Plans are underway to turn part of the former Presbyterian Church of Laurelhurst in Portland into a tiny-home village for Indigenous families experiencing homelessness. As reported in Underscore News, the project — known as Barbie’s Village — will also include family and children’s programming in the former church building. The project was made possible after regional Presbyterian Church leaders voted to sell the land for $1 to Future Generations Collaborative, a local Indigenous services nonprofit.
Jillene Joseph is the executive director of the Native Wellness Institute and the engagement mode lead for Future Generations Collaborative. Chris Dela Cruz is a former associate pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church, which helped sponsor the project. They join us to talk about the vision for Barbie’s Village and how the project came to be.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Leaders of the Presbyterian Church voted to sell a Portland church property to an Indigenous social services nonprofit for $1. It’s being described as the “Native Land Back Movement in Action.” That’s first reported in Underscore News. The Future Generations Collaborative will turn part of the former Presbyterian Church of Laurelhurst into a tiny-home village for Indigenous families experiencing homelessness. The project is called Barbie’s Village. I’m joined now by two of the many people who made this happen. Jillene Joseph is the executive director of the Native Wellness Institute and engagement lead for the Future Generations Collaborative, a citizen of the Aaniiih Nation. Chris Dela Cruz is a former associate pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church, which helped sponsor this project. Welcome to you both.
Jillene Joseph: Thank you.
Chris Dela Cruz: Glad to be here.
Miller: Jillene Joseph, can you describe the ceremony that happened not too long ago, that involved a bowl of pennies?
Joseph: Yeah, sure. It happened on March 15th. That’s ingrained in my brain as this historic evening where we had the signing between the church and the Native community, really, and we wanted to just make it memorable. We wanted to make it historic. We wanted to instill our values into it. So, as everyone entered the room, there was a bowl of 100 pennies, and we just asked people to take one or two pennies. And then, when it came time for the signing, we took a red piece of cloth that represented a prayer cloth and we set it on the table where the signing would happen. We asked everyone who picked up a penny to come and put them in that prayer tie because it represented how we sit on the prayers of our ancestors and their prayers, and this dream was actually coming true. And we wanted everybody to be a part of it because it really was this communal event. So everyone came forward and they put their pennies in and we counted every single penny to make sure that we had 100. We took out the Canadian ones and then we wrapped it up and we presented that to the church. All of our prayers were presented to the church.
Miller: Why try to create a tiny-home village for Indigenous families experiencing homelessness? Why pursue this project to begin with?
Joseph: Well, it all started… In the work of the Future Generations Collaborative, we have community members that we call elders and natural helpers. And one of our natural helpers was named Barbie. [She] and her family experienced homelessness for many different reasons, and Barbie was always so proud to serve her community, to volunteer to be of service, to volunteer to help uplift others. She was always concerned about our people that were living on the streets or that were couch surfing. And she always wanted to do something about that.
Seven years ago, she passed away from a brain aneurysm. And after she passed, we wanted to do something to honor her and to uplift her memory and her legacy. So we brainstormed and came up with the idea of Barbie’s Village – that we would focus on our community members that were experiencing homelessness. And there’s a lot. What we found was that many of our community, they’re not necessarily on a list that the county might have or on a list that somebody else may have. They’re out there fending for themselves.
And because we’re solution oriented, we wanted to do something to help that population and a population that especially has young children, that we could wrap around the whole family and help them to be successful. So that’s where the vision of Barbie’s Village came from.
Miller: Chris Dela Cruz, how did the Presbyterian Church get involved?
Dela Cruz: Future Generations Collaborative and folks working on Barbie’s Village started talking with a number of folks about where this could happen. They got in touch with a network of congregations and communities – Leaven Community Land and Housing Coalition. That’s a number of church folks and other community groups that organized around housing and want to develop housing on their own land. And through those conversations, it then got to Westminster Presbyterian Church, where I was serving as associate pastor.
We hold, and I personally hold, as an ordained pastor, in many ways, a conflicted call. A call where the church has this call to do much good in the world but has this long history of partnering with tools of empire, including the American government and how it did awful things – genocide and land displacement of Native folks. So we thought, even in Westminster’s own workaround, working with this history, what could we do? What could be something tangible? So we brought to the Presbytery of the Cascades, which is the regional body of Presbyterian churches above Westminster, what if the land could be given to Future Generations Collaborative as a tangible act of repair?
Miller: You’ve said that this is incredibly personal to you as a Filipino American church leader. What do you mean?
Dela Cruz: Even when I walked in on March 15th that day, I said I was bringing the collar I was wearing of the saints and sinners of the church, and I was bringing also my own ancestors. The islands that make up the Philippines, for many, many centuries prior to colonization, they had Indigenous folks who had Indigenous cultures that I’ve tried to spend my adult life trying to connect with.
But because of both the Catholic colonizers with Spain and then with American colonizers… I mean, President William McKinley dropped on the floor and prayed and got the answer from God. He said that he had to colonize the savages – talking about my ancestors, my family. And I’m thinking, “What?”
Miller: And this is also your church.
Dela Cruz: Yes. Exactly right. This is the Protestant Church doing that. And so the hope is, this can’t be how we are justifying in the world, so what would it be like to live into a new calling of repair?
Miller: Jillene, can you give us a sense for the kinds of conversations that you and others had with people in the neighborhood when you were trying to get this off the ground? What were those conversations like? What did you hear?
Joseph: That’s an amazing story. At the very beginning, there’s this saying, that is “Not in my backyard.” That kind of was the pushback that we first received.
Miller: I like this idea, but not here…
Joseph: Yes, we want to do something but not in my backyard. So we went to work, our allies went to work, our allies within the Westminster Presbyterian Church went to work, in terms of hosting house meetings, where, either on Zoom or in person, where they were inviting the neighbors around Barbie’s Village to come and learn more about who we are and what we’re trying to do. We had presentations at the Neighborhood Association meetings and people that were against it rallied other neighbors that were against it, and they came and sat in the front rows and told us to our faces, “Not in our backyard.”
And people had a lot of questions about what was going to happen. So we just kept trying to find the solutions. And then because of that work, because of the work that our allies were doing, because of the work that we were doing and just trying to meet neighbors and meet with neighbors, and calm their fears, I guess you could say, things started shifting. We always say that “shift happens,” things started shifting and pretty soon neighbors were coming by, and they wanted to volunteer and pretty soon neighbors were contributing large amounts of money to the FGC. And pretty soon neighbors were like, “We can’t wait to be your neighbors.” So there’s been this incredible shift and I think part of it as well was because of the prayers that were going into this greater vision.
Miller: Chris Dela Cruz, what role did the church play in those conversations, whether it’s convening or explaining to existing members of the neighborhood your vision?
Dela Cruz: Like Jillene said, those church folks, through the larger network with Leaven and the Westminster folks in particular, we were trained in organizing skills and we were trained in organizing practices that were really just about relationship building, taking folks’ concerns seriously, and also modeling what it is to be a neighbor and an ally. It was purposeful, especially in a mostly white neighborhood to have the mostly white church folks be allies in that. There is intentionality behind that.
So it was in a way, it was… “Neighboring,” is something that Jillene, you’ve said repeatedly, is a value of yours. And of course, a value of the Christian Church to be a good neighbor.
Miller: That’s a verb, the way you’re using it – “Neighboring.” What does it mean to “Neighbor”?
Joseph: From a Native perspective, we could look at neighboring as being a good relative, being a good relation. Really looking at, we are all related as human beings. We’re related to the trees and the grass and everything. So we tried to be a good relative and an example of that, for the past couple of years, we’ve hosted Indigenous People’s Day celebrations at Barbie’s Village. And the very first year we did that, it was intentional to invite the neighbors, the neighbors of Laurelhurst and Kerns, to invite the church community, and to invite the Native community.
We had hundreds, like 600 people show up, and we fed people for free, our traditional foods. We had little children’s pow-wow and they got to dance, and we had vendors and we had speakers and it was this amazing time. So we got to show who we were and the kind of neighbor that we would be, and we invited people in. And I think those really helped for people to see who we are and what we’re all about.
Miller: Jillene Joseph, what is the plan right now for what is going to happen on this site, and what’s it going to take financially to make that happen?
Joseph: Right now, we’re in the process – I hope it happens today, actually – to do the final closing with the title company. And then we have funding actually waiting for us to start the initial renovations of the inside of the building. So there’s lots of things happening at once.
We’re currently doing early childhood programming out of the building. We have a couple of playgroups a week and some support circles and things like that. We’re also operating some of our public health work out of the building. We host different community events and gatherings out of the buildingand we really want to expand our early childhood services, and we can’t really do that because the building isn’t up to code yet. So we’re working on the internal structure, doing the renovations.
While we’re doing that, then we will also start the fundraising that we’ll need to build the actual tiny homes. And right now, we’re writing grants to different places. We’re advocating for funding from different sources to make that happen. This will be a multi-million-dollar project to build the tiny homes and all of the infrastructure that’s needed. We want to build tiny homes and not just to have pods. That is our goal.
Miller: How much money in total might you need to raise?
Joseph: Well, it’ll be multi-millions. I don’t have the number right off the top of my head, but it will be a multi-million.
Miller: I want to turn to a clause that’s gotten some attention in the article in Underscore recently. The clause says that if you become, as a nonprofit, insolvent, or if the property is no longer used for charitable purposes or various other things happen, then the church would then take control and be responsible for finding a new Native group to take over the land.
One of the leaders of the Presbytery wrote this to us in a statement over the weekend: “The process, including the purpose of the reversionary clause that Future Generations Collaborative fully agreed to, was established to ensure that the property would always remain in the hands of a Native American community. This never had anything to do with strings attached. Instead, it was a clause that allowed us to keep our promise to the Indigenous Community, so that in case something ever happened to FGC, the property would stay in Native American hands and not be taken by the government.”
I want to give you a chance to give your side of this. How do you feel about that clause?
Joseph: Well, we didn’t want that clause in there because it did feel like strings of oppression attached, it felt like there was doubt attached, and we didn’t want that doubt attached to anything that we were doing. And it didn’t really need to be in there, either, because in our bylaws, it says if we fold as an organization, we would get rid of our stuff and we would give it to another Native nonprofit organization.
Miller: So you’re saying it would have stayed in Native hands, no matter what?
Joseph: Yeah.
Miller: Chris Dela Cruz, I’m curious about another issue here. To what extent do you think what the Presbyterian Church did here… after years of work…could this be a model for other churches?
Dela Cruz: We would love it to be a model. And I say that humbly because I would be the first to say, I’m sure there’s a lot to learn from in terms of any mistakes we made, or ways it could be done differently; but precisely because of that, I think the opportunity is here, especially at a time when churches are wondering what could be done with land as churches close.
In our theology, back to the Book of Genesis, it talks about what it is for this earth and this land to be a gift, and what it is to steward that. And at various stages of whatever particular churches are at in their life, what does it mean to be stewards of that land and what could it be to do these acts of repair?
Miller: Chris Dela Cruz and Jillene Joseph, thanks very much.
Joseph: Thank you.
Dela Cruz: Thank you so much.
Miller: Chris Dela Cruz is a former associate pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church. Jillene Joseph is executive director of the Native Wellness Institute and engagement lead for the Future Generations Collaborative.
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