Holding keys to an apartment of his own only two months after entering a temporary housing program at Multnomah County’s Behavioral Health Resource Center, John is glowing over what he has accomplished.
“My goal is to have a place in 60 days,” John said in February 2025.
And by early March, the 55-year-old had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Northwest Portland with help from Do Good Multnomah, which steered him through the application process and even made sure he had furniture and furnishings.
John was experiencing a mental health crisis last December when he came to the Behavioral Health Resource Center, which provides a range of support services for people experiencing homelessness who also have symptoms of mental health and substance use disorders.
On the third floor, Do Good Multnomah manages 30 temporary shelter beds with a 30-day average stay, plus three crisis beds. On the fourth floor, Do Good Multnomah’s Bridge Housing Program provides 19 beds with an average stay of 90 days that helps serve as a transition to permanent housing.
John stayed six days in one of the crisis beds before moving through the temporary shelter and then the Bridge Housing Program.
“I was skeptical at first,” John says of the Behavioral Health Resource Center. “But I realized all the resources to make me a better person are right here.”
Dane Achalas, Do Good Multnomah’s program team manager, says the Bridge Housing Program has served 91 unique participants from July 24, 2024, through March 10, with 29 people moving out and into longer-term housing or shelter. These placements range from renting, moving in permanently with friends or family, to securing a tiny home or pod where they can stay as long as they need. Achalas says more participants have had other kinds of "positive exits," such as moving into a long-term care facility, substance use treatment, hotel or motel shelters, or short-term stays with friends and family.
Before John moved up to the fourth floor, Do Good Multnomah’s peer-led staff helped him replace critical personal documents — including identification and Social Security cards — and assigned him a case manager. John likens the approach to being cared for by a village.
“The resources are amazing. But it starts with staff and it starts with leadership,” he says, expressing gratitude, in particular for Achalas, who “took a chance on me,” and Mia Edera, who manages Do Good Multnomah’s clinical team, and ensured John received the medications he needed.
Still, his journey hasn’t been entirely smooth, John says, noting setbacks that included a couple of “breakdowns” the first week in February. He perseveres.
“I believe this place saved my life,” John says, adding that he had never been houseless until arriving in Portland in late fall 2024, returning to the city where he was born and raised after spending 20 years in Chicago.
“As soon as I came home, I had a mental health situation and I relapsed,” he says.
John’s situation is representative of the multi-faceted challenges experienced by many of the people the Behavioral Health Resource Center sees and serves each day, Achalas says. “Not everybody comes here ready or looking for housing.”
“In a lot of cases, we take people directly out of crisis. We talk a lot about reminding ourselves to embrace non-housing wins,” Achalas says, “because there’s a lot to be said for just getting somebody out of the elements, getting somebody fed, providing them a safe place to sleep, and to recover and reset themselves.”
John credits a staffer with Cascadia Health’s Project Respond Mobile Crisis Team for bringing him to the Behavioral Health Resource Center. The staffer had worked at the center previously and had crossed paths with John shortly after a relapse episode.
“He said, ‘I got a place for you,’” John recalls.
“I was like, ‘Okay God, you brought me here, so you gotta open the doors.’”
In high school, John says, he was a running back for Marshall High’s Minutemen. Two of his best buddies were athletes, too — one played football at Benson Tech, the other basketball at Grant. Both went on to play their sports at Division I universities.
But John says he took a different path, starting a gang in Portland. He now believes undiagnosed symptoms of mental illness helped contribute to that choice.
“When I look back on it, it was taboo to talk about mental health,” John says. “Nobody wanted to identify with it. This program allows you to open up about it.”
Now, with the gang life of his youth long behind him, John is on a different path, this time with an apartment of his own.
But in February, not yet knowing he’d feel the cool metal of a house key between his fingers just a month later, John was proceeding with the caution of feeling that nothing is guaranteed, until it is.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” he says. “Until I get a key, I’m going to keep using all my resources.”
