What is one of your earliest memories of the power of human connection?
I was four years old. My preschool shared space with a church in downtown Portland, and on days with indoor recess we played in the church gym. One day I noticed Murphy beds folded into the walls, so I asked, “Teacher Maggie, what are these beds for?” She didn’t lie to me. She said, “When you all go home, families sleep here.” I asked why. She said, “They don’t have homes.”
In my four-year-old mind, I pictured my own house with its extra space and everyone I knew who had extra room. I figured this had to be an isolated incident. Maybe their homes had burned down. I thought that once the grown-ups knew, they would fix it. So, I made it my job to tell every adult I could find that there was a crisis: these families don’t have homes.
Thirty years have passed, and I have become the grown-up working on this issue.
What values guide your personal life and your work?
The first value, the one that guides everything in my life, is devotion.
I’ve been on a spiritual journey for much of my life. I wasn’t raised in a spiritual home; if anything, my upbringing taught me that faith is a weakness. But once I stood still long enough to feel the unconditional love of what I call God, and what others might call the divine, my life went somewhere I never could have imagined. At 20, I probably thought I’d be expanding my family’s commercial real estate and construction business across the country. Instead, I got a very clear message in the words of Mother Teresa: “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” That brought me back to Portland, the city that raised me, to do my work here.
I learned my next two values while working with a colleague as I was developing the fund. She taught me that values aren’t just words. They can be the strategy for what I was building.
The first of these is the power of the collective. Issues like homelessness are complex because they sit downstream of so many broken systems. No one person can solve this. It will take all of us.
The second is now, not later. Part of this is a healthy sense of urgency. It’s game time, and we’re all needed. I spent a few years on the sidelines, and I believe the world is begging for our participation.
This value also shapes how I think about money. If we look at what it costs to support a family before they become homeless and compare it with the cost of waiting 20 years, trying to help those same children once they’re in their twenties, then the urgency is clear. I work with these young adults weekly under the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and many of them are now living with both mental health challenges and substance use disorders. The math of waiting doesn’t work anymore. More resources to support people are needed now.
When did a person or experience change your mind about an idea or belief?
That preschool memory stayed with me my whole life. I did weekly homeless outreach as a volunteer, got involved with a foster care organization, and joined the board of a domestic violence nonprofit.
After a few years of being on the board of the organization, we began planning a capital campaign to share space with the county’s leading child abuse service provider and medical forensic services. It would become a one-stop shop to serve domestic violence survivors and survivors of child abuse, too. To help us understand why it made sense to bring these services together, the board went through training on adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.
The ACEs framework has been around for decades, but it was brand new to me. It’s a simple questionnaire that asks which of 10 kinds of childhood adversity you experienced. The research has been clear for a long time: people with a score of four or more face much higher risk of mental health challenges, substance use disorders, incarceration, and homelessness.
It was a paradigm shift. I remember exactly where I was sitting. It was 2020, and the board met over Zoom during the pandemic. For the first time, I felt like I was standing far enough back to see the whole picture. It wasn’t just people sleeping outside and how to help them back to stability, but all the earlier moments, years or even decades before someone loses housing, where the right support could have changed everything. The data had been there all along, and I couldn’t understand why we weren’t stepping in earlier.
That question is what flipped homelessness on its head for me. Instead of only seeing a crisis to respond to, I started seeing all the upstream points where we could intervene, so people never have to experience homelessness at all.
What are you working on right now?
Everything I’ve shared are the building blocks of what I’m now fully devoted to: reimagining how philanthropic dollars can work together to prevent homelessness upstream. I repurposed the money that could have been spent to start a foundation for my own family and used it as matching funds to start a collaborative effort.
The pooled fund will invest in just five grantees, each working at a key upstream point for preventing homelessness. Over time, we’ll bring those leaders together to talk about coordinated systems change. Where are the gaps? Where can we work together?
I’m also working with six community advisors with deep roots in Portland around this work who will help determine which organizations will receive the money through a “participatory grantmaking” framework.
What is giving you hope? What positive visions do you have for our future?
Another value of mine is grounded optimism.
I hold a vision of a world where everyone’s needs are met. Oddly enough, what gives me hope is seeing how much money is sitting on the sidelines, not yet benefiting the community. I believe that in front of every dollar is a human heart. If we can shift our collective heart toward interdependence — we cannot succeed until we all succeed — then there is enough.
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