It’s 27 degrees on a weekday morning in January 2025.
A white van staffed by the Mental Health & Addiction Association of Oregon is parked on a tent-lined gravel lot in where Old Town meets the Pearl, serving as a beacon — and coffee dispenser — for participants like Kenyatta and other pre-dawn risers.
After standing in line, Kenyatta comes away not only with coffee but also with a ticket that will get him a shower and access to other peer-led services at Multnomah County's nearby Behavioral Health Resource Center, opening just 30 minutes later at 8 a.m.
As Kenyatta walks his bike a few blocks to the center, he describes usual routine of coping with freezing temperatures overnight. He doesn’t sleep much.
“You do certain drugs, and it keeps you warm,”he says. He says he knows about warming shelters that are open on the coldest nights, “but you have to be there at 7:30 (p.m.), blah, blah, blah. All these stipulations.”
“I’m a recovering drug addict trying to find my way. I just recently relapsed. I need to get that under control.”
Since opening in December 2022, the Behavioral Health Resource Center has served — especially for people struggling with mental health and substance use disorders — as a welcome landing pad of sorts: a place to reassess, reset, revive, or simply to recover.
The Mental Health & Addiction Association of Oregon operates a day center on the center’s first two floors, providing shower and laundry facilities, phone charging outlets, access to computers and mailboxes, and day-use lockers, among other needs.
Maranda Grimaldi, the agency’s senior program and operations director at the center, has been there from the start and remembers the growing pains.
“Our incident levels were really high,” she says, noting that it was not uncommon for people to show up at the day center at 8 a.m. and stay all the way until its 8 p.m. close and not seek any of the available services or resources.
That changed in September 2023, when the agency worked with the County Health Department to dramatically overhaul the way participants engaged with the day center. To address queuing and to help more people move through the center over the course of a day, a Referral Van began seven-day-a-week operations, first at N.W. Glisan Street and Sixth Avenue and now at N.W. Glisan and Broadway.
Tickets from the van, limiting people to certain periods of the day, meant fewer people would be competing for amenities at the same time. That turnover also freed up space for others to use the center, while preventing people from gathering outside the Center and causing conflicts with some neighbors.
The impact was immediate, Grimaldi says, recalling, for example, the shift in one person’s day-to-day routine of sitting in the same place open-to-close and charging a phone at a nearby electrical outlet.
“When we implemented the tickets, he wasn’t afraid of losing that chair or that plug-in to charge his device,” she says. “So he was taking showers. He was working with peer support and building those connections.”
Check-ins at the van run from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., dispensing tickets for services at the Behavioral Health Resource Center for one of four three-hour periods in a day: 8 a.m., 11 a.m., 2 p.m., or 5 p.m. The participant provides their preferred name while at the van, and a photo is taken and entered into an information log for Behavioral Health Resource Center staff.
After entering the gate at Behavioral Health Resource Center, Grimaldi says, the ticket holder is checked in by a peer support specialist, who asks whether there are safety items or weapons that need storage while there. Staff asks about basic services needed, such as showers, laundry, computer access.
“In our experience, meeting people's basic needs … opens a door to conversation and learning more about what the individual needs or wants,” Grimaldi says.
Over the last week in January, when Kenyatta visited for the first time, the intake van received a one-day peak of 292 people and no fewer than 221 people on a given day.
“We’ve slowly built connections with people to where, now, we are trusted,” Grimaldi says. “They want to talk about what’s going on and how we can help them.”
Of those who stopped by the van that week, as many as 120 then went on to the Behavioral Health Resource Center on a given day, and no fewer than 95.
“Success is measured in many different ways,” Grimaldi says. “Success for someone surviving on the streets is very different. Maybe they don’t go to the Behavioral Health Resource Center, but they were brave enough to go up to the van and get a ticket. And what we have seen historically at the van is that people will go every day, they get a ticket, but they never come to the BHRC. And then, one day they do.”
In this way, Grimaldi says, the van has been transformative — reaching people who might never have known about the Behavioral Resource Center just blocks away.
“What we realized is that by opening the van across Burnside, there was still a huge population of people who didn’t know about what we do,” she says. “It’s like Burnside was this divide, and people in Old Town didn’t really venture across Burnside to check us out.”
Kenyatta, 29, sips his coffee as he makes his way through the North Park Blocks and across West Burnside Street into downtown toward the four-story building with services and resources — breakfast, a day center, and shower and laundry facilities.
He says he came to Portland from Lincoln City last November and is trying to shake his drug habit. There’s many nights he doesn’t sleep, he says, only to doze off early in the morning and wake in the early afternoon, setting up yet another night when he can’t fall asleep.
“That’s the cycle,” Kenyatta says. “There are very few people who are homeless who don’t have mental or drug issues. There’s no way in heck I'd be homeless if I didn't do drugs. I have too much to offer. I have too much potential. Drugs are the only thing keeping me in the way of it.”
Kenyatta says he’s holding fast to his goals — among them, permanent and stable housing, and a job.
“Everyone has their own steps and route they take,” he says. “A lot of people can benefit more if they utilize the resources. Some people just want to get warm, want some food. I know the first step is to get clean.”
It’s hard, though, when other daily needs might go unmet, like finding somewhere to take a shower, charge a phone, and a secure place for belongings. All of which can be found at the Behavioral Health Resource Center, along with staff with lived experience who can help navigate people to services, including shelter and transitional housing programs on the center’s upper floors.
Just before 8 a.m., Kenyatta approaches the entry gates, somewhat anxious about his first visit.
“It can, maybe, be looked at as enabling, because, where are you going? Are you just staying there or are you trying to get out of there? That’s the whole goal, is to get out of there. These are just stepping stones to get you where you want to be.”
