Bringing music to the community

Choir director encourages self-esteem, healing and support through singing

By Nick O’Connor
The Portland Upside
November 2009

Photo by Shannon Batts

Crystal Meneses’ childhood love of singing has transformed into a passion for using music to bridge generational gaps.

In the small auditorium at Ethos Music Center in North Portland, I’m listening to a choir of about 25 boys and girls sing “To Zion,” Lauryn Hill’s powerful love anthem to her unborn son. This recital is the culmination of a weeklong summer camp which my 8-year-old daughter attended, and I’ve heard her practicing the song around the house. But as 11-year-old Ella’s lead vocals soar, backed by the full choir’s angelic chanting of the phrase “marching, marching to Zion,” I’m struck more deeply than I know. Good gravy, I’m actually crying.

I return to interview the dynamic 27-year-old Ethos choir director, Crystal Meneses. At Ethos, Crystal leads both a kids’ choir and The Portland Women’s Intergenerational Choir. In its third year, the Intergenerational Choir has grown from about 15 singers last year, to more than 40 now.

How does Crystal feel about the large turnout?

“I was overwhelmed... My vision is being realized.”

I visit practice sessions of both choirs. Voice warm-ups are brief and the material challenging and diverse, ranging from an Italian aria to a medley from “Phantom of the Opera.” Crystal encourages boldness by telling her singers to “make mistakes loudly.”

For the interview Crystal is cheerful, happy to discuss her life in music. She speaks quickly, imparting a lot of information. Occasionally, she lets loose a big laugh.

“I’ve always been in a choir,” Crystal says. “I started in third grade.”

She began with the Greater Gresham Kids Kwire (later called the Mt. Hood Youth Choir), directed by Dr. Gayleen Martin. Continuing throughout her school days, Crystal sang with the Portland Symphonic Girlchoir, Sam Barlow High School’s Barlow Sound, and both the Portland State and Marylhurst University choirs.

At age 17 Crystal’s musical path took a mystical turn.

“We went to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, to the ICU. I had always been shy about singing solos. But that day, something inside me said, ‘You can sing by yourself.’ It had never occurred to me to do that. And then a mom pulled me into a room and asked me to sing for her daughter, Karly, which I did. I thought she was sleeping peacefully.”

Crystal sang “Silent Night” and “Some Children See Him,” which she was getting ready to perform at The Grotto. Karly sat up and smiled at her.

“Later I found out she was in a coma and woke up.”

The Oregonian’s Margie Boulé wrote a story about the experience and asked if Crystal had ever heard of music therapy.

“That was the beginning,” Crystal says.

Crystal went on to study music therapy at Marylhurst University. Although she expects to receive her degree along with a teaching certificate by the end of this year, it will not be in music therapy, but a major she made up herself.

“I decided to switch my degree to ‘Music In The Community,’” she says. “I had a great mentor at Marylhurst named Christine Korb. She inspired me to research intergenerational community projects.”

Crystal further explains, “In my school practicum, I was leading sing-a-longs with young choir students and in wise-elder communities.”

I stop her to clarify the term “wise-elder community.” She and some fellow Marylhurst students didn’t like the terms “nursing homes” or “assisted-living communities,” so they chose something better.

She adds, “I’m Filipino and we don’t have old folks homes there. My dad freaked out when he saw the wise-elder homes.”

Crystal was directing the choir at Grout Elementary and at the same time, visiting the Odd Fellows’ wise-elder home directly across the street.

“I had been doing research on intergenerational studies, the attitudes of generations towards each other. I realized the dissonance. So I brought the kids over to the wise-elder home. The kids and adults wouldn’t look at each other, or talk. The kids were afraid to sit next to the elders or shake hands.”

For the first time she pauses. Her tone turns serious.

“Susan (the principal) and I got a grant together to fund my intergenerational project. I researched what to ask to get them talking and writing. What I did was create an intervention called ‘scripted musical dialogue,’ in which they made postcards to talk about music, art and everything. For example, I had students draw pictures of what they would look like when they got older.”

Both groups wrote musical postcards for five months, and Crystal hand delivered them to their “musical pals,” walking back and forth across the street like a letter carrier.

“Things happened,” she says. “Some musical pals passed away. Kids talked about their parents not being together. I was delivering mail and putting together a sing-along program that would engage both groups. I used songs from the wise-elders’ childhoods like ‘Daisy Daisy,’ and patriotic songs. The kids loved these songs. At the second sing-along, they were holding each other’s hands and laughing. I couldn’t get them to stop talking.”

Looking for a space for an intergenerational choir, Crystal came to Ethos in 2001.

“They said ‘Yeah, here’s a space, we’ll work with you, go ahead.’ Three people showed up to the first practice. Then one of them passed away and another one left, I think because a family member was sick.”

She had to put the intergenerational choir on the back burner.

“Then,” she shrugs, acknowledging fate, “I really started teaching.”

Without a credential, and while a part-time student at Marylhurst, Crystal has been teaching—often one-on-one—for almost a decade at elder homes, hospitals and treatment centers, and in the public schools.

“I do four to five schools a year. Sometimes they can only offer you an hour a week. Or I’m artist in residence for one or two full days, rotating all the kids through, maybe 25 minutes or a half hour per kid.”

For many children, she notes, this is the extent of their music education.

“As I did more music in the community, I realized it’s what I want to do. That’s where my heart and core are. My teaching style is influenced by my music therapy education. The skill crossover has been easy for me, and has given me a useful edge.”

And Crystal has benefited from the support of her family. Crystal’s mother and grandmother were teachers. And the musical steps of her brother Vincent have closely matched her own. Vincent is a performer, songwriting teacher and social entrepreneur. He opened a nonprofit called Organized Sound on the coast this year.

Yet Crystal’s natural talent for spreading self-esteem and support through singing is all her own.

“When you sing, your insecurities are right in front of you. You can look around and get instant support. I’ve always just wanted a safe place where women can sing, which this is about, not competition or being perfect.”

With fond memories of traveling internationally with her choir as a girl, Crystal wants the intergenerational choir to tour. And she would like to hold an intergenerational choir camp.

“I have a vision of 100 women of all ages singing together. I want to do outreach with the choir, want it to be a mentoring program, a group to be with and be part of.”

And she will do it. When I ask about obstacles, Crystal says simply, “I don’t let anything get in my way. Sometimes it just takes more time.”

_____


Ethos Music Center is a nonprofit organization that brings music and music education to underserved youth. Visit them online at www.ethos.org

Nick O’Connor contributes to Free Fun Guides at www.freefunguides.com He has rejected the motto “Keeping Weird and Just Doing It In The Rose City That Works.”

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Community Organizing 101 with MACG

By Nick O’Connor
The Portland Upside
August 2009

MACG participants, left to right, Nick O’Connor, Muriel Wentzien and Rev. Bill Gates put their leadership training to work when they lobbied at the Oregon state capitol in April. (photo provided by Nick O'Connor)

On a warm Wednesday evening I’m listening to Christi, a young mother of two boys, whom I’ve just met. She tells me about the icy Portland winter her family moved into a camper parked on the street while their house was being remodeled. When a promised bank loan failed to materialize, the contractor wouldn’t agree to new payment terms and walked off the job, leaving the house without plumbing or heat. The camper became the family’s bedroom.
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In turn, I tell Christi about my struggle with unemployment and the looming foreclosure on my family’s home mortgage.

We’re sharing these stories as part of an intensive 12-hour, four-week training, called Leadership Institute for Public Life, sponsored by The Metropolitan Alliance for the Common Good (MACG).

MACG describes itself as “broad-based,” and indeed, draws members from a wide range of backgrounds. We’ve gathered in Gladstone at the Operating Engineers 701 Union Hall with 25 others from churches, synagogues, labor unions and community service organizations. We’re here to learn the elementary skills of community organizing.

According to John Schwiebert, pastor at Metanoia Peace Church, “A primary task of broad-based organizing is to dis-organize the cultural isolation that has turned us into little more than consumers. We get people to talk to each other at some meaningful depth, about their pain, pressures, and unrealized dreams.”

Good idea. But how?

MACG’s basic tool is the “relational meeting” or “one-to-one,” the kind of thing Christi and I are practicing. It’s a heart-to-heart telling of personal stories, exactly the kind of honest talk that happens in well-functioning families and between trusted friends. In this setting we’re doing it as concerned citizens. We want to unearth common pressures and problems so we can face them together, publicly, politically, and most important, powerfully.

One of MACG’s member organizations is Phoenix Rising Transitions, a successful prison-to-community program. Phoenix has developed a “relational culture” that forges bonds between prisoners and community leaders.

Harry Olsen, a leader in MACG and founder of Phoenix, says, “When I got out in 1991, there was nothing like a prison-to-community transition program in Portland. I’d attended the Native American Sweat Lodge, led by a volunteer, at Oregon State Prison. I called him the day I got out and that saved my life. Still, I longed for social connection. I searched for that link for others, too. In the Lodge I envisioned Phoenix, an organization of and for people that were in and had been to prison. In 1999, I found MACG. Its freethinking leaders answered my prayer. No longer need parolees starve for normal human and social connections. No longer need they exist as outcasts, pariahs without an avenue to approach, to participate in community.”

Another Phoenix member, Willy Smith, tells his story.

“Volunteers from Phoenix and MACG came to the prison to attend and facilitate classes. These classes gave me a new beginning and taught me leadership skills that I immediately began to use upon my release. The support and mentorship gained through these gave me strength to believe in myself enough that at the age of 54 I returned to college. I’m now in my second year at PCC with a 4.0 GPA, a member of Phi Theta Kappa honor society, and just received Student of the Year in the Alcohol & Drug Counselor program.”

One MACG credo, embodied by Phoenix, is that leadership is not a single inborn trait, like eye color, bred only in peppy college kids running Student Council or shrewd and driven entrepreneurs. It turns out there are practices and strategies, like the relational meeting, available to the average person. Such strategies create a context for leaders to emerge.

Practices developed in the 1930’s based on the research of University of Chicago sociologist Saul Alinsky, brought together groups as diverse as labor unions, the Catholic Church, ethnic minorities, business owners and government. Eventually the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) arose, an international umbrella entity that now has 59 affiliates. As a budding community organizer, I learn I’ve joined a lineage of thousands of IAF trainees who have included such luminaries as United Farmworkers founders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, as well as Barack Obama.

At the Gladstone Union Hall we get plenty of theory and history under our belts, yet for three weeks there’s scant mention of MACG’s current role in the political arena. More than one participant asks what MACG is doing in the real world right now.

Mike, a labor organizer, likes the training but I can tell it all seems a little soft to him. He’s used to hardball negotiations over contract terms and wages and it’s not clear how relational meetings will translate to the union setting. During the workshop’s last night, we hear more details about MACG’s political actions.

One story catches my attention.

Lois Jordahl, MACG leader with Redeemer Lutheran Church, tells how a recent MACG action cleaned up a meth lab in her neighborhood. Police had busted the meth house in the glare of TV cameras, yet the boarded-up house languished, a contaminated eyesore. Lois notified her Redeemer “core team,” a small group of leaders acting as a liaison with MACG.

“[My team] met with neighbors, city officials, bureaucrats, housing inspectors who told us they couldn’t do anything under the current laws and ordinances. We invited recovering addicts from Recovery Association Project to join with us, and several did, including a former meth cook. Folks from labor got involved. We met individually with City Council members. We were instrumental in writing a resolution that allows the city to force cleanup even when the owners are uncooperative, and provides funding methods for cooperative owners who can’t pay the cost of decontamination.”

Bottom line, the house was cleaned up.

Toward the end of our last meeting, we try an exercise at odds with the familiar talking heads format. We’re asked to figure out how to rearrange a stack of chairs to represent “power over” and another to represent “power among.” Our group of a dozen sits around a table, uncertain how to do this. There’s disagreement as people talk out their own concepts. Discussion stalls and we’re struggling for a handle, when Christi stands up.

“Let’s do the best we can. We want a tall pile over here, right? And a circle for the ‘power among’?”

Christi’s decisive move breaks the deadlock and provides a powerful demonstration of true leadership. In no time we’ve got a teetering hierarchy of metal and plastic—“power over,” and next to it we’re sitting in a circle—“power among.”

Our final activity is to declare our next steps. Some of us aim to establish or strengthen core teams at our institutions. Others, like me, promise more one-to-one meetings. Everyone pledges something. As we leave, the night air is refreshingly cool. Organizing for power? We can do it!

_____

For more information about community organizing, visit the following websites: www.macg.org, www.rap-nw.org & www.phoenix-rising-transitions.org

Nick O’Connor contributes to Free Fun Guides at www.freefunguides.com He has rejected the motto “Keeping Weird and Just Doing It In the Rose City That Works.”

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Tony Fuentes puts heart into business and community

By Nick O’Connor
The Portland Upside
June 2009

Tony Fuentes and son Gael, one of his main inspirations for community activism. (Photo provided by Tony Fuentes)

In 2004 while scouring the city for ways to eke further value from our daughter’s used clothes, my wife, Shannon, walked into Milagros, “a boutique for little miracles and their mamas.” Besides new stuff, Milagros sells clothes on consignment. Shannon became a regular consignor.

The storefront is located on NE 30th Avenue just south of Killingsworth, a business corner known as Fox Chase. Though modest in size, Milagros feels spacious thanks to a high ceiling, good light and a peaceful, welcoming vibe. When I first met owner Tony Fuentes there, I must have been fooled by his flowing hippie locks and self-effacing demeanor. I assumed the store—which he operates with his wife, Jennifer—defines his life.

Soon, though, I was seeing Fuentes’ name and face all over town—creator of the Portland International Short Short Film Festival (now the 10 or Less Festival); Concordia Neighborhood Association board member; contributor to the blog BikePortland.org; leader of the Keep Colwood Green! Coalition—just for starters.

Fuentes, much like Milagros, radiates a friendly, warm presence. So I was happy when he agreed to an interview. Waiting for me at the Cup and Saucer Cafe across the street from his shop, he sat ignoring a cup of herbal tea.

I asked how Milagros evolved.

“I was working freelance, doing both filmmaking and management consulting. Jennifer was being a parent. We had talked about establishing a family-friendly bookstore or coffee shop, but when we became parents our world changed. Our daughter Mila, and now our boy, Gael—they are our living, breathing investment in the future. Thanks to them, the desire to make things better has become genuine to us. Environmentalism, supporting community and building community: those three things define what we do at Milagros.”

He connects the dots, pointing out that the shop is small but from the beginning has had a play area and a room adjacent to the sales area set aside for community events and classes where parents and neighbors can connect.

Supporting local artists and selling handmade crafts have been essential aspects of the business because, Fuentes says, “helping people help themselves by creating and selling things locally mattered to us.”

In selecting products, Fuentes holds Milagros to high standards.

“Everything is sweatshop-free, environmentally and socially friendly. So people know the products they walk out with are beneficial not only to themselves but to the larger community.

“One of the hardest things on the business side has been keeping faith that our values and decision-making are important to others. This commitment has meant finding and supporting local suppliers and foregoing hot products when the country of origin or overall environment did not feel comfortable.”

Fuentes believes that people want to make right choices and do the right thing, but often are missing necessary information.

“When I explain, ‘Here’s why we’re not carrying X,’ I see the light bulb go on.”

Fuentes explains how the store has been a springboard for his and Jennifer’s political activism. He mentions their projects helping small businesses and families, protecting open space in the Cully neighborhood, and enhancing livability in Concordia.

“It’s been exciting and sometimes daunting. People look to us as community leaders, the city asks us to join various initiatives. It’s interesting because we didn’t walk into this with the goal of being leaders or activists.”

In passing, Fuentes references past occupations. He’s made films, run a record label and distribution company, worked as a rock climber with Outward Bound as well as been a self-employed guide.

As he sits back sipping tea I wonder how such an apparently laid back person has done so many things and how, given the workload of a job, a business, and a family, he manages to flourish.
As if reading my mind, he says, “On some level, doing all these things has allowed me to build a sense of optimism and resiliency.”

When I ask Fuentes for a take on the economic future, he immediately advocates for the virtues of entrepreneurship and small business.

“In the recent past . . . most jobs created to pull out of downturns were created by firms with five or fewer employees. In Portland, 75 percent of the jobs are in small businesses. Investing in that diversity, rather than investing in a few big winners, promotes resilience. I want to see political leaders focused on the real value in growing entrepreneurship.”

“When you work in a small business you know everyone you work with and what they do, have a broad view of business, and usually have more opportunity to expand your skills and for mentorship. Others have more opportunity to know what you can do. Anyone who works at our shop could start their own shop, after working there for a year.”

Fuentes is also concerned about education, Portland’s high dropout rate and the poverty that adds to it. Not surprisingly he’d like to see a youth entrepreneurship training program that works with local businesses like Milagros, where youth could learn management training and what it takes to run a business.

Business as an arena that brings students into the real world is clearly one of Fuentes’ passions, and he has more to say about it. But an hour has passed and he has to leave for his part-time job as a technical writer/consultant at Tri-Met—yet another item on the slate of things he does “on the side.”

_____

Nick O’Connor contributes to Free Fun Guides [www.freefunguides.com]. He has rejected the motto “Keeping Weird and Just Doing It In the Rose City That Works.”

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