December 2020
Dearest Friends,
In the past year Hygiene4All took six months out to work with other grassroot organizations in developing and supporting the creation of 3 emergency villages, now known as C3PO (Creating Conscious Communities for People Outside) for our unhoused neighbors. We are beyond proud to have contributed to Portland’s first city sanctioned LBGTQ+ and BIPOC villages.
Through intense collaboration we learned so very much about how to deepen our practices of developing spaces, structures, and staff that actively disrupt racist, sexist, anti-LBGTQ+, and anti-ableist harm.
We built new ways of prioritizing the safety for our most targeted houseless community members.
We honed our strategies for managing mental and physical health crises, de-escalation, and community accountability and power sharing.
Now many of those villagers are a part of our staff. Nothing brings us together like adversity.
This Pandemic has ravaged us all. Worst of all - it has killed and pushed hundreds of thousands of poor families to the brink of losing homes, jobs, and daily sustenance. It is clear that our governments are not ensuring the survival, health, and wellbeing of our people and planet. Only by organizing ourselves for mutual aid, by making plans to press society to care for our people, and by preparing for the struggle ahead will we emerge from the ashes of now better prepared to face an uncertain future.
Hygiene4All is ready for the fight.
Through this cold, dark winter of strife we will persist in meeting our neighbors’ basic bodily and mental health needs. From our example, we will gather our village, and push for solutions and action to end decades of negligence, neglect, and ruin.
Buildings in our hygiene hub. Building on the right is our First Aid Hub. Building on the left is a storage building.
In just one year,
we have raised over 150,000 in grants and donations.
Generous community organizations have additionally given over 60,000 in in kind donations and services.
Thanks to our tireless tiny team of unsheltered members, allies and volunteers we have built a haven for health and safety and the skills needed to launch the H4A “Ark.” Now we embark on our voyage.
But we need you by our side.
Please help provision and navigate our ship through the icy waters of COVID, political, and economic turmoil massing on the horizon. We need funds, volunteers, and supplies to protect whole community health and show that a better tomorrow is possible.
We are a scrappy organization. We have moved mountains to gather the first resources to open. But we will only grow in impact if our community has our back.
15 dollars pays for an unsheltered staff member to welcome and lend a helping hand to their peers for an hour.
90 dollars ensures six hours of paid staff and volunteer time, offering safety, bathrooms, showers, wound care, and clean clothing and bedding to those for whom most spaces are currently shuttered.
Your recurring donation not only guarantees basic bodily and mental wellbeing to those most affected by the current crises; but would ensure grant makers understand the importance of our life saving activities to the community with whom we share the sidewalks.
Individually we can offer a ray of hope and kindness; Together we can make the world a more hopeful place.
