’t tell my allergies that!)

In April the Board met and discussed a wide range of issues for the organization and the neighborhood, from safety at Sunnyside Environmental School (SES) pickups and dropoffs, to partnering with a new neighborhood nonprofit, to renaming a prominent Sunnyside street.

We heard from the founder of the new Friends of Sunnyside Community Center nonprofit, which was founded by the tenants of the Methodist Church on Yamhill to help manage the building and advocate for repairs with the United Methodist Oregon-Idaho Conference. As you may know, this is where we have hosted the Sunnyside Shower Project (SSP) since 2021. It has provided us with space to grow the SSP and become an essential service for our houseless neighbors. It also contains several other tenants hosting activities like youth basketball, training and support for documentarians, and addiction support. It truly has become more than a church and has earned the name Community Center. The SNA Board agreed to sign on as a member of this new organization to help protect this essential neighborhood asset.

We learned from our SES PTSA liaison about dangerous, too-fast driving that’s been occurring during drop-off and pick-up times. The school is trying to ramp up its volunteer Crossing Guard program to help mitigate the issue. There will be more information as we head towards the 2026-27 school year, but if you are interested you can contact the PTSA at
sesptsa.org/contact-us. Please, drive safely out there! We’re all in a hurry, but everyone is someone’s child and endangering their safety is not worth
your saved minute or two.

Finally, we discussed the situation surrounding the potential renaming of Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard.  As you have probably heard recently, Mr. Chavez has been credibly accused of multiple incidents of sexual assault, harassment and child sexual abuse during his lifetime. 39th Ave. was renamed a decade and a half ago to honor the man who had spearheaded the great work of the farmworkers of America. 

However, we do not now believe, given the recent revelations, that his name should appear on one of our neighborhood’s major thoroughfares.  Portland government officials have said that the name should be changed, but we have seen little of the urgency that we have seen in other communities in the rest of the country. The SNA is calling on PBOT and the City Council to expedite the renaming rather than let it get caught up in the usual Portland bureaucratic maze. We are not advocating for a specific name, only that this one cannot stand.

May is the kickoff of election season in Oregon with the May primaries completing on the 19th. We’ll be voting for nominees for governor, state representatives, senators, Metro Council, and ballot initiatives. But, did you know that it is also election season for the Sunnyside NA? We’ll be hosting our annual meeting at 7 p.m. at SE Uplift (3534 SE Uplift) and on Zoom to elect five members of the Board to two year terms. Serving on the SNA Board has been so rewarding, knowing that we are donating our time to serve the community and its interests while getting to know a great group of neighbors! If you are interested in joining and would like to learn more, please contact me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you and tell you all about it! Before elections, the Board will be voting on a few technical amendments to our bylaws, one of which will allow you to vote for your Board even if you are attending remotely via Zoom. All residents and business owners in Sunnyside are eligible to vote and nominations will be accepted at the meeting. You do not have to be present in order to be nominated or elected.

That’s it for now. Looking forward to seeing everyone at the Annual Meeting as we wrap up this Board’s term. It’s been a great year and I can’t wait to keep working for this place I love!

Something major happened in Silicon Valley in 2007 that completely changed our relationship to technology, though the general public was told nothing about it. That year, a secretive science called Persuasive Design Technology was born, and it’s the primary reason that it’s been such a struggle for parents to regulate screen time for the last 20 years. If screen time is difficult in your house, Persuasive Design is to blame.

Persuasive Design Technology was invented by a behavioral scientist at Stanford University named BJ Fogg. Fogg spent 10 years exploring ways to take everything he knew about behavioral science and combine it with technology to create apps that persuade and motivate us. He described his work by saying, “I design systems to influence human behavior.”

By 2007, Fogg had perfected this new science and founded a class at Stanford called the Persuasive Design Technology Lab. He taught 75 of Stanford’s best young tech designers the science of how to motivate human behavior and then asked them to create apps using his techniques. (Instagram originated as one student’s homework assignment.) Just ten weeks after this Persuasive Design Technology class ended, the apps these students designed had amassed 16 million users and taken in $1 million. Fogg quickly became known as “The Millionaire Maker.” The tech industry immediately hired these designers, asking them to add Persuasive Design to as many of their products as they could.

Persuasive Design Technology—such as loot boxes in gaming, Youtube’s autoplay, notifications, and the ability to scroll infinitely—works by lighting up the reward system in our brain. This system evolved to help us survive by rewarding us with the neurotransmitter dopamine whenever we engage in survival behavior, like eating, seeking the company of others, and sex. We often hear dopamine referred to as a “pleasure chemical,” but it’s much more accurate to think of dopamine as a “motivation chemical.” It’s responsible for our feelings of wanting, craving, and seeking. The higher an activity raises our dopamine, the more we crave it, and the more motivated we are to do it.

However, because our brains evolved in a Paleolithic environment of scarcity, our reward system can glitch when confronted by modern activities and substances. Many of these (alcohol, nicotine, opioid drugs, and slot machine gambling) raise our dopamine much higher than our brains can cope with. These high dopamine activities can hijack our reward system, causing us to crave, seek, and repeat behaviors that aren’t survival based.

What Fogg perfected in the 10 years he spent developing Persuasive Design was how to make technology that significantly raises our dopamine levels. Many of the apps we now use raise our dopamine as high as addictive drugs. A handful of tech industry insiders, including several of Fogg’s former students, have come forward to say they regret adding Persuasive Design to the technology we use. Tim Kendall, the former head of monetization at Facebook, testified before Congress in 2020 saying, “We [Facebook] didn’t just create something useful and fun. We took a page from Big Tobacco, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.” He went on to say that their intent was to make Facebook as addictive as cigarettes. Today, some of the tech products with the highest levels of Persuasive Design are video games, social media, and YouTube—the screen activities our kids use the most. The parents of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids grew up using technology that was a neutral tool. The technology we are buying for our kids today is anything but—it’s chock full of addictive behavioral design. We have unwittingly become the first generation of parents to have to navigate this shift.

Persuasive Design is the missing piece of the puzzle when we’re wondering WHY it’s so hard to set limits on tech, and why it’s so hard for our kids to self-regulate. It’s why we remember being able to self-regulate our own gaming when we were young, but can’t understand why our kids struggle with it. Tech companies are getting better at Persuasive Design every year, hiring psychologists, behavioral scientists, and neuroscientists to ensure their apps raise our dopamine as high as possible. As one of the whistleblowers from BJ Fogg’s class now says, “There are 1000 people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”

Learning about Persuasive Design is one of the best things families can do to make screen time easier to manage. Great resources for parents are the book Better Than Real Life by Richard Freed and the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix. There’s a brand new book that explains Persuasive Design to kids ages 8-12 called The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price. We can also remove some of the Persuasive Design from the tech products our kids are using. Check out my website mindful-media.net to find my printouts How To Spot Persuasive Design and “Removing Persuasive Design from Technology.

Marine Biology Trips

May is the month of Marine Biology trips for Middle School students. These trips are a precious time in the school year where each grade leaves the campus with their own cohort to study marine biology for the week. It’s a week filled with hands-on learning, community-building, and memories that will last a lifetime. These trips are a culmination of all the environmental learning they have done throughout the year and bring everyone at each grade level together for a final hands-on boot camp before the end of the school year.

You may or may not know that the SES middle school classes are mixed grades 6–8. It is a challenge to teach three grade levels all at once, but the rewards outweigh any difficulties one might encounter. Older students become mentors, younger students ground their older peers  and teach them the importance of showing up for each other. They are all teachers and all of them are given the opportunity to grow and learn as a community.  One week out of the year, they head off with their own grade for an entire school week. Trips will take them to the Oregon coast, Olympic mountains and kelp forests in California. On these trips students leave the amenities of home and are challenged to step out of their comfort zones with hikes, climbs, water activities, research, team building and more. The mantra is participation and everyone must at least attempt to grasp the first grip on the climbing wall, put the wet suit on even if they might not snorkel, touch the live crab, row the canoe and look through the microscope even if they are afraid of what they will see. They return with a renewed energy, the pride of pushing past discomfort, newly formed bonds, and an expanded knowledge of marine biology.

Eighth Grade Speeches

Eighth grade speeches are in full swing. The eighth grade experience at SES is like no other. Students are asked to prepare for their eighth grade promotion by examining their life experiences so far. They consider the most impactful moments of their lives up to now and dig deep to find the best way to share who they were, are, and who they hope to become. They do this by building a portfolio and writing their 8th grade speech. All eighth graders must give a 3–5 minute speech to the entire middle school, family, and friends. It can feel daunting, but the pride that comes from the completion of this special project can’t be denied. Students reflect on topics like the education system and learning, travel, family, facing challenges and so much more. The audience laughs, cries, and commiserates with them as they share their perspective on life thus far and what might come to be. One walks away with optimism for the generation which will be leading us in just a few years. If you know a current eighth grader, check in to see if you can join the fun on their big day.

May 19th Dine Out for SES at McMenamins Bagdad Pub

Support SES and head to McMenamins Bagdad Pub on May 19th from 5–10 p.m. for a meal that will fill your belly and support SES at the same time. 50% of sales will go to SES! This restaurant has one of the best locations for people-watching and the atmosphere can’t be beat. Invite your friends and make a night of it!

Free People’s Society Book Drive

Mobile libraries are no longer a thing of the past. There is a mobile lending library right here in Portland! The Free Society People’s Library (FSPL) is putting together an end-of-the-year book drive to fill in some areas in their collection, including disability justice, food justice, middle reader and YA, Indigenous studies, border abolition, and reproductive justice. They are hoping to have 100 books donated by the beginning of summer. You can buy books from their wish list on bookshop.org.

All book sales will benefit Revolutions Bookshop in St. Johns. If you have books you would like to donate you can send a picture of them to info@freesocietylibrary.org. They will take a look and follow up.

FSPL’s goal is to “provide free, accessible, information on radical movements and revolutionary ideas past and present to people of all ages.” They provide services in NE and SE Portland. In addition to a mobile library, they also have community bookshelves around town. They collaborate with schools around the city to help provide books and knowledge to classrooms that one might not find in a school library. You can go to their website (freesocietylibrary.org) to find out where they will be and to get more information.