Cahootsians stand up a new nonprofit, prepare to restore Eugene crisis service

Presenter: Eugene’s Budget Committee heard the latest about ‘CAHOOTS 2.0,’ the effort by Cahootsians to establish their own nonprofit organization: Willamette Valley Crisis Care. Offering public comment at the May 28 meeting, Jacob Trewe:

Jacob Trewe: Hello there, City Council. My name is Jacob Trewe. I’ve been keeping track. We’ve had well over 50 people come here and speak about how important CAHOOTS is to them. I won’t belabor the point. I’ve sent messages. I’m with Friends of CAHOOTS and sent messages and explanations and possible ways that we can move forward with actually getting CAHOOTS back on the streets.

[00:00:35] The thing I want to bring up, first and foremost: Willamette Valley Crisis Care. They are ready to go when it comes to being able to provide a CAHOOTS 2.0 service in our streets. They consist of the folks who currently are with White Bird who have the experience. We’re talking 36-odd years of experience helping out folks on the streets.

[00:00:55] And I suggest that you reflect the importance of CAHOOTS to our community by including them in the budget. Right now, we have half a million dollars allocated. That would not even cover half of a year. Now my estimates indicate that we need more like $2.25 million each year to be able to cover CAHOOTS services, and I suggest that you go for that.

[00:01:16] The Budget Committee right now can fund CAHOOTS. You don’t have to wait. Willamette Valley Crisis Care, which consists of former and current CAHOOTS workers, is ready to serve. Consider whether the police prefer keeping budget items for already-vacant police positions, and unpopular police programs, such as the drone problem, er, program, or to re-funding CAHOOTS. We’ve had 50 folks come here and say we want CAHOOTS back. I think we should do that.

[00:01:38] Presenter: Michelle Perin:

[00:01:39] Michelle Perin: My name is Michelle Perin, and I’m an LCSW and an EMT. I’m a former CAHOOTS van worker and a clinical supervisor who began in 2016. I’m also one of the co-founders of Willamette Valley Crisis Care.

[00:01:51] Thank you to everyone tackling these challenging times and financial struggles. Thank you to our advocates and our allies.

[00:01:57] In these final moments before important decisions are made, here are some thoughts. We spent a lot of time discussing existing services and the gaps. Specifically, how did CAHOOTS fit in and can someone else do it?

[00:02:09] I’m saddened by this framework. We are trying to figure out who is the lowest common denominator to provide a basic service function. We as a community are being asked to pick from whatever is left after a financial battle. Why are we settling for just ‘adequate’ when we’re talking about comfort, compassion, competency, and empowerment in someone’s most vulnerable moments? Crisis touches us all and respects no demographics.

[00:02:34] Although we didn’t ask for this disruption in service and it’s created such suffering for the most vulnerable in our community, here we are. And we’re faced with the opportunity for transformation, but transformation has to be built on a solid foundation. Your choices, your decisions can provide this. Not just for this fiscal year, but for generations. We’re standing at a pivotal moment and all eyes are on us.

[00:02:57] Thirty-six years ago, Eugene city leaders, your professional ancestors, made a brave decision to partner with my Cahootsian ancestors and roll out a creative, innovative, and effective community safety program that’s now honored throughout the U.S. and beyond. I’m now standing here before you, having worked tirelessly and bravely with my colleagues to stand up Willamette Valley Crisis Care, lovingly known as CAHOOTS 2.0, to honor our ancestors, and I leave you with these questions:

• Will you now honor your city ancestors and bravely make the decision to continue to partner with us?
• Will this be a moment you can look back on with pride and honor? And
• Will you be part of the continued legacy of the city of Eugene and CAHOOTS?

[00:03:42] Presenter: Berkley Carnine:

[00:03:43] Berkley Carnine: Hello, my name is Berkley Carnine. And I am a former CAHOOTS worker and co-founder of Willamette Valley Crisis Care. I want to thank city councilors and everyone from the Budget Committee who we’ve been able to meet with to find a way forward to get our services back to the city.

[00:04:01] We’ve heard from so many community members advocating for our role in a public safety and wellness ecosystem that we know is vital to the history of this city and also its future.

[00:04:18] In a meeting recently, I was asked about what am I grieving most in the loss of this work. And it made me think about two of the main learnings I have integrated as a crisis worker. And I had to practice those because at the same time I found out about our program going under, I lost a beloved to violence.

[00:04:41] And I first had to receive and ask for tremendous support and witness in my experience of grief, and to be held in that and know that everything I was going through was normal and okay. I also had 10 days of bereavement leave, which was won by my union, and that was tremendous.

[00:05:03] And as I was feeling overwhelmed by grief, I had transitioned into the other part of our work that I find so vital, which is finding a place where someone has choice and where someone has agency in what’s happening to them.

[00:05:18] And we know that is one of the most important things that marks when people have a traumatic experience and come out of that feeling more capable and resilient, is to not go through it alone and to also have choice around what happens.

[00:05:33] And in the way that we do our work, we center our clients’ agency and their sense of what they know they need to get through, even if it’s not what we think is what they need in the moment. And sometimes that means we go back and we go back and we go back until they are like, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I do need to go to the hospital. I haven’t slept in days,’ or ‘I am ready for treatment,’ or ‘I do think this wound has gotten so bad that I’m scared.’

[00:06:01] And when we center their choice and when we join them in that journey, we see profound things happen. We see the reduction in violence and, yeah, the kind of collaboration we want to build.

[00:06:14] Presenter: Alicia Rabideau:

[00:06:15] Alicia Rabideau: My name is Alicia Rabideau. You’ve heard from me a few times. I’m a crisis worker in EMT here in Eugene, formerly worked on the CAHOOTS vans. I want to add my voice today to acknowledge and share gratitude for the proposed budget change that happened last week, allotting some money, half a million, I believe, to a new crisis response service.

[00:06:39] And ask you for more and ask you for a fully funded, well-well-resourced crisis response to put back in the hands of CAHOOTS workers and others who have been serving this community for decades; and to ask that that money be diverted from the EPD programs that are also being called ‘crisis response services.’

[00:06:59] And I just want to emphasize this it’s how vital it is to have non-police response in mental health crises and related crises and I’ve heard a lot of talk about service gaps and I just want to contextualize us in a really critical national moment when service gaps are rapidly increasing.

[00:07:21] Everyone is talking right now about losing access to Medicaid and many mental health services and other free lifesaving services that people are depending on. And I just think that the gaps that are being alluded to will only be increasing in these next weeks and months.

[00:07:38] I also want to contextualize this in a time when our president is rapidly expanding the power of law enforcement and ICE agents and our community members are rapidly becoming less safe in those contexts. And so having a crisis response service that does not depend on police is extra important.

[00:08:01] And finally I just want to bring back what someone has been mentioning at the start of every City Council meeting, ‘centering the people who aren’t in this room.’ There are people who can’t come in this room because they’re afraid of ICE agents, they’re afraid of the police who are in every room of this building. They can’t sit here quietly for three hours because of mental illness or disability or what have you and those are the people who most will depend on the CAHOOTS and aren’t with us today and so I really ask you to be centering them.

[00:08:28] Presenter: Robert Parrish.

[00:08:29] Robert Parrish: My name is Robert Parrish, I am a current staff member for CAHOOTS. I’ve worked for CAHOOTS for 21 years in the city of Eugene and now also in the city of Springfield.

[00:08:43] So many people have come up here to extol the virtues of our program but to just cover it a little bit and briefly. We are a highly valuable part of public safety. Sending CAHOOTS is a humanistic response. It is a professional response and it deescalates many issues before they spiral out of control potentially needing other public safety responses.

[00:09:05] CAHOOTS is also the least expensive response that Lane County dispatchers can send to a call. Every time you send a CAHOOTS response, it saves money. It is less expensive than doing something else about that call.

[00:09:19] What the 2025-2027 budget appears to show is that you’re trying to manage $446 million. And what we’re asking for is roughly $2 million a year. For that money, we have in the past handled half of the welfare checks that come into the city of Eugene, close to 20,000 calls.

[00:09:44] We make our entire system of medical and social services work better. And I think one of the important points here is that current and former CAHOOTS workers are ready to return to helping the people in the city of Eugene. We just need a small portion of the city budget, of that $446 million over two years.

[00:10:04] We will show up for the people of the city of Eugene. If you can help find the portion, the small portion of the budget that we would need to operate and show up for the people here, the citizens here, and to try to make a difference in our community.

[00:10:20] Presenter: Chloe Trifilio:

[00:10:22] Chloe Trifilio: Chloe Trifilio. I’m also here advocating for CAHOOTS, but I also echo the frustration of others over the disinvestment of our third spaces. When I began looking for my next home back in 2019, a friend brought up this small city that I had never heard of in Oregon, with a mobile crisis team that serves as an alternative to policing. And I thought, ‘Wow, that is a community where they must be dedicated to some meaningful solutions outside of our prevailing carceral system.’

[00:11:01] And like other speakers we’ve heard tonight, I’m another person who sought to move to Eugene because of systems and services like CAHOOTS and I did. I moved here shortly thereafter and it just deeply saddens me to see that through our budget choices, which is really where our power lies as taxpayers, we won’t be the same Eugene. Who are we going to become?

[00:11:25] And I will say seeing all this testimony this evening in the past couple weeks has really reminded me what it’s like to be amongst the people that do have the same priorities.

[00:11:37] But with pending cuts to services at the local state and federal level, we will see the mental health crisis escalate. And if we don’t pay for CAHOOTS now, we will certainly pay in other ways down the line. So let’s budget now with prevention and compassion and empathy in mind.   

[00:11:56] Presenter: Marty Wilder:

[00:11:57] Marty Wilder: My name’s Marty Wilder. And a friend of mine asked me to join the meeting today to talk about the Willamette Valley Crisis Care.

[00:12:05] And some of you may remember me from 2020 on the Ad Hoc Committee for Police Policy and at that time there was a strong voice on that committee around supporting CAHOOTS and at times recognizing that the police are not the best fit for the job and that we need a CAHOOTS-like response.

[00:12:32] At the same time, the Community Safety Initiative was being enrolled and there were public listening sessions. Again, there was a strong voice saying we need more CAHOOTS. It was during the defund police time. And again, it felt like the voices were undermined, only to find out later that CSI was written in the code to be something that was supposed to support police, EPD. And even though the promotional material promoted CAHOOTS, none of the funding went towards that.

[00:13:12] So this was disappointing and I kind of checked out and put my energy other places. But I’ve been watching from afar. And, you know, I recognize that there were some things that were problematic around White Bird in the mix.

[00:13:28] But now we have a wonderful opportunity with the Willamette Valley Crisis Care. We can hold to our unique Eugeneness and continue to provide the kind of response that we need around crisis care.

[00:13:49] The reason why I feel like the police could never replace this: It’s not about the van, it’s not about having a mental health person with you, it’s not about having a community service officer. The bottom line is whenever you do that, the primary focus is still law enforcement, whereas with a CAHOOTS-like response, the primary focus is consensual care.

[00:14:14] Presenter: William Parham:

[00:14:15] William Parham: Yeah, my name is William Parham. And I was a Eugene police commissioner. I served on the council as an abolitionist. And so as an abolitionist, my main goal was to be able to reroute money from the police department and put that in the hands of crisis workers like CAHOOTS. I failed that task miserably.

[00:14:41] I have since resigned from the commission because I feel like there’s an inability to enact change from a more radical perspective.

[00:14:52] And so today I come at you first with one number and that number is $618,000. That is the fiscal budget this year for the volunteer police force that walks the streets in those obnoxious yellow jackets for the city of Eugene’s police department. And I’m curious why a volunteer unit requires so much funding.

[00:15:18] And I want to task this city with the knowledge that there is going to be a talent drain, a talent drain of qualified and ready-to-go crisis workers if we do not make the funding available for Willamette Valley crisis care. These folks are ready to go. They’re ready to put their boots on the ground and they are ready to put the 36 years of experience, the 36 years of rapport, and the 36 years of serving this city on the line right now.

[00:15:51] And so to all the City Council members that are sitting there right now, I’d ask you with: What Eugene do you want to leave for your kids? Do you want to leave a city that is ready to bend the knee to the police or do you want to leave a city that is ready to honor all residents and all citizens with holistic choices for health care?

[00:16:12] Presenter: Ryder Hales:

[00:16:13] Ryder Hales: Hello there, I’m Ryder Hales. You heard from me a couple weeks ago, and I’m here once again to stress the importance of CAHOOTS amongst all of the public services that are tragically on the chopping block.

[00:16:26] So CAHOOTS, a nationwide precedent and a landmark of Eugene, the, like, the importance can’t be, it’s incalculable. We’ve heard many people here tonight say that they found their home in Eugene, that it put Eugene on the map because of this landmark service and it would only take $4.5 million across the next two years to save it with a CAHOOTS 2.0.

[00:16:51] That’s a drop in the bucket for—forget the whole city, that’s a drop in the bucket for the police department. And it’s like, it is a good thing that you know these other services look like they’re going to last this summer. So let’s take a moment and be relieved that we’re going to have these services this summer.

[00:17:07] But more importantly, let’s acknowledge the system that enabled this massive budget crisis in the first place and made these services what’s on the chopping block and not MUPTE and the inflated EPD budget.

[00:17:20] So I paid the city $1 to park here tonight, and I wasn’t too thrilled about that. Not because I’m upset about paying a dollar to park, I’m privileged enough to spare a dollar. I was upset because I don’t think that dollar of my hard-earned money is going to something that’s going to benefit the people.

[00:17:37] I feel like that dollar of my hard-earned money is going to wealthy developers and police drones and inflated salaries for officers that harass and threaten, not protect and serve. So let’s use this opportunity and let’s do the right thing. Let’s create a budget system that keeps these services for years to come, not just the next year. And let’s save CAHOOTS.

[00:18:03] Presenter: Athena Aguiar:

[00:18:04] Athena Aguiar: My name is Athena Aguiar. Half a million dollars is not enough. Just so I have this right: This budget’s for the biennium, right? So that means that’s actually a quarter of a million dollars per year. And what, the $100,000 from the community safety payroll tax? Does that gap funding renew?

[00:18:21] Do you think that’s going to be enough to run all of CAHOOTS (sorry, I mean Willamette Valley Crisis Care) for the next two years. (Oh, everyone follow their new Instagram, it’s @WillametteValleyCrisisCare, all one word.)

[00:18:31] I saw this draft motion that increased alternative response by $4.5 million and reduced funding to Volunteers In Policing, vacant EPD positions, the drone program, and other police programs. I don’t know if this is a real motion that someone is planning to make today or if that’s just like Jacob (Trewe)’s fantasy on paper, but if it’s real, please do that. Thanks for listening.

[00:18:51] Presenter: During public comment at the Budget Committee May 28, Cahootsians offer to help the city upgrade to CAHOOTS 2.0. Learn more on Instagram at WillametteValleyCrisisCare.