Category: Neighborhood Newsletter

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

A Q&A with Ophelia Schechter, team leader for Sunnyside’s Neighborhood Emergency Team, and SNA Board Member.

Ophelia Schechter and her husband, David, moved to Sunnyside in January of 2022. They’d been renting in the Mt. Scott-Arleta neighborhood prior to that, but moved to Portland from San Jose, California in June 2018.

With three kids, the eldest of whom is a first-grader at SES, Schechter is a stay-at-home mom who is also involved in the school. Lately, that’s meant “daylighting” the curbs around the school to encourage safer driving. Then, wanting to get even more involved in her community, Ophelia attended an SNA meeting a few months ago and heard we needed Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET) volunteers. She promptly went to a city training and is now certified. After our May elections, not only is she the team leader for Sunnyside’s newly revived NET team, she’s the most recent addition to the SNA Board. We sat down with her on a recent Friday to find out what she loves about Sunnyside and what drives her involvement in the community.

You have a big family. Tell me about them!

There’s Elie (short for Elijah), who is seven and goes to Sunnyside [Environmental School]. Izzy is four, and Ariya is two. Elie will be in 2nd grade. This year, his teacher is Wayne.

How do you like SES? 

Sunnyside is great. I love how supportive the teachers are and how involved the community is. Everyone in my family absolutely adores the Harvest Fair. In early elementary grades I really don’t think there’s a huge difference from other schools—other than the gardening class. But from my understanding, our school spends less time on the computer than other schools do, which is an advantage for my family because my kids are low screen users. The principal and vice principal at SES are advocating for less screen time in the class room. Additionally I am looking forward to when my kiddos are in upper elementary and middle school when they will have frequent field trips.

So tell me how you got involved in NET training?

I came to one of the Neighborhood Association meetings. I had heard something in passing about NET teams, and I didn’t understand what that was. Then I went to the meeting, found out that we don’t have a NET team and that there is a program through the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management where they train everyday citizens to volunteer in emergency situations and also ultimately train us to be ready to self deploy during the “Big One.”

What was your inspiration for wanting to be trained in that?

I grew up in California. Understanding that a major earthquake could happen at any time was our default assumption. Then I moved here and I knew nothing about the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Since most Portlanders aren’t from here, they also don’t know that we live in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. So I felt unprepared and I suspected most of the people around me were unprepared as well…So while I prepare my household and myself, I’ve had a lot of thoughts: Sure if I were to have enough water for that time that’s great. But I imagine that most of the neighbors around me are not going to be ready. And I’m not going to sit around watching my neighbors suffer! So…

How long was the training?

First off, you have to watch two hours worth of videos in order to qualify for the training. Then the training itself is four weekend days from 9–3. Three hours are sitting and learning about how NET teams operate. A little bit of radio, medical, and some search and rescue. Those trainings give you a few skills that could help in the field. What if you come across somebody who is not breathing? What if you come across somebody who is bleeding out? What are you supposed to do? In the final training you do “cribbing”—how to save someone who is trapped. There is a dummy under a huge concrete block and we have to lift it so you can take the dummy out from underneath the block. (You and six other teammates are doing this together.) We did a stop the bleed training where you learn how to make a tourniquet, also wound packing. They teach you how to use a fire extinguisher.

After you’re done with this, if you’re interested in further training you can take additional classes like medical or radio. If you’re interested in sanitation—because when the earthquake happens we’re not going to have access to plumbing—we need to have sanitation. Then there’s food, and there are so many other  things for you to be trained in so you are better prepared as a community. From my understanding the Mt Tabor/Montavilla team has a specialized medical team. And Laurelhurst is well-resourced and well-trained. So my plan is to work with those groups.

My plans as Sunnyside NET team leader is to get our NET team going again and assess our strengths and weaknesses. Stage 2 is trying to pull more people into the team—especially folks already possessing the skills we lack. Stage 3 is to work with team leaders in adjacent neighborhoods. Especially during the Big One, we should be aware of their plans and all work together.

In the future, I would love to have a fundraiser to distribute supplies throughout our community. My first priority would be to acquire lots of water jugs. Water is the most important supply and a huge challenge in disaster prep. They say you need to have one gallon per person per day and they want you to have water supply for 14 days. So it’s a lot of water! I’m fortunate—I have a garage. It’s so daunting—especially for people who live in apartments—to store all that water.

Why were you interested in getting involved in the SNA?

I would say a third of it because I’m already going to be the Team Lead for NET. I think it’d be a lot easier to communicate with the Board if I’m on the Board. A second part is after having children I realized that when I grow up, I want to be a matriarch. Part of that is advocating for other people—and focusing on children, the elderly, and the vulnerable.

Being on the Board also gives me more exposure to the rest of the people in my community. I really see Portland through the lens of a parent. I go to parks, show up to community centers. I go to all these events. I know that’s only one part of Portland, so I want to find ways that I can both see and advocate for other things.

Even in emergency management a lot of the literature out there assumes that you are an adult and that you are able-bodied. That’s not the case for most people. That’s part of the advocacy work, especially at the local level—reminding folks that not everyone is going to be capable of the things we’re asking them to do.  If we don’t consider them now, they will be left behind in an emergency.

Do you have a cat or a dog?

Both. Harley is the cat and Woz, the dog. He is named after Steve Wozniak. (Did I mention that my husband David is an IOS developer?) 

What do you love about Sunnyside?

The #1 reason why we chose Sunnyside is because of how walkable it is and how family friendly it is. I think it is a unique neighborhood because we are so central and yet it is quiet. I’m two blocks away from bars and 99% of the time we hear nothing. We also love the library and we are eagerly awaiting its reopening!

Is there anything you’d like to see change or improve?

The thing that I would want to see improve about Sunnyside is making it feel even more like a community. Having deeper ties between homeowners and renters is important. Also, a sense of pride about the area that we live in.

News From Sunnyside Environmental School (SES)

The school year is wrapping up this week. The last day of school is June 5th instead of June 12th, due to the sudden PPS budget shortfall this Spring. The final week of school will be filled with finalizing projects, cleaning desks and lockers, 5th and 8th grade promotions, and end-of-year celebrations. Starting June 6th, the park and playground will be open to the public until school is back in session at the end of summer. Feel free to grab a snack from the garden while you are there—at least up until August 21st. Don’t forget to check out the outdoor learning space that was designed by our amazing middle school students! It’s a great spot to sit and eat your garden snack.

Get Tech Out of PPS

A new SES group is forming to petition PPS to restrict the adoption of AI tools and generative AI. PPS is spending millions of dollars on technological adoptions, while data shows that analog learning has higher success rates. This is especially concerning when the PPS school district is in the middle of a $54 million budget shortfall and is in the process of cutting teacher positions, closing schools, and raising class sizes. Many advocates of public education feel that PPS is spending money in the wrong areas. If you are interested in supporting this effort you can send an email to [email protected].

Storyline

Did you know that SES uses Storyline methodology as part of their English Language Arts curriculum. In great part due to the hard work of the SES Site Council, grades K-5 used Storyline this year. Storyline begins with an anchoring phenomenon such as, in the case of SES 4th graders last year, learning about Celilo Falls through a visit from Linda Meanus, a Warm Springs elder. Her stories sparked a line of questions from the students that later directed their research. The unit culminated in the 4th grade classes visiting the Senate Appropriations Committee and presenting cases in defense of Celilo Falls at the committee meeting. This type of education is what is so special about SES. Learning that is based in real, and current topics that are student-led stretch beyond the classroom and enhance student engagement.

Drive Safely

Please remember to drive safely and slowly around the school. This is especially important at the beginning and end of the school day as there are many students who walk and bike to school. There have been some close calls in the recent weeks. Be vigilant, drive slowly and follow the rules. Please pay attention to the crossing guards and the parking signs. Last month volunteers painted the curbs around the school yellow to promote traffic safety. Since many children play at the school during the summer months it’s always best practice to slow down in school zones and be vigilant when driving through crosswalks. 

Have questions about SES? Email [email protected] and maybe I’ll answer them in a future column!

News from the President

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!

Tech Tip: Persuasive Design and Why It’s So Sinister

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.

News From Sunnyside Environmental School (SES)

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.