It is a Wednesday morning in February, and Cassandra
Garrison is at the Adult and Family Services office on
Southeast 39th Avenue and Powell Boulevard. She is determined
to save the world.
She starts at a table of women and young children, dealing
out her business cards as if it were a Vegas blackjack
table. "My name is Cassandra Garrison," she says. "If
you don't get what you want out of your appointments today,
what you want, you call me. I can help you."
Nearby is a man in his early 30s, battered hiking boots
on his feet, backpack by his side. He is recently homeless,
he says, and hasn't been eating. Garrison leans in close
to him. Her demeanor softens to give her the air of a
kindergarten teacher. She hands him a copy of Street
Roots, the newspaper sold on street corners by homeless
vendors, and opens it to a list of places he can get help.
"Here," she says, pointing to Sisters of the Road Cafe.
"You can get a hot meal here every day. And here," pointing
to another agency, "you can take a shower." She looks
carefully into his eyes to make sure he understands. "These
people can help you," she says.
As he mulls over the paper, Garrison approaches an emaciated
elderly man who is bent over by himself in a corner. "Why
are you here?" she asks gently, sitting next to him for
a moment. "To apply for food stamps?"
Meanwhile, the receptionist calls out the name of the
homeless man, who walks up to the desk, then turns away
baffled, his eyes searching the room for Garrison. "They
need an address," he says helplessly. "I don't have an
address."
Garrison marches to the front desk and demands to use
the phone at the desk to call JOIN, an agency for the
homeless that will collect mail for them.
"Here," she says to the counter worker, handing over
the phone. "You talk to them."
Her red Geo is waiting in the parking lot, packed full
of pamphlets, binders and file folders. She slides in
and begins punching numbers on her cell phone, returning
some of the 30 or so calls she receives every day. She
dials and talks, dials and talks--advising, cajoling and
screeching as she listens to people's battles with AFS.
"You call them back right now," she demands of one client.
"You tell them you talked to me."
Garrison pulls out of the AFS parking lot and drives
to Teresa McReynolds' house in Clackamas. Earlier, Garrison
helped McReynolds get emergency rent and auto insurance
money from AFS. Today, she will help the mother of two
fill out a grievance form against AFS.
"I wouldn't have anything if it wasn't for Cassandra,"
says McReynolds. "She has been an angel."
Sitting in McReynolds' sparse kitchen, Garrison dictates
the details of the complaint to the woman while answering
two more pages and again checking messages. One of the
messages is from a woman Garrison had met that morning.
The woman is crying--she says AFS refused to help her.
"Every day," Garrison mutters. "This happens every single
day."
This is the world of Cassandra Garrison, officially a
policy advocate for the Oregon Food Bank, unofficially
the most outrageous poverty warrior Portland has ever
seen. But you won't find her at the corner church benevolently
passing out food boxes. You'll find her shrieking at the
AFS counters, demanding justice. She is a shrill, self-righteous
finger-pointer, and anyone who has faced her righteous
rage will tell you, with an eye roll that belies the understatement,
that she is "difficult." If you don't know where your
next meal is coming from, however, she may indeed seem
like an angel.
Like all radicals, Garrison is a reflection of the time
in which she lives. Most of Oregon is enjoying unprecedented
abundance. Yet, in a shameful paradox, a growing number
of Oregonians cannot meet their most basic needs. According
to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report issued last
fall, nearly 6 percent of Oregon households suffer from
hunger, giving this state the dubious distinction of having
the highest rate in the country.
In Oregon, the agency responsible for stopping poverty
is Adult and Family Services, a $1.3 billion agency that
administers the state's cash-assistance program and the
Oregon Health Plan. It provides job-training services
and child-care money. It is also where people go to apply
for the federal food-stamp program.
In 1996 the role of AFS was turned upside down with the
passage of the federal welfare-reform act. Almost overnight,
AFS became as much an employment agency as a welfare center.
By many standards, the change has been positive. Welfare
reform has broken the cycle of dependence, and the state
welfare rolls have dropped 60 percent since 1994. Yet
there are signs that the impact of welfare reform has
been uneven, that not all of those who no longer receive
help are fully self-sufficient.
While the rest of us ruminate on the meanings of this
incongruity, Garrison lives it every day.
Lisa Stegner, a caseworker for Adult and Family Services,
says her colleagues dread showdowns with Garrison. Watching
her in a meeting is like watching a hurricane, she says.
"It's because she is so vocal and so incredibly brave.
But that's hard to take. People think, 'Oh God, Cassandra's
coming to this meeting,' and they brace themselves."
There is no better example of what Garrison faces than
these two statistics: Adult and Family Services reports
that food-stamp rolls have declined 19.2 percent over
the past three years. During the same period, demand on
the private, nonprofit Oregon Food Bank has increased
20 percent.
Jim Neely, deputy administrator at AFS, says part of
the food-stamp decline is intended.
"Congress intended to save $25 billion in five years
by eliminating certain groups and tightening requirements
for others," he says. "It should be no surprise to anyone
that food-stamp rolls have decreased." Under the Welfare
Reform Act, he points out, food-stamp benefits to illegal
residents were eliminated, and benefits to able-bodied
single people were drastically reduced.
Additionally, the federally established gross-income
cutoff point for food stamps has not kept up with the
cost of living. A family of three loses benefits at $1,500
per month. There are other restrictions that limit qualification.
Also, owning a car worth any more than $4,650--the value
of, say, a 1993 Plymouth Duster--pushes people off the
rolls. The car allotment has not increased substantially
since 1977. If it had kept up with inflation, the value
would be around $12,000 today.
As food-stamp rolls continue to decline, the Oregon Food
Bank is growing. A $27 million private charity supported
mostly by donations from the food industry, the Food Bank
distributes food boxes to 250 outlets in Oregon and Clark
County, Wash.
Command central for the Food Bank is a massive warehouse
on Riverside Drive in North Portland's industrial district.
That warehouse and a second on North Williams Avenue give
the organization 55,000 square feet for mountains of cardboard
boxes. They're big, but not big enough. Last year the
food bank distributed 460,000 boxes of donated food to
area food pantries statewide, a 14-percent increase over
the previous year. This week the Food Bank is going to
the state emergency board to ask for $2.35 million to
build a new warehouse that will allow it to increase capacity
nearly 25 percent.
"We're here to get food for hungry people, and we will
continue to do that," says Kim Thomas, policy director
at the Food Bank. "But the Food Bank was never intended
to meet 100 percent of people's food needs."
The demand on the food bank has expanded beyond just
food, however. It has become a one-stop referral center
for people who have been pushed off the welfare system.
In 1998, Garrison was hired by the Oregon Food Bank to
be one of three policy advocates, to reach out into the
low-income community to help people get both food boxes
and food stamps. Her boss, Kim Thomas, says she has taken
that charge and made it an explosion.
"She is fearless and has negotiated clients through the
entire system," Thomas says. "I don't know if that's a
direction we plotted at the food bank, but when I saw
that she was keeping people from being evicted, I wasn't
about to stop it."
Garrison, 42 and a single mother, works days at the Oregon
Food Bank and two nights a week taking calls for the Oregon
Human Rights Coalition, another welfare-rights group.
She trolls the city for those not taking advantage of
public services, going to places like Multnomah County's
community court looking for prostitutes and petty thieves
who may have turned to crime because they were too intimidated
by the state benefits system.
"They are always surprised when I call that anyone gives
a shit," she says, "because so few people do."
She takes calls from clients around the clock. She has
three voicemails, a cell phone and a pager. Clients who
phone her at home in the Brooklyn neighborhood will hear
a jungle cacophony in the background as her 12 birds,
six cats, one dog, two box tortoises, two rats and one
guinea pig call for her attention. She is a one-woman
humane society for both animals and people.
It's no surprise that Garrison takes her work personally.
A former welfare mom herself, she used state assistance
to support herself and her daughter while attending Portland
State University in the early 1990s.
"That's where I learned to demand what I got," she says.
"I lived this."
Now, she says, AFS, in ways both subtle and overt, is
keeping people off food stamps.
She rattles off a rapid-fire litany of complaints: that
AFS accepts new food-stamp applications for only a few
hours each morning, making it difficult for working people.
That receptionists pre-screen clients without the expertise
to do so. That offices split the caseloads by zip code,
so that someone living a few blocks from an office might
have to go to an AFS office miles away.
"We can cut AFS some slack for the problems that are
due to federal limitations," she says. "But what I'm seeing
is systemic problems that are keeping people from getting
help."
Jerry Burns, district manager for AFS in Multnomah County,
faces Garrison's wrath frequently. Recently she sent him
a box of whitewash because she says he was glossing over
one of her complaints about a client.
He says carefully, "She's critical of us. It's something
I expect. I respect her, and we have a very good relationship,
and I expect as long as the two of us are around we'll
have issues."
At the same time, Burns denies that his office is systematically
keeping people off food stamps.
"AFS is not denying food stamps to people who are eligible,"
he says. And yet, he admits that the morning intake hours
are difficult for working people to get to and that the
zip-code cutoffs are "ridiculous." Largely because of
complaints from Garrison and other advocates, the agency
is working to address the problems, he says.
Garrison snorts at what she sees as AFS's snail's pace.
She holds AFS to an impossibly high standard--her own.
"I can talk on the phone, work on the computer and help
whomever's sitting in front of me," she says. "Why can't
they do better there?"
Thomas, who is responsible for unleashing Garrison on
AFS, doesn't always agree with her harsh criticism. She
says AFS case managers, like everyone working with poverty
today, are besieged. Still, she says, things are better
today than they were two years ago, and she credits her
hot-headed employee.
"We're social-service workers," Thomas says. "We're trained
to be polite. But more change has happened in the [two]
years she's been here than in the past 10 years I've been
here. I have to think if she was polite and professional
like me, would we have the same results? Now, things are
rumbling."
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Willamette Week | originally
published February 23,
2000
