McCoy Village is a nondescript apartment complex on the busy intersection of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Prescott Street. But walk inside its double doors and there’s a large room filled with a dozen kids ages 7 to 13 busy doing their homework.
This is the office of The Giving Tree, a Portland-based nonprofit dedicated to providing disadvantaged, low-income people access to the arts, culture and recreation.
Founded in 2006 by Wendi Anderson, the Giving Tree already serves at least 50 to 70 people a week. Anderson spends 30 unpaid hours each week visiting people who are moving from homelessness into single-room occupancy housing.
“When they’re in transition, they are given the basics,” says Anderson, 34. “A room with a bed, a dresser, clothes, food boxes—but that’s just surviving.”
“It’s the first time that they’ve had four walls around them,” she says. “It’s not the social environment that they’re used to, and they don’t realize what is out there for them.”
Anderson’s mission: to take those people out of their rooms to experience Portland—to First Thursdays, parks, the Oregon Zoo. The Giving Tree also provides a space for kids to come after school and do their homework. And in the summer, the Giving Tree hosts an all-day program with as many as 22 kids supervised by Anderson, who got into social services through her work as human-services coordinator for a property-management company.
“One of the most rewarding parts of my job is seeing their eyes light up when they recognize something…and ‘get it,’” she says. “They just aren’t surviving, they’re living.”
The Giving Tree aims to expand its scope in the future. But what Anderson is really anticipating is watching the kids she is working with grow up.
“I’ve helped a couple apply to college,” she says. “But it’s so hard to get older kids to come, because they’re like, ‘It’s not cool.’”
When she talks to the younger kids about college, she doesn’t say, ‘If you go to college.’
I say, ‘When you go to college,’” she says. “And talk like it’s reality.”
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