Israel Bayer grows roots in Portland

Street Roots’ executive director talks about his non-traditional path to journalism

Story and photo by Nikki Jardin

The Portland Upside
January 2010

Israel Bayer “wandered aimlessly” as a young adult, eventually finding his passion and calling in poetry and journalism.

The Street Roots office on Northwest 2nd and Couch is surprisingly quiet. Outside, the skies are clear but the wind is bitter cold. Israel Bayer pokes his head up and waves from behind his desk where he is finishing a phone call. After a moment he comes out and offers a chair at the large table laden with snacks for the 70 vendors who make up the distribution team for the paper. Street Roots is celebrating its tenth year as a nonprofit newspaper, no small feat for any organization that relies on donations and hard-working volunteers.

Israel, imposing in stature, offers me coffee and a smile. He has a kind and welcoming face. He has been with the organization for the majority of its ten years, leaving only briefly a few years ago to head up the Seattle street paper, Real Change. Starting as the poetry editor back when Street Roots was a small collective, he is now the executive director and the bi-monthly has a circulation of nearly 25,000.

Israel didn’t take the traditional track into journalism. Raised in a working class family in an industrial river town “where factories meet the farmland,” he saw economic devastation firsthand. In the nineties, all along the Mississippi River, job loss escalated as work moved overseas. His hometown, a vibrant city built on munitions factories, glass works and a shipping lane for corn and soybeans, withered.

“Unions were being busted, jobs were leaving, and it was becoming an economically depressed area. There was a lot of hopelessness.”

Quitting high school, Israel took up life on the road, traveling the country, living in a biker compound, following the Grateful Dead and experiencing “different unique situations. Some good, some not so good. I was wandering aimlessly, working here and there, mostly as a convenience store clerk.”

During many mini-mart graveyard shifts Israel got a different kind of education.

“I was witnessing urban poverty during those shifts and felt that was my first taste of social work. You see a lot of despair during those hours.”

His travels brought him to Denver, Colorado, where he began to write poetry, inspired by what he was seeing at work. He began reading works from other poets, as well.

“I was into Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski, basically all the beat poets. I was also reading travel literature and it occurred to me somewhere along the line that I was living a unique life and that I could actually write this stuff down.”

Israel began attending poetry readings and working more diligently on his craft.

Traveling with a group of “artists and freaks,” he set out west, arriving in Portland in 1996. He went back to work in the convenience store trade but eventually got a job at the William Temple House Thrift store, where he was promoted and began learning the administration skills that would become valuable in his current position.

In 1998 while walking downtown Israel passed by the Street Roots office, then located on Southwest 12th and Morrison. He walked in and immediately felt at home.
“I felt like these people were cut from my cloth.”

He entered a poem for publication and soon began volunteering and working with other street poets. They began what Israel calls, “a collective atmosphere,” and he began to feel a sense of community.

“I wasn’t hearing anything until I started going out with these drunkards and these homeless guys. I hadn’t heard anything with that kind of grit before. This was different.

“And then the WTO [World Trade Organization protest in Seattle] happened and I went through my own personal revolution. I hadn’t been a part of political activism, nothing to speak of. I had never connected the poverty I had seen throughout my life with politics. I mean, I knew about class dynamics, I lived it, but I didn’t understand the interconnectedness of it all. And then I was accidentally arrested and spent about a week in jail with these union guys and hard-core activists and my eyes just popped wide open. Then I got pissed.”

Israel became active in the anarchist scene and found his way to journalism when he realized that writing poetry wasn’t doing enough to describe what he was witnessing and learning.

“I just started putting two and two together and I wanted it to be my job to write these people’s stories. And so I started learning. I read everything I could get my hands on, just to learn how writers were putting things together. I mean, I dropped out of high school. I had ninth grade English skills. I didn’t know how to write. I started learning from everyone around me at Street Roots and through other organizations. I just started soaking them up like a sponge.”

While Israel grew as a journalist, Street Roots grew as well. The circulation increased and the stories became more political and hard-hitting. The grass-roots publication began reporting the stories, both local and national, that were affecting people experiencing poverty, homelessness and drug addiction.

For Israel, talking about Street Roots and the stories it covers is a point of pride and passion. The organization, started as a collective, has had to adjust and learn to straddle the fine line between being a direct service nonprofit and a news source that sometimes bites the hands that feeds it.

“The better our journalism gets, the more serious our topics get and sometimes we get a little pushback from it. That just shows me we’re doing our jobs,” Israel says with a wry smile. “We don’t run in the usual journalism cliques and sometimes that gets tricky. We’re a nonprofit, and sometimes we pay for that.”

“But, it’s important that we cover issues that are affecting people’s lives. We’re going to take difficult topics around homelessness and poverty and politics and we’re going to go deeper. We want to allow people to tell their stories, in laymen’s terms, so that everyone can understand them. We take our job seriously. I think sometimes people expect less from a street paper. We expect more. There’s this stereotype, even in the messaging around homelessness that people are used to hearing and we try to shatter that with the type of news we’re publishing.”

Talking about the circuitous route his life has taken, Israel shakes his head and smiles, his voice softening.

“There are a lot of peaks and valleys in the day in and day out. I’m learning how to pace myself and sometimes I feel jaded. I’ve watched waves of people come and go. And it gets harder for me to buy into the bullshit around the effects of the streets and homelessness and then bounce back into an administrative role of running a nonprofit and then do my investigative journalism. But I knew, back after the WTO that I wanted to tell these stories. It was a calling. You know, back then, I had been whiskey-bent and hell-bound for so long that when I started this type of work, I finally felt like I had some meaning in my life. To tell these stories and to help other people find their voice. I love it, even when it’s hard.”

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Visit Street Roots online at http://streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657.

Nikki Jardin has written for The Oregonian, Street Roots and the recently launched id Magazine. She lives in Southeast Portland and is continually impressed and inspired by the creativity and gumption of her neighbors and friends.