Skip to main content
Like the song says, it’s hard to be a saint in the city.
Especially this city. The problems of Portland are so acute and threaded so deeply into our streetscape that fixing them feels like one of those repair projects you stuff into the garage until next year. The pain of others—yes, we’re talking about homelessness and addiction, but also people dying in the heat caused by climate change, or a generation mangled by getting locked out of school—can be overwhelming to contemplate too closely. It’s a relief to look away.
Goodness is a lot of work, for slim rewards, and it isn’t exactly in vogue. “Compassion fatigue” is a phrase people started throwing around midway through the pandemic shutdowns—and it was clear that, for some of us, this indifference was a kind of freedom.
But this isn’t a new phenomenon. Music critic Lester Bangs wrote about it in 1979, in an essay that considered how his idealistic generation stopped caring: “So you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die.”
What you’ll find in the following pages is an opportunity to live a little.
We know the appetite is there. As frequently as any other request, WW readers ask us to write more often about ways that they can help. Each holiday season, you give millions to nonprofits through our Give!Guide. But you also ask if there are ways to give something other than money.
There are. You could open a food pantry on your front lawn. You could get out the vote in the counties that matter most in the presidential election. You could pile saplings on your bicycle and wheel them to heat islands or fill a Mason jar with shampoo rather than tossing another plastic bottle in the trash. Or you could visit Portland’s zombie mall to send foster kids to school with a fresh wardrobe.
In other words, there are countless things you can do to make this city a little better. We selected 25. All you have to do is choose one. —Aaron Mesh, WW managing editor