Sunnyside Neighborhood Association
Helping connect neighbors through events and information in Portland's Sunnyside Neighborhood.
The Community Care Committee (SNACC) meeting is usually held on the first Thursday of the month at 6:30 p.m. at SE Uplift (3534 SE Main Street). Actual dates, times or locations can vary, so please check the announcements below and our calendar to confirm the exact details for upcoming meetings.
The Committee Co-Chairs are Hannah Wallace and Josette Hodge.
The Sunnyside Neighborhood Community Cares (SNACC) Committee Meeting will be held on Thursday, January 20th at 6:30PM. Here is the agenda and the zoom link.
Looking forward to meeting with you (virtually due to omicron) this week! We will be discussing several important efforts the committee is working on with opportunities to volunteer including continuing the community needs assessment that we began last month with our shower participants, trash clean-ups, and outreach to houseless neighbors.
We had a productive meeting in-person for the first time since Covid! We went through a quick orientation to transformative justice processes and what they can look like. We then discussed outreach strategies to build stronger relationships with the houseless community living in Sunnyside. We plan to partner up and divide up the neighborhood to do this outreach, initially to spread the word about the shower program and eventually to assist in conflict mediation and transformative justice processes, if appropriate. We also discussed the response we received from the City of Portland’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program (HUCIRP) last month. We went through the letter point-by-point to note inaccuracies based on our various experiences. We discussed further action, like gathering testimonials from other folks or publishing an article.
We encourage anyone who is interested in these efforts to attend our next SNACC meeting on Thursday the 20th at 6:30 p.m. Meeting details will be posted on the SNA website the week of January 17th.
The SNACC committee began its monthly meeting debriefing what we know following recent sweeps of houseless neighbors from Laurehurst and Sewallcrest parks. We will meet in two weeks to discuss ongoing conflict resolution and transformative justice strategies to strengthen relationships between housed and houseless folks in Sunnyside. In the long term, we hope that strengthening these existing relationships will help us advocate for greater City investment in providing services to houseless people, instead of sweeping camps. We will also be moving forward with a needs assessment survey of the Sunnyside shower program in early December. Finally, we will begin exploring fundraising and leveraging the giving season to solicit donations from the community to fund other projects, like paying houseless volunteers for the work they’re doing for the community.
We encourage anyone who is interested in these efforts to attend our next SNACC meeting on Thursday, Dec. 16th at 6:30 p.m. Meeting details will be posted on the SNA website the week of December 13th.
We had our November meeting on the 18th. Minutes from the meeting are attached: SNACC November Minutes
At the last SNACC meeting on Thurs. Oct. 18th, we discussed conducting a needs assessment of the shower program to gather feedback from the people who use the showers to learn what is working well and what isn’t. The shower program is also organizing another clothing drive to provide requested winter gear for the houseless community. The date and location to be determined. There wasn’t much to report on trash removal, other than that the same areas continue to be a challenge. There was some talk about investing in longer term solutions, which the group agreed was important to revisit. The committee will also finish the work needed to launch the “Get On The Sunnyside” communication plan. Some members then signed onto (zoomed over to?) the South Tabor Neighborhood Association meeting. Tremaine Clayton and Britt Urban shared information about the work they’ve been doing with Portland Street Response (PSR). This program will be expanding starting November 1st to include East Precinct, which covers Sunnyside east of Cesar Chavez Blvd. Next Mireaya Medina and Babatunde Azubuike from “Black and Beyond the Binary Collective” facilitated a conversation about how their organization could collaborate with neighborhood associations to reimagine community safety. We encourage anyone who is interested in these efforts to attend our next SNACC meeting on Thursday, Nov. 18th at 6:30 p.m. Meeting details will be posted on the SNA website the week of Nov. 15th.