Three years ago, Paul Susi launched PDX ID Assistance, a free service to help people replace lost forms of identification, such as a driver’s license or birth certificate. In a recent magazine essay he wrote for Oregon Humanities, Susi says he was motivated to start PDX ID Assistance after working for years as a manager of homeless shelters in Portland where he saw firsthand the frustration clients experienced trying to obtain housing, employment health care or other services without identification documents.
PDX ID Assistance operates as a kind of free drop-in clinic Susi holds several times a month at locations that are familiar to people experiencing homelessness, like a library or homeless services provider. Susi shows up with a stack of application forms to request a birth certificate in all 50 states, envelopes and stamps for mailing off the forms and checks he fills out to each person seeking his help to cover the cost of replacing an identification document.
Susi joins us to share his experiences with PDX ID Assistance and how it’s taken on new significance in the current political climate.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For three years now, Paul Susi has spent a lot of his own time and some of his own money helping people get identification documents like driver’s licenses and birth certificates. It’s not an official job or a nonprofit. He’s just one guy who provides his services as a kind of free drop-in clinic several times a month at places like libraries and homeless service providers. He wrote about this recently in an essay in the Oregon Humanities magazine. And he joins me now.
Paul Susi, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Paul Susi: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Miller: What prompted you to start doing this?
Susi: I used to be a homeless shelter manager for Transition Projects back before the pandemic. I spent five years leading different shelter programs, six in total, in those years. And I would see over and over again folks really working hard to get off the streets. But they would be derailed by seemingly really petty but really insurmountable obstacles. The most insurmountable one that I saw was the lack of ID.
Miller: What kind of obstacles did that lead to?
Susi: Well, without ID, you can’t access health care. You can’t access veterans benefits. You can’t access housing. You can’t access employment. You can’t necessarily even qualify for case management or for rental assistance. And now, in this day and age, there are very real consequences to not having valid government-issued ID, where you could be deported, you could be removed from this country. The list just goes on and on. And it’s the first, but it’s the most important, domino to fall. It really just questions, in our system, your validity, your legitimacy, as a human being in our society.
Miller: What are the reasons that people might not have IDs?
Susi: Anecdotally, because I currently work as a vendor program director for Street Roots and a peer resource navigator for Portland Street Medicine, I’m seeing a lot of folks losing their ID because of city-funded sweeps of encampments, tents and folks sleeping out on the sidewalk – all of their belongings are removed by city contractors. And there’s really no discernment about what objects are removed and placed in the trash and what objects folks are allowed to take for themselves. So when you’re in that situation, which thankfully I’ve never been, but when all of that is happening, all that chaos is happening, it’s really hard to keep track of your medications, your prescriptions, and things like your ID and your birth certificate.
Miller: You do note in your essay that there are systems in place for people who are homeless where they should be able to get IDs at the DMV, for example, for no cost. But what are the challenges in accessing that?
Susi: It’s called a declaration of homelessness waiver, which is a really patronizing, condescending way to do this. You have to be engaged with a service provider to get one of these waivers. And you can only use those waivers twice in your lifetime, before you’re forced to wait eight years before accessing it again. And even if you have the waiver, first of all, you’re treated poorly at the DMV. I’m throwing no shade at the DMV. They’re working hard and they’re understaffed. But they’re making judgment calls based on a person’s appearance and on the materials that they arrive with. And when you show up with a declaration of homelessness waiver, you’re more likely to be treated poorly at the DMV.
The waiver does nothing if you don’t have enough corroborating proof of your identity. So at the DMV, you’re required to bring proof of a mailing address, which many unhoused folks don’t have. You’re required to have a utility bill or a leasing document or a title document, some kind of official mail. It can’t just be personal correspondence. It has to be from a corporation. Those are the standards that we have, to prove that a person is a real human being, in our city.
Miller: So then, where do you start? Let’s say you’ve announced in advance you’re going to be at a particular library some afternoon. People come to you. I imagine often you don’t know who they are before. What kind of questions do they have and how do you help?
Susi: Well, this is where I’m leaning really heavily on my experience as a shelter manager. A lot of former staff that I used to work with are now in other positions at other organizations. So I have this sort of network of contacts at places like Central City Concern, Transition Projects, William Temple House and Blanchet House. So I put the word out that I’m gonna be at a certain time and place, and that I’ll help whoever shows up. And because I’m a private volunteer, I don’t have the capacity to track appointments or to have all of that information ahead of time.
I just print out a stack of birth certificate forms ahead of time and I bring those with me. And I bring my checkbook. I start with very simple questions like have you ever had an Oregon ID before? Was it just the regular ID? Was it a driver’s license? Was it expired when you lost it? And the answers to those questions, then, will help me figure out what the quickest way to helping this person replace their lost ID is. And sometimes it means I have to start with their birth certificates.
Miller: Can you get people’s birth certificates from other states?
Susi: I can. I became a notary in Multnomah County specifically so that I could help people replace lost birth certificates from states like California, which requires a notarized birth certificate application. New York – the city of New York, not the state – requires a notarization. Florida, Georgia and various other states. Sometimes the notarization is used in combination with other corroborating proofs. But most notably, for California, all you need is the notarization.
Anecdotally, I would say about a third of the folks that I’m helping are from California. And the lack of the birth certificate from California has been what has held up a lot of, what we call, the chronically unhoused in Portland, because they can’t find a notary to notarize a birth certificate application.
Miller: If you help them with all this, are they then mailing the documents in themselves, or do you do that? And if it all works out, how do they end up getting their IDs?
Susi: That’s correct. Yeah, so I am notarizing the document. I’m filling out the address on the envelope and I’m putting the stamp on it. And then I say to the person, “This is your ID. So I want you to make the choice whether to take this to the post office yourself or I could take it to the post office for you.” In the cases when birth certificates need to be mailed to them, we have to problem solve: “OK, what can the return address be? Are you enrolled in any shelter programs or in any case management programs?”
This is where, if you were a vendor at Street Roots, Street Roots can accept your mail for you and hold your mail for you. There are little workarounds like that all over the city, and folks have different layers of trust and of relationships with those different organizations. Some places are notorious for only accepting the mail for a couple of days before sending it right back to the DMV. So then, the DMV stops sending the ID to that particular shelter or resource center. So it’s really on a case by case basis, helping folks figure out what a good mailing address is for them.
Miller: I wonder if you could read a short excerpt from your recent essay?
Susi: Certainly: “The longer I do this work, the more callous I become. I’m no longer moved by the miserable circumstances and shocking traumas of a person’s life story. I noticed myself looking away and folding my hands, quietly impatient for this mom to finish telling me her story so that I can move on to the details needed to finish her application, write her the check and see the next person in line. I don’t have the time or capacity to give each person their due regard.”
Miller: You note after that passage that many people would regard that callousness as professionalism, as just a requirement for doing the job. How do you see it?
Susi: I see it as an attempt to get through the trauma. [Among] the case managers, the doctors, the parole officers, the counselors, everybody who’s interfacing with folks in crisis, it’s like working in a nuclear reactor of trauma. And we’re irradiated with what other folks are experiencing and being victimized by, being oppressed by. We all have to come up with ways to get through the task at hand and be whole human beings, at the end of the day. And for some folks that’s being really detached and dissociating from what’s going on. For other folks, it’s the exact opposite. I’ve seen so many folks just throw themselves wholeheartedly, with their entire physical and emotional selves, into the work. And then they burn out really, really quickly and themselves go into crisis.
I have to admit, there’s really no valid way to get through it, because these are fundamentally unacceptable things that we are doing as a society to one another. So of course, unacceptable consequences are happening and it’s really, really hard for us to metabolize that.
Miller: You don’t charge for this and you also know just the bewildering array of prices. If it’s an expired identification that needs to be replaced or when it’s been lost or a new one, everything has a different price, but it all does have a price. Where does the money come from?
Susi: This is mostly from my own savings. Also, from time to time, I reach out to my circle of friends. I am a theater artist, so I do weird experimental performances in people’s backyards and in warehouses. I ask those audiences to contribute to this thing. But really this is more than the money. This is really fueled by my own anger. I was just noting how it’s hard to metabolize trauma. The way I’m metabolizing my anger at how unjust our society is and the poor decisions that our political leaders have made over generations, not just the current leadership ... The way I metabolize that is by putting my energy into this project so that I don’t, myself, break down and have some kind of psychological break with reality.
Miller: In the essay, it does make me wonder how successful that’s been, because you write this: “I have to remind myself not to allow my own self-righteous anger to become the very hatefulness I so abhor.”
What do you mean by that?
Susi: I have encountered folks who have been openly racist to me or to folks like me. I’m a son of Filipino immigrants. I’m a Brown person in a white supremacist city. So I’ve worked with folks who’ve said things like, “Well, it’s the immigrants that are taking everything away from us and we’ve got to …” I don’t want to get political, but it just goes into that very reactionary space.
Miller: Just to be clear, you’re saying these are people you’re helping, let’s say a white person who is experiencing homelessness, who is saying this to you?
Susi: Correct, that’s right. That’s right. So folks, mostly white men experiencing homelessness, will often say something like this to me or say remarks that aren’t pointed at me but are impactful to me. And in those moments, I have to remind myself it’s not my job to preach. It’s not my job to espouse a particular political thing. I’m just trying to help people replace their ID documents.
Miller: Has doing this work in the last three years changed the way you think about presenting your own documents? If you’re going to fly, for example, or just, as you noted earlier, we need IDs for so many things. When you take out your driver’s license now for whatever reason, do you hold it differently?
Susi: I absolutely do. Prior to doing this project, I was one of the people who didn’t know where my birth certificate was, who wasn’t necessarily tracking that information, and only knew that my license was expiring when law enforcement or someone at a checkout counter would say, “Hey, by the way, this thing you probably want to get this replaced.” Now, I’m hyper aware of those things and I have digital photocopies of everything. I applied for the passport card as well as the passport, because I now have this nightmare of being in a particular situation or at a border crossing and, for whatever reason, the person evaluating what I have says I don’t have what I need to have.
Miller: When is the next drop-in clinic that you’re going to be hosting?
Susi: It’s going to be Wednesday, September 10 at the William Temple House on Northwest Hoyt – 2030 Northwest Hoyt. Then I’m gonna be at Blanchet House on Thursday, September 11 at 11:30 a.m. And then I’m going to be at Central Library on Sunday, the 14th, at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. And then I’m going to be at Street Books in Southeast Portland on the Tuesday following that.
Miller: Paul, thanks very much.
Susi: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Miller: Paul Susi launched PDX ID Assistance. It’s a free service to help people replace lost forms of identification like driver’s licenses and birth certificates. He wrote about this in an essay recently in the magazine Oregon Humanities.
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