Q&A with Dresden de Vera, SNA Board Member-At-Large
If you’ve attended a Board meeting recently or stopped by our booth at the Belmont Street Fair, you’ve likely met Dresden de Vera. De Vera, 35, joined the SNA Board last May. He moved to Portland in 2015 and eventually landed in Sunnyside, which he chose, in part, because he leads his Throw Snakes Tours bar crawl along Hawthorne. Dresden is known for his gregarious personality and positive energy. And he’s already assumed some important roles on the Board. He runs both of the SNA’s social media channels (Facebook and Instagram, where you should follow us at @Sunnysidepdxna) and he’s also the Board’s liaison to the Hawthorne Boulevard Business Association. We talked to him about his fierce love of Portland, his past as a social worker, and his ideas for the future of the SNA.
What is it about Sunnyside that attracted you to live here?
Dresden: It was always where I was naturally magnetized to. Everything I wanted to do was here—Laurelhurst Park, Mount Tabor, cool bars. A lot of my friends would either be in the area or want to hang out here. It just made sense.
Tell me about your “weird bar crawl with a fanatical local” which you advertise on Airbnb Experiences. What year did you start the tour and how did you get the idea to do it?
Dresden: I started it in 2018. When I was traveling abroad, I did a bunch of bar crawls, and I thought, “This is fun and I could do this better!” They would take us to locations, but that would be it. They wouldn’t try to stir conversation between people. I was a huge fanboy of Portland. I’d tell my closest friends about how Portland is heaven on earth. I wanted to be able to talk about how great this place was all the time, and then I just combined it with my love for travelers and leading people through cool places.
You call your tour “Throw Snakes”—what does that mean?
Dresden: Throwing snakes means doing something memorable and unexpected.
Where does that come from?
Dresden: I read this column that was entitled, “How to make the most of your time at your first semester of college.” The columnist said, “Play fewer video games and throw more snakes at things.” He explains that what he means is: Be bold. And what could be more bold than throwing a snake? You could get bitten by the snake, but that’s just the consequence of doing something bold. There’s risk, and what is a good life but a collection of bold moments?
We live in a culture where it’s really difficult to be seen, and it’s to the point where being seen is being bold. The snake that a guest throws on a tour is being seen. I like to curate the experience in such a way where people know that it’s a safe space to be themselves. One of the recurring reviews that I receive is, “It feels like you’re hanging out with old friends.”
You mentioned earlier that you’ve met thousands of people since launching the tours—and renting a room out on Airbnb.
Dresden: I’ve met 3,000 people over the past six years.
My tours are an experience of being immersed in the values of Portland. There’s this idea by [British-American author] Alan Watts—“The menu is not the meal.” And I feel like what a lot of tour guides do is they give you the menu. And I think that the meal of Portland, the experience of Portland, is to be vulnerable and your authentic self and to realize that it can be accepted by strangers. There’s a sense of kinship and camaraderie that comes from that that’s very unique to Portland.
Tell me about the Day Oddities tour.
Dresden: I take people to see more of a buffet of locations along Mississippi. I take people to eccentric art shops, to oddly-themed bars, to hidden cafes. I take them to food carts that were featured on Netflix. It really paints a picture of what Portland offers.
You used to work for Transitions Project homeless shelter, right?
Dresden: I’ve always been in social work. I was working with youth at the Boys and Girls Club in California. When I got here, I wanted to continue in social work and what was available were homeless shelters. I did that for about five years.
What did you do at the shelters?
Dresden: The first half of my stint there, I was a residential advocate for Doreen’s Place, which is a hybrid program where half of the beds are for veterans. It wasn’t just a free bed—you had to be working toward self-sufficiency with the help of a case manager. That was more of an uplifting shelter.
The latter half of my time at Transitions Projects was supervising a low-barrier shelter, which, at the time, was the largest in Oregon. There were 200 beds. At this shelter, you didn’t have to be making progress. And that was kind of demoralizing because you saw people who just wanted to stop falling, and they didn’t have hope to climb because in their minds, they would climb to a position where they would fall from it again.
Did you burn out on that kind of work?
Dresden: It was definitely humbling, and it taught me a lot about leadership. But it ultimately led to wanting to go back to my roots of helping youth, because with youth, there’s still a lot of hope. I felt my influence would go farther.
Over the past couple years, I also picked up work for Weird Portland United, building their social media. Over those two years, their following grew by over 16,000 people.
What do you think could use improvement in Sunnyside?
Dresden: I’m glad that we have a graffiti abatement program. I just worry that the businesses are being discouraged by the types of vandalism that happen to their storefronts.
And I do think that mental health has been an issue of people who seemingly are houseless and causing a scene on the street. But I do think that investing in programs like Portland Street Response is important.
Our Street Fair [the Hawthorne Street Fair] is awesome but I would love to see more community events. I know that the upper end of Hawthorne has Volume Bomb Fest—a punk rock concert where they have several bars collaborate to host different shows. I’d like to see Volume Bomb be a street event.
What do you like about serving on the Board of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association?
Dresden: I love that I get to interview local businesses and get a more rooted sense of the magic surrounding the entrepreneurs of the city. I do think a lot of them are driven by passion and by good networking etiquette. There seems to be a trend of a supportive community behind a successful business.
Portlanders love to support their small local businesses.
Dresden: This contributes to the idea that Portland is just a self aware place. And one of the parts of being self aware is realizing that when you prioritize convenience, you sacrifice community, and community is more important than convenience.
