White Bird managers leave former workers in the dark

Presenter: After a layoff, consultants say best practice is to make management—and especially the top managers—visible and accessible. But after laying off nine Front Rooms workers, White Bird’s top managers went in a different direction. On Dec. 17, they cancelled an all-staff meeting and spoke only to police. White Bird Volunteer Coordinator Georgia Quinn:

[00:00:23] Georgia Quinn (White Bird volunteer coordinator): We were standing outside the all-staff annual in-person board meeting, the only real time that I know that people can come and speak to the board, the people that have the most power in our agency, there was supposed to be a Q&A session for employees to ask questions or make comments to the board.

[00:00:44] It was very exciting that we could all be here in person together after being so siloed into our separate departments and not having meetings together as a clinic, and, you know, speak truth to power. This is the only meeting that you can do that and speak your voice, like, really trying to encourage people to do what is in the spirit of White Bird and making their voices heard.

[00:01:05] We’re standing out in the cold, 10-15 people just chatting, you know, trying to figure out where we can stand so we are the least intrusive and the least aggressive because we just want to be seen and we want to encourage people. We want to do the White Bird way.

[00:01:20] Presenter: The candlelight vigil outside the meeting was supported by Eugene HAND, which stands for Housing And Neighborhood Defense.

[00:01:28] Executive Director Jeremy Gates sent an email message to White Bird employees explaining management’s perspective. Quote: ‘This event was canceled due to the actions of an activist group that targeted the meeting. The venue canceled the event an hour before the start time after incidents of vandalism and threats of violence associated with this group.’ Georgia Quinn:

[00:01:51] Georgia Quinn (White Bird volunteer coordinator): They called the cops on CAHOOTS, like so many CAHOOTS staff members. I mean, I don’t want to out them because like, I think everyone is so afraid of retaliation at this point and doesn’t want to lose their jobs, not only for losing money for themselves, but knowing that the clients they take care of, they want to be there to support them and they don’t want to lose their job simply for that. But like, I want to say like half the CAHOOTS staff was there. You’re going to call the cops on CAHOOTS?

[00:02:19] And it hurt me. And I feel sad for myself. But I almost feel like the most sadness for HAND and for the other staff members who showed up to support us, because they care. They should not be persecuted and they should not be, they should not feel like criminals or feel like they have threat of the law from their workplace for showing up to an all-staff board meeting.

[00:02:44] Presenter: It could mean the end of White Bird operating by consensus. Georgia Quinn.

[00:02:49] Georgia Quinn (White Bird volunteer coordinator): Why we work at White Bird is because you can start working, I mean, at least historically it used to be, you could start working at White Bird and show up to the community clinic meeting and maybe you have an idea on a policy that is being implemented and you can raise your hand and make a suggestion.

[00:03:04] And you know what? Maybe that gets implemented because it’s such a great idea. Maybe not, or maybe it does. And that’s just like such an amazing thing about this clinic. And we’ve known that the consensus has been eroded for a number of reasons, but at the same time, one of the reasons that Front Rooms was so special was we were one of the last departments that used consensus to make all of our decisions in any legal way that we could.

[00:03:30] We followed every rule and regulation as we should, but any change in policy and procedure within our department and our personnel that we could sit down and have a discussion and make sure that everyone was pleased would always happen.

[00:03:46] And it was just so special and it really connected us all together into being a family every week, 4 p.m., the Front Rooms meeting. We sit down for two hours and have, you know, sometimes a heated, sometimes a lovely, sometimes a mix. Sometimes we’re crying because the client’s passed away.

[00:04:04] But you can bet that we’re sitting there for two hours and we are discussing how important this work is to us, how important our clients are to us, and I mean, most of the time for the past year, we’ve spent those two hours trying to figure out how to keep our department alive and funded and coming up with solutions to this exact situation and giving those solutions to management only to hear nothing.

[00:04:27] Presenter: Georgia said White Bird management has blamed the union.

[00:04:31] Georgia Quinn (White Bird volunteer coordinator): It’s very alarming, I think, to me, there’s a lot of history within White Bird along with the consensus that’s been around for, you know, 50 years, with that being eroded, the blame has been placed upon the unionization of certain departments, starting with CAHOOTS, saying that, ‘Oh, because folks are unionized, we can’t do consensus now,’ when that is just, in my opinion, is strictly fear-mongering.

[00:04:55] A lot of people decided to unionize because we were getting no support from our leadership, or we felt like we were being dissolved or, you know, X, Y, and Z, depending on what department and what reason and what pressure they were feeling from management.

[00:05:07] For Front Rooms at the time it really was, we were being displaced from our building and we felt like we were going to be dissolved at any moment. And the only possible thing in our control that we could maybe do was trying to stand together and unionize, and that definitely scared them.

[00:05:23] I think if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from the past month of standing in solidarity with other people who love people, is that the people in power and the people in management are so scared when we stand together, they were so scared that they couldn’t even face us on Tuesday night.

[00:05:40] I mean, I just spent like over a year having to tell God knows how many people, ‘The clinic is not in a wage freeze because of the union. The clinic is in a wage freeze (if it is) because of the clinic, because the clinic’s management says so.’

So many times I was in meetings for the beginning of volunteer coordination and HR and management and leadership is telling me, ‘Well, we can’t have volunteers because of the union. We can’t have volunteers because of the union.’ And I go, ‘Where does it say anywhere in any law about that?’

[00:06:13] I went to the union and I said, ‘Hey, is this like, can we do this? Like, why, why is the clinic saying that this isn’t allowed?’ Worked with the union. They were super cool. We wrote a proposal together that was to go to the table that was stating that as long as it is needed, volunteers are welcome to support and do some of the basic needs services alongside Front Room staff.

[00:06:36] And I never heard anything else about that. That was a year ago in that proposal with them to take. And I can tell you that nothing else happened to volunteers after that.

[00:06:47] I think another interesting thing that I’ll just throw in here is the last board meeting that happened, a group of Front Rooms people, the announcement of the disillusion of the department had happened right before this. So some of us decided to kind of gather outside the building where they meet for the board meeting.

[00:07:05] Once again, not be aggressive just to say, ‘Hey, we don’t get to talk to you guys. And we’re told you guys make all the decisions,’ like, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’re people, these are our faces. And we did the same thing. We put headphones in and we listened to the board meeting outside.’

[00:07:20] And as we glanced into the board meeting, they went into executive session, which they like to do, and it’s only the board members and only who’s allowed to be in there, which is usually (Executive Director) Jeremy (Gates) and them and they had done that and we’re just chatting and then we kind of just glance into the glass room where they’re having the executive session and we just see Jeremy just pointing and screaming and spitting and like pointing in our direction, and I’m assuming yelling about us.

And like looking at the rest of the board, like, they looked horrified. And I kind of felt in that moment I was like, ‘Is this the moment where everyone’s going to like see what we’ve seen and feel what we feel?’ And it was so—oh my gosh it was so strange to see him thinking that we couldn’t see him in the reflection but, oh, God, the, just the moment, the true snowballing of demoralization right there, you know?

[00:08:13] Why are you angry at us for laying us off? You know, even if this isn’t the situation that you want to be in, I don’t know why you’re angry with a bunch of people who like care about homeless people.

[00:08:24] The board members, a number of them left sobbing, didn’t want to speak to us or like, in fact, none of them really wanted to speak with us. Most of them were just like, ‘I got to go’ and was really stressed and like ran. Some of them walked by us and acted like we were going to bite them like piranhas, which was pretty demoralizing. And then the other half stopped and said, ‘Hey, like you guys just found out about this, like we just found out a week before you, we didn’t make this decision.’

[00:08:49] It was so horrible. I like I’ve been through a lot of horrible things in my life, but there’s been something about this month that has just been beyond and I think it’s that layer of, like, I do this work because I’ve been a client before, because I’ve handed a sandwich to someone and third person zoomed out and, like, seeing me doing that and thought to myself, ‘Damn, like, I’ve been that person on the other side. And I desperately needed someone like me to help them.’

[00:09:19] And you can’t do anything else once you have like seen the catastrophe that capitalism has like put upon us as a society, especially the people that the society tries to turn away and keeps everyone from seeing. And I feel like this decline of social services is just such a point to that.

[00:09:39] I mean, wide lens, you zoom out, it feels like the city is trying to push all of the houseless and vulnerable people out onto Highway 99. It feels like they are not allowed to exist in the city center. It feels like we are not allowed to provide services out of a building in one of the only areas with somewhat affordable rent because we can’t have homeless people in the city center.

[00:10:03] I think them not responding to my letter, not showing up to the vigil, the fact that you are too scared to face us I think says a lot, because we are some of the least confrontational people in the world. We are a bunch of people who are counselors, crisis intervention, just feed homeless people.

[00:10:23] You start screaming in front of me and I’m going to go full crisis intervention mode and go, ‘Hey, like, let’s be chill.’ That’s just like who I am to my core. And I’m going to say, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ And when you don’t have an answer for, ‘Hey, what’s going on here,’ I’m going to be a little bit mad. I just don’t understand why they don’t understand why this answer of, ‘Oh, a bunch of money was lost,’ isn’t enough because we work in an environment of consensus where we not only have management kind of put on our shoulders, the fact that we need to figure out how to fund our department.

[00:11:04] So we’ve been working hard on that.

[00:11:07] When money is suddenly lost, we want to know, we want to find solutions and we had been trying to, you know, tell them, Hey, solutions, solutions. In fact, like, I know this isn’t going to help the department for a year, but we have over $20,000 of donations lined up, but you have to promise to like leave Front Rooms for 60 days, because these donations are tax-deductible and, you know, people don’t want to just donate to a GoFundMe. It needs to be tax-deductible, but they, like we told that to the board at that first, first meeting, like a week after the announcement of it being dissolved, we said, ‘Hey, there’s people with $20,000 ready to donate.’

[00:11:45] I know I was working one afternoon and an older couple came in and donated a $1,000 check each, so $2,000 directly to Front Rooms. One of the members of management kind of followed them around, like, didn’t want us to talk to them, but he walked away and they came up to me. I was sorting mail and they go, ‘Hey, like, do you know where the money is going to go if, like, you guys don’t stay?’

[00:12:07] And I was like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you. If they dissolve us, I don’t know where it’s going to go. I can’t tell you that it’s going to go to a department that you want it to go to.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, we really would like it to go to CAHOOTS.’ And I was like, ‘I wish I could promise that to you.’

[00:12:21] But I would love to know where the money that you’re donating is going., I would love to know as well. I saw on one, I think it’s UpCause, the donation website for the month of November. They got, like, over $7,000 just on that website. And that doesn’t count the people who come in and drop off checks because, you know, they’re worried about Front Rooms and the service.

[00:12:43] It just is so shocking to me that instead of being willing to show their faces and listen to us and give us answers besides, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘This sucks,’ or ‘I don’t like this situation either.’ We get the cops called on us instead of just giving us an answer. You know, it’s very suspicious. It makes me feel weird.

[00:13:09] I think the thing that I’ve taken away that is most powerful for me during this period. And I said on the mic, the thing that I’m taking away from tonight in this past month is that if we stand together in solidarity, not only have I felt the most powerful that I’ve ever felt in my life, the most nonviolent that I’ve ever felt in my life, but they are scared of us.

[00:13:34] These people are scared of us. Why would that be? Why are you scared of a bunch of people who love to feed homeless people? You know, like, why are you scared of a bunch of people who just want answers? That says a lot to me.

[00:13:51] Presenter: Georgia Quinn says rumors are flying about other departments facing the same fate as the Front Rooms Department. But instead of making themselves available to talk with staff, White Bird managers cancelled the meeting.

[00:14:04]  We’ve been reaching out to White Bird managers since late November, inviting them to share their perspectives, and encouraging them to hold a press conference with local media. We welcome any statements they wish to share.