WW welcomes letters to the editor via mail, e-mail or fax. Letters must be signed by the author and include the author's street address and phone number for verification. Preference will be given to letters of 250 words or less.   CALL US COMMITTED Your paper seems to have generated lots of interest in name-calling over these past weeks [Letters, May-June 2000; "Assault on Tract 86," May 24, 2000]. It is particularly interesting that race and class issues have erupted on your pages simultaneously. Do you suppose that it's time to take a look at the basic idea that words do hurt, and when someone says "Ouch," we should get off their toes? Since so many have been creative in name-calling, we would like to help along this discussion by sharing some names that we in outer Southeast Portland call ourselves. About nine years ago, some of us started working together because we cared about helping students succeed in school. Neighbors, schools, agencies and organizations joined together, so we called ourselves a Caring Community. Now the Outer Southeast Caring Community involves over 200 locally connected people who work together to help our kids succeed. At about that same time, some of us noticed a need to revitalize housing and economic conditions in the area, so we called ourselves ROSE: Revitalize Outer Southeast. Now ROSE CDC has blossomed to provide housing and economic opportunities in the area. This was going along pretty well, and then some of us started thinking about how we could help to develop pride in ourselves and in our neighborhood. So we called ourselves the Neighbor-hood Pride Team. NPT has created a Computer Skills Center and spawned Trillium Artisans to support earth-friendly neighborhood entrepreneurs. These are places to meet others, learn and grow, right in our neighborhood. Those of us at Kelly Elem-entary School started thinking about a home to build community, so we rented a modest ranch house right across from the school and we called ourselves Kelly Community House. Now neighbors can meet and learn in a homey atmosphere where all are welcomed, and a flourishing preschool program is getting kids off to a good start for school success. We started thinking about how important jobs are to families, so we got busy developing a new kind of one-stop employment center, and we called ourselves SE Works. Each year, hundreds of jobseekers meet online recruiters, develop job search skills and take advantage of language-specific services, youth services and adult training opportunities. We got together to look at how we could better serve children, families and communities through programs extending the school day and during the weekend. We called ourselves the Outer Southeast Coalition for School Communities and set about creating a "seamless" day for children and families through our schools. This was the basis for building SUN Sites (Schools Uniting Neighborhoods) at Kelly, Lane and Woodmere. Our work is helping to foster the growth of SUN throughout Multnomah County. We are a community, and we are learning to do everything under the SUN to assist and support our families. These stories represent only a part of the thousands of hours put in by hundreds of us. We didn't even get to a slew of other efforts that create still more positive names for ourselves. We also didn't get to a discussion of the alienating effects of poverty, and how easy it is to place blame and shame upon people we perceive to be different from ourselves. Slurs of any kind discount efforts, discount people and entrench the alienation already felt by those living in poverty. By working together in outer Southeast Portland, we have harnessed an explosion of positive assets with work that is recognized nationwide. We have been pretty busy thinking up good names for ourselves, so please lay off the negative slurs and join us instead in growth and celebration. Anne Peterson, Erik Sten, Ginny Peckinpaugh, Judith Brown, Heidi Soderberg, Karen Belsey, Laura Knechtges, Lin Vannest, Madeleine Mader, Maren Walta, Mike Peterson, Mary Davis, Molly Cooley, Nancy Yuill, Nick Sauvie, Phyllis Shelton, Peggy Shultz, Robert Earhart, Samantha Osborne, Susan Cox, Susan I. Stoltenberg, Tami Perkins, Vonnie Condon Outer Southeast Caring Community YOUR MESSAGE HERE I commend Katz and Hales and others with guts to stand up to AK Media ("When Billboards Attack," WW, June 21, 2000). All outdoor advertising is offensive in that it violates our right to choose whether or not we will be assaulted by a commercial pitch. We can choose to listen only to KBPS, view only public television, and discard junk mail and most other print media before reading, but we can't ignore billboards or high-rise painted wall ads, especially while driving. We are selling our souls when we put ads on Tri-Met buses and allow visual obscenities like billboards and electric signs. Architects and their clients must comply with reams of design guidelines and submit to nitpicking design reviews, while next to their projects very ugly billboards or painted wall signs 70 feet high are OK! How is it that we can control building design but billboard controls are often in this state deemed unconstitutional? It is outrageous that a judge ordered the city to pay AK Media nearly $1 million for "damages" and legal fees. And it is disgusting and sad that seemingly the only way to limit billboards and wall signs is to also prohibit artistic murals of any appreciable size. Other states have prohibited or greatly limited billboards. If our "quirky constitution" (WW words) is the problem, let's change the constitution to get the quirks out! Gary Michael Milwaukie