Rising to Our Humanity
Portland Magazine
Alumni
October 21, 2020
Kaia Sand ’94, executive director of
Street Roots, the award-winning weekly social justice newspaper, admits she’s an “all-in” kind of a person. A poet and a journalist, she looks at the poet-physician William Carlos Williams as an example— someone who did house visits for patients and wrote poetry on prescription pads. Since 2017 the people that Sand has walked with most closely in her writing are Portland’s community of individuals living with homelessness. With the pandemic, her organization has had to respond quickly and with creativity. The vendors of the newspaper now go through COVID-19 public health training and serve as public health ambassadors to others in the homeless community.
Street Roots offices had to find a way to get government relief checks safely to individuals, and her vendors can also now accept cashless payment through Venmo. Then came the wildfires. “What a horrible choice we face,” she wrote in a recent editorial. “[T]he healthiest place to be in COVID-19 is outside, and the healthiest place in these fires and smoke? Indoors.” (
Street Roots suspended the newspaper for a week so that vendors could stay safe from hazardous air.) But Sand presses onward, and in spite of these challenges says she still loves how people—their tenacity, their compassion—never cease to surprise her. “As even more people are suffering now in these tragic months of pandemic and fires, it is a challenge for all of us to rise to our humanity.” Thank you for naming that challenge, Kaia, and thank you for your advocacy.
