Nabil Zaghloul works every day to ensure the needs of his neighborhood in Northeast Portland are met.
As director of Bienestar de la Familia, a bicultural and bilingual Multnomah County social service hub in the Cully neighborhood, Zaghloul and his team provide a variety of direct services. Those include case management, behavioral health, and substance use assistance to predominantly Latinx, Somali and Ethiopian families in the area.
Zaghloul’s passion for helping people in need comes from a desire to improve the lives of those in his local community. “I’m a big believer in starting in the community where you are,” he says. “By supporting the families, we give them a network and a safety plan to focus on their children and their goals and I think that goes a long way. It helps in terms of economic mobility and plays a big role down the road.”
Zaghloul was chosen as winner of this year’s HILLTOP Public Official Award because of his continued devotion to the Cully neighborhood for more than 25 years. “Nabil’s work reflects his deep commitment to create awareness of those who request services from Bienestar de la Familia,” says Multnomah County Community Action Coordinator José Ibarra.
As a young child growing up in Morocco, Zaghloul’s family instilled the value of volunteering and working to help less fortunate members in their community.
Zaghloul remembers spending long hours constructing houses for homeless community members in North Africa. While constructing one of the houses, Zaghloul was struck with plywood. Despite being injured for a week, he returned to the house to finish its construction. “Sometimes it’s not easy, the work we do, it comes with risks. But at the end you really feel good about it because you made an impact regardless,” he says.
After living in Spain and other places in Europe, Zaghloul fell in love with Portland and moved in 1993.
When he first came to Portland, Zaghloul immediately immersed himself in the Cully neighborhood, working at the Hacienda Community Development Corporation (CDC) helping community members obtain driver's licenses and insurance. Zaghloul began working with the County in 1994 as a manager with the Department of Community Justice (DCJ).
Since 2012, Zaghoul has been working as the program manager of Bienestar de la Familia, and has helped connect and provide community members with food assistance and substance use and behavioral health wraparound services and food assistance.
He’s even helped clients pay their medical bills.
Zaghloul recently met a mother who had been diagnosed with cancer, but was unable to pay for treatment. Zaghloul and his team contacted La Clínica de Buena Salud, the County’s neighboring health center and helped create what he calls a “safety plan” to partly cover the costs of treatment and assist with housing and utilities.
And though he has received opportunities to pursue other fields in the County, Zaghloul says he always finds himself back in the Cully neighborhood actively serving their needs. “Working for the community is really what brings me a great deal of satisfaction at the end of the day,” he says.
Because of the program’s services, Zaghloul says forming relationships and proactively engaging with the community are key. “It’s all about engagement with the community and the clients every day to make sure that this is how we deliver services that are crucially specific to them,” he says.
The Bienestar team regularly visits community members in their homes and provide check-ins with families who have been previously helped.
“We have really in the last decade taken the program to the next level in terms of directly engaging with the community and changing the downstream strategies to upstream strategies, which means not staying in the office waiting for the community to come to us,” Zaghloul says.
Zaghloul says this approach, along with the dedication of his team, are what have made his program so successful. “I am very fortunate to be working with a wonderful team who are bicultural, bilingual, and speak the language,” Zaghloul says. “I’m proud to say that we’ve won the Chair Excellence Award, the County Cultural Diversity Award, and these are really whole team achievements.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, Zaghloul continued to work and even personally delivered food to families during the pandemic. “It was something that I felt was my responsibility,” he says.
As priorities in the Cully neighborhood changed with the pandemic, the services of Bienestar shifted as well to mainly food and rental assistance.
Because of the risk of spreading the virus, Bienestar employees and volunteers adjusted and found creative ways to perform services while social distancing. “There were some cases where clients had willingly disclosed that they had COVID-19,” he says. “[So] I would deliver the food and leave it at their doorsteps.”
And though Zaghloul’s work has made a tremendous impact in the Cully neighborhood during his career and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, he says that none of it would be possible without the help of his team. “I am just one person working within a big team with wonderful volunteers, wonderful providers, wonderful staff who contribute to the work we do. So I feel like [the award] shouldn’t be about one person, it should be about the team that made this happen.”