Earlier this month, the celebrated and prolific poet, author and professor Nikki Giovanni died at the age of 81 from a third bout of cancer, according to Virginia Tech. She taught at the university for 35 years as an English professor before her retirement in 2022. Giovanni published her first collections of poetry, “Black Feeling Black Talk” and “Black Judgment,” in 1968, and was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement that emerged during the Civil Rights Era. 

We listen back to an interview we recorded with Giovanni in 2014 after the release of “Chasing Utopia,” a collection of poetry and prose which covers topics both personal and political. 

U.S. Fish and Wildlife are proposing federal protections and label the Western monarch butterfly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The federal agency will be accepting public input until March 12. At the same time, a federal grant of $300,000 was awarded to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation to aid in habitat restoration. The Portland nonprofit will be using the funds to continue offering free kits containing milkweed and wildflowers for community spaces and working, tribal and public lands in Oregon, Washington and California. 

Emma Pelton is a conservation biologist with the nonprofit. She joins us to share more on the impact this funding will have and what potential protections for the butterfly will mean going forward. 

If you’re not a fan of traditional holiday movies, “Breakup Season” might be for you. It follows a young couple that plans to spend Christmas together, only to break up on the first night of their vacation. A snowstorm makes travel impossible, meaning they’re stuck together for the holiday. The movie was entirely filmed in Eastern Oregon, featuring shots of downtown La Grande and the surrounding snow-capped hills and valleys.  

Filmmaker H. Nelson Tracey developed “Breakup Season” through a residency with the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. He joins us to talk about his debut feature film and why it was important to set it in La Grande. 

Earlier this month, the City of Portland and Multnomah County released data and survey results about Portlanders’ experience with ranked choice voting. According to the survey, 91% of voters said they understood how to fill out their ranked choice ballots. But only 55% of voters in East Portland’s District 1 turned in those ballots, compared to rates of turnout that ranged from 74 to 76% for the other three districts. District 1 voters were also more likely to turn in ballots that had no candidate for city council selected, and nearly a quarter of D1 voters surveyed said they had no awareness of ranked choice voting. 

City officials acknowledged that more work needs to be done to reach voters of color and to better understand the low voter turnout in District 1. The lack of engagement may also be a result of decades’ long neglect for the needs of East Portland voters in City Hall, according to José Gamero-Georgeson, a D1 resident and volunteer at East County Rising, a political action committee that supports progressive candidates in East Multnomah County. He is also the co-chair of the Portland Government Transition Advisory Committee. Gamero-Georgeson joins us to share his perspective on how to engage and boost participation among voters in East Portland. 

During an interview on “Think Out Loud” last month, Portland Mayor-elect Keith Wilson said that he was “an admirer” of Interim City Administrator Michael Jordan when describing whom he would want to hire to oversee the day-to-day operations of city bureaus. Outgoing Mayor Ted Wheeler announced Jordan’s appointment in May as part of the voter-approved changes to Portland’s new form of governance and elections using ranked choice voting. 

Jordan’s contract was set to expire on June 30, 2025 to ease the transition from one administration to the next. But Jordan will now stay on through at least the end of next year, according to reporting by The Oregonian.

Jordan joins us to talk about the transition and his priorities amid a grim financial outlook for the city’s finances and its departments.

New federal data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that Oregon’s outdoor industry continued to see growth last year, earning more than $8 billion. Kate Porche is the director for Oregon State University’s Center for the Outdoor Recreation Economy. Randy Rosenberger is an economics professor in OSU's department of forestry. They both join us to break down the growth the industry has seen and what its future may look like.

Acadia Healthcare runs methadone clinics around the country and the clinics bring in millions of dollars in annual revenue. A New York Times investigation found that the for-profit company is accused of failing to provide counseling, falsifying records and enrolling patients who aren’t addicted to opioids. The company already faces federal investigations over practices at its psychiatric hospitals. Jessica Silver-Greenberg is a business investigations reporter for The New York Times. She reported on Acadia Healthcare with Katie Thomas, an investigative health care reporter for the news outlet. Silver-Greenberg joins us with more on the reporting. 

Last week, Troy Price was sworn in as the new chief of police in Vancouver. A 27-year veteran of the department, he takes the helm a month after Vancouver voters rejected a proposition that would have helped fill staffing shortages. Proposition 4 would have raised property taxes starting next year to pay for hiring 80 fulltime sworn officers and other police positions, along with funding for new equipment, technologies and investments in other areas.  

As the city’s population has risen in the past decade, so too has the demand for police services. According to city officials, more than 3,000 cases go uninvestigated each year as the call volume for police response has grown by more than a third since 2017. The Vancouver Police Department also has the second-lowest staffing levels of any city in Washington with at least 100,000 residents. Chief Price joins us to talk about his priorities and how he aims to fill police officer vacancies as the city faces a budget shortfall of more than $40 million.  

Tom Cole moved to Southern Oregon in 1995 with the thought of starting a new regional chapter of Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Instead, what he saw around Medford made him realize the community was full of families whose children weren’t getting the educational support they needed, many of them low-income and from households that didn’t speak English.

In 1998, Cole piloted an after-school program at one school, serving 50 students with a $500 grant. Since then, his efforts have turned into a full-fledged nonprofit called Kids Unlimited, which operates in nearly every public school in the Medford School District. In 2013 the organization launched the Kids Unlimited Academy, a charter school for underserved communities.

Lupita Vargas was in kindergarten when she started in that first Kids Unlimited after-school program. At that time no one in her family spoke English, she says, and the tutoring and other support that the program provided to her and her three siblings was life changing. Vargas joins us, along with founder Tom Cole, to tell us more about her family’s experience, and talk about her job now as the nonprofit’s director of educational services.

This fall, the Meadowlark Day Program held an official ribbon cutting ceremony, to celebrate the unique mental health program for Salem-Keizer students in need. Trillium Community Health Plan and the school district had an existing partnership to provide lower levels of mental health care in some schools. But for some kids, their challenges from depression, anxiety, PTSD and other disorders are so steep as to make it impossible for them to be able to get any educational benefit in school.

Meadowlark is a 10-12 week program that gives kids intense treatment as well as instructional support every day, so they don’t fall further behind. We get the details from Chris Moore, the director of mental health and social-emotional learning for the district, and from Chiharu Blatt, Trillium’s vice president of community services in the Willamette Valley and Central Oregon.