Helping people help themselves

Program provides opportunities for the low-income to climb the economic ladder

Story and photo by Aaron Lundstrom
The Portland Upside
January 2010

Over 1500 people in various professions and small businesses have benefited from the EOI program, raising their incomes an average of 25%.

Just as one may feel the gnaw of a cold rain lasting for days and the need to vent about it, it’s just as easy to feel the weight of taxes and bewail them.

Taxes are potent enough to start wars and to inspire political bumper stickers with multiple exclamation points. So if you’re not fully assuaged by tax money going towards road maintenance, police protection and other public services, or if you’re concerned about taxes being taken from your hard-earned wages only to be recklessly spent, there is good news.

By paying your taxes you could be making a charitable contribution—one that empowers individuals to better themselves and their families in a challenging economy.

The Economic Opportunity Initiative (EOI), spawned in 2004 in part from taxpayer funding, focuses on helping the economically disadvantaged while adapting to the diverse needs of the individual.

Lynn Knox, program manager for the EOI, mentions seven microenterprise projects and 25 workforce projects now running, with more to come once the funding is available.

Weaving through every project is the goal to keep low-income individuals in the program for three years, with an end to increase their income and assets by at least 25 percent. The EOI is openly accountable, so anyone can look at the statistics to see whether the efforts are paying off.

As results for the August 2009 graduating class show, enrolled microenterprise start-up businesses—after three years and starting with nothing—averaged $65,515 in sales. Existing businesses in the program more than tripled their sales.

For the workforce program graduates, most participants entered the program unemployed. EOI prepared them for work, helped them find a job and provided advancement assistance until their three-year graduation. From EOI job placement until graduation, adults increased their wages by an average of 33%, and youth saw a post placement increase of 23%.

This kind of success comes from the EOI’s philosophy of “people not places,” which aims to build up the individuals before building up the glitter-glassed structures and streetlights they walk past in their neighborhoods.

EOI “helps people to walk so that they can run,” Knox asserts.

Karina Potestio, a clothes-crafting wife and mother of three girls, has experienced the success of this dynamic. She graduated from Trillium Artisans, one of the EOI’s microenterprise projects that is committed to ecological and individual respect in economic development. In a world economy where jobs and wages often keep families apart, Karina’s experience is all the more remarkable because it enables her family to spend more time together. You can see Karina’s husband and children accompanying her to craft shows, helping her to set up, sell and then pack up her work once the day is finished.

Karina’s girls have even begun their own microenterprise project. In the spirit of Luna, their mother’s craft business, they offer handmade, cloth birds from a miniature wooden tree.
With 40 low-income artisans now working in Trillium’s nonprofit program, a driven community now dances within, around and away from the tangled web of poverty in Portland.

Each artisan, having committed to the three-year challenge to grow a sustainable craft business, stands upon a foundation of three principles: people, planet and profit, symbolized by Trillium’s three-pointed flower namesake. Fifty percent of everything made is from recycled or reclaimed materials and is priced to provide a fair wage to the maker, thereby honoring the person and planet with profit going to each.

Because of the EOI and programs like Trillium, artisans and crafters possess a means to have “more than a hobby,” says Knox. “They can pay the rent.”

Dave Sage is a Trillium artisan who transforms reclaimed and found wood into pragmatic art. In appreciation of the support and service offered by Trillium he says, “Trillium helps keep me connected to the rest of the world.”

While not offering a complete solution to the cause of poverty, the EOI program and Trillium offer impoverished individuals a means to climb the economic ladder. But viewing the person and their family as a dynamic structure deserving integrity and opportunity takes more than a program. It also requires an understanding that we are all only as respected as the opportunities we are given.

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For more information about the Economic Opportunity Initiative see http://pdc.us/eoi or call 503-823-3200. Visit Trillium Artisans at http://trilliumartisans.org or call 503-775-7993.

Aaron Lundstrom is a freelance writer and craft maker with a focus on truth, concept and bicycles. You can contact him at poveranews@grovestream.com or see his cooperative chess work and jewelry made from bicycle parts at http://poveranews.com