Bobbin Singh had no idea, two years ago, why he was meeting Ben Sand at a coffee shop in Southeast Portland.

Singh is the founder of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, a legal-services organization fighting to reform the criminal-justice system.

On that December morning in 2017, Sand, through the Portland Leadership Foundation, had already spent four years coming to the aid of Oregon’s child-welfare system and the Department of Human Services.

And Sho Dozono, the Portland businessman who ran for mayor in 2008, wanted to introduce them – on the chance they might find common purpose in these uncommonly contentious times.

They talked, Singh and Sand. For the first of many times, they discussed the state’s most beleaguered agencies, DHS and the Department of Corrections, and a restorative response to both the agencies’ clients and employees.

And Sand left that coffee shop thinking, “Maybe what we’re building isn’t just a foster-care solution but a delivery system to mobilize neighborhoods.”

Can we take our skills, our outreach experience, and our statewide contacts, Sand wondered, and spearhead an entirely new rescue operation?

Oregon’s about to find out.

On Friday, The Contingent – as the Portland Leadership Foundation is now known – will unveil “Know Me Now,” a community mobilization effort with the following goals:

· Reconnect foster children with their incarcerated parent by providing transportation services to prisons within 60 miles of Portland. “We will care for the child by making sure they can see, touch and hear their parent in prison,” Sand says.

· Recruit a “crew,” a supportive social network, for each mother and father leaving prison, to ease their re-entry into the community and strengthen their commitment to remain and prosper outside the walls.

· Renovate the visitation areas at two Oregon prisons each year, and provide “radical hospitality” to all Department of Corrections employees

The planning for this initiative has already rocked the state prison system.

“I’m pinching myself to make sure this is real,” says Kelly Raths, the former prison chaplain now working as the agency’s community advocacy administrator. “We’re cautious and humbled. It feels too good to be true.”

“When I look at the work (The Contingent) did with DHS,” adds agency Director Colette Peters, “it can be a real game-changer.

“We release 400 people every month. We want to put the right training into place to make those transitions successful. These people are going to be our neighbors.”

Over the last seven years, Sand, Anthony Jordan and The Contingent staff have made extensive efforts to support Oregon’s child-welfare system.

The nonprofit has recruited new foster families and renovated branch offices. Through its “Every Child” initiative, The Contingent responds to volunteer inquiries about foster care in all 36 Oregon counties.

Dozono contacted Sand two years ago because he was frustrated that the state spent twice as many general fund dollars on corrections than it did on higher education in 2013. As former Gov. John Kitzhaber told Willamette Week at the time, “The relentless growth of the Department of Corrections is one of the reasons we cannot adequately invest in education.”

What Sand heard from Singh and Dozono was this: We can’t cut the recidivism rate in Oregon, much less the corrections budget, without a unique community response.

The only model we see out there is Every Child. Can you replicate it for the thousands of Oregonians with family members in a state prison?

“The cost of saying yes is formidable,” Sand admits. “But what does it mean if we say no?”

For the children of the 15,000 people incarcerated here?

For the corrections employees who don’t recognize themselves in the cast of “Orange is the New Black?”

For the 400 people each month who, having served their time, need a job and a stable support network, not a reunion with an old addiction?

“We want our volunteers to understand those dynamics,” Raths says. “How do you support someone who only knows how to hustle? Or who might slip back into addiction? We want to equip them to be safe.”

Sand wants to remind us that Human Services and Corrections can’t heal our wounds in isolation: “Government is never going to be a great parent. The government is never going to build neighborhoods.”

And in “Know Me Now,” which will be funded without a dime of public money, Singh sees something essential to us all.

“This is bigger than public safety and bigger than the recidivism rate,” Singh says: It’s a deeper conversation “about the people who have been harmed and the people doing the harm,” and one that honors both victims and the possibility of change.

“It’s an important pivot, and a much broader cultural change: helping people come back into community. That shouldn’t be limited to people coming from incarceration. That’s how communities should work.”

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com