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Seeks to represent: District 2 (North and Northeast Portland)
Age: 42
Pronouns: She/they
Job: Programs director, The Shadow Project
Fun fact: She was voted “most likely to stand out in a crowd” in high school.
Jennifer Park runs the Shadow Project, a nonprofit that provides classroom assistance to children with learning difficulties, including autism, ADHD and dyslexia. In her campaign for City Council, she is similarly focused on helping people who are struggling. She’s gained the endorsement of progressive groups like Next Up Portland and Bernie PDX, and has qualified for Small Donor matching funds. Here’s what she would do if elected.
Why are you running for office?
I have dedicated my professional life to improving the way our institutions support our most vulnerable neighbors. Six years in working in supportive housing serving formerly chronically homeless adults with acute mental and behavioral health challenges, five years providing programs and training to public schools to support students with learning challenges and behavioral support needs. After over a decade of feeling like I’m addressing what are the symptoms of systemic problems I am running to address the issues that harm our most vulnerable neighbors from the institutional side as a community representative and advocate on the City Council.
What are your top three priorities if elected?
I approach my platform from two different lenses: the values I believe our council should embed in the way we govern—equitable community engagement, effective service networks, human centered policies—as well as the priorities I intend to champion for our community:
- Inclusive Housing Continuum: ensuring individual needs are being met and supportive from keeping people housed, to accessible reentry to housing, to affordable home ownership.
- Climate-Focused Policymaking: considering the climate implications of every policy and embedding sustainability and resiliency.
- Restructured Public Safety: fully funding Portland Street Response and Community Health Assess & Treat, looking at our Public Safety Service Area comprehensively.
How would you foster economic growth in Portland?
Ensuring people can afford to work, live, and play here is critical to economic revitalization. We need to reevaluate how we implement affordable housing to ensure it is actually affordable to the neighbors who need it, accessible to those who are looking for it, and plentiful to fully meet our needs. I would like us to implement a Renters’ Bill of Rights like the one I signed onto from Portland’s Democratic Socialists of America, and I’ll call out one particular value, the goal to link the cost of housing to the minimum wage in a way that ensures a balance of keeping housing costs from exacerbated inflation while also uplifting wages.
The city of Portland is facing budget cuts next year. Where would you cut money from the current city budget? Please point to a specific program, bureau or place.
Before I make proposed cuts I want to understand how an $8.2 billion budget isn’t meeting the needs of a city our size. Then I want to find the pockets of unspent or ineffectively spent money, for example the $5 million brought in from inclusionary housing fees that hasn’t been redistributed. Only after we’ve taken the time to understand the history of our budget inefficiencies can we then pivot to proposing where cuts will come from. This is going to be a big project for our new council, and frankly, one that the political wonk in me is very excited about.
Where is the city currently wasting money, or is using money in a way you think is inefficient or unnecessary? Where is the bloat?
One of the biggest budget mistakes we’re making is looking at it in the silos of our bureaus as they are broken up for commissioner oversight. This prevents us from seeing where we can support and work more efficiently. I’ll use our Public Safety Service Area as an example. The budget this spring was investing a huge amount of money into police over time, while underfunding Portland Street Response preventing 24/7 operations. If we look at the budget more holistically we can find the areas where we can bring individual components together to improve the whole.
What is the Joint Office of Homeless Services doing wrong, and what do you see as things that can right the ship?
Poor coordination between the city and the county to ensure the division has the support and resources it needs. They shouldn’t be forced to close a warming shelter while it’s still freezing outside; it shouldn’t be nearly four months since the grand opening of a veterans shelter and the doors still be closed. Ultimately they either lack support and/or leadership.
I want to add that it is critical that the council does not pull out of the relationship. We need to invest in fixing our failing systems, not starting from scratch every time we get hit with a challenge.
Is the tax rate in Multnomah County (with Portland Clean Energy Fund, Preschool for All and supportive housing services taxes) too high, or at an appropriate level? If too high, what do you suggest be done about it?
All of the referenced taxes are on high-income businesses and individuals. I would not be an advocate for making any tax changes until we’ve got a handle on why our current $8.2 billion budget isn’t meeting our needs. Additionally we have yet to fully and effectively implement the programs supported and funded by these taxes. There are still not enough Preschool for All spots for all preschool age children in Portland, and the supportive housing services tax is still very new and we have a lot more work to do to ensure people are supported in staying housed.
What is the first piece of policy you would bring to the City Council?
I would likely bring or support a proposal to stop the sweeps very quickly. Especially given that we will be taking office in the middle of winter. Until we can ensure that we know where services are that our houseless neighbors are in need of, for example shelter that supports the needs of an individual’s situation, we cannot continue to displace people from their only security. We can support cleanliness with rotating services, but we cannot continue to perpetuate the harm that is caused by sweeps.
Beyond policing, what measures would you take to improve public safety in Portland neighborhoods, and where would you get the money for it?
Operating Portland Street Response to 24/7 service is critical to improving public safety, emergency dispatch and response, and rebuilding public trust in emergency services which ultimately leads to an increase in accepting treatment and other supportive services. I would also like to see us ensure the budget for CHAT continues and increases. I want to see how much of this we can achieve through the restructuring of our Public Safety Service Area as a whole, improving our efficiency in managing our spending and our budget.
What experience can you point to that you believe would make you a prudent policymaker on the City Council?
The combination of over a decade of non-profit programs and operations experience combined with my executive master’s in public administration prepare me to be an analytic, evidence-based, pragmatic policymaker. Being able to assess challenges from a community-centered lens, evaluate relevant precedent and how it might serve or under support our unique needs, and drafting policy to include evaluation, accountability, and restructuring until our goals become our outcomes.