Think Out Loud

In downtown Portland, squatters broke into a vacant multi-story property. The area near Washington Center became a “problematic corner of downtown,” according to reporting by Willamette Week, with ongoing drug trafficking and other criminal activity. Anthony Effinger is a reporter at Willamette Week. He joins us with more on his reporting and what he learned about fentanyl use in Portland and the city’s efforts to manage the situation.

In Medford, the downtown library location has offered social services for people experiencing homelessness, including social worker appointments, meetings with nurses and camping gear rentals. For some, the services are a beacon of hope for people dealing with dire situations. But others in the city say that the location is now experiencing problems. City officials and the police department agree that the library has been flooded with calls, from putting out warming fires to drug use in the bathrooms. Buffy Pollock is a reporter for the Rogue Valley Times and wrote about what’s happening in the city. She joins us with details of her reporting.

Since the 2018-19 school year, Portland Public Schools has seen a decline in elementary enrollment by 17.3%. The reasons include safety concerns, the rising cost of living in Portland and a plethora of other schooling choices like charter and private options. Rachel Saslow is a freelance reporter based in Portland. She joins us to share why parents are leaving neighborhood schools.

The Karibu program provides culturally specific support for people in the Black community who are involved or at-risk of involvement with the criminal justice system and have behavioral health needs. Alonzo Roper is a case manager who has previously been incarcerated in Oregon. He says his clients know that he’s walked in their shoes, and that makes a difference in the connection he makes with them. We talk with him and Tori Hatter-Smith, Karibu program manager at Central City Concern.

Firefighters along the Oregon Coast say they’re struggling to meet increased call volumes with fewer and fewer volunteer staff. A group of North Coast fire chiefs requested to meet with the Daily Astorian about the issue, saying it's reached “a breaking point.” They say staffing struggles aren’t unique to the region, or even the state, but they hit particularly hard in smaller departments that are primarily staffed by volunteers.

Jeff Adkins is a battalion chief and acting fire chief at the Coos Bay Fire Department and Marc Reckmann is the fire chief for Cannon Beach Fire & Rescue. They join us to talk about the challenges firefighters are facing and how they plan to address them.

Author Nicole Chung was born to Korean immigrants in Seattle and later adopted by a white couple in Southern Oregon. The 2018 memoir “All You Can Ever Know” follows Chung’s exploration of her identity as a transracial adoptee as she searches for her birth family. Her second memoir, released earlier this month, covers the untimely deaths of her adoptive parents — first her father from kidney disease, then her mother from cancer in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “A Living Remedy” chronicles Chung’s grief and rage as she reckons with ways financial instability and inadequate health care access contributed to her parents’ deaths.

Chung will be at Powell’s City of Books on Thursday, April 20, for a conversation with Lydia Kiesling. She joins us to talk about her most recent work.

“Suzie Hicks the Climate Chick” freely admits to being inspired by “Bill Nye the Science Guy.” But their focus is exclusively on engaging kids about climate change - and connecting them with solutions. Hicks’ pilot episode of their kids show, “Suzie Hicks the Climate Chick,” is part of the Ecofilm Festival at the Hollywood Theater in Northeast Portland. The show won them the festival’s Visionary Film Award, and they will be at the festival for a screening and workshop with kids. Suzie Hicks joins us in the studio to talk about the show and some best practices for engaging young kids about the most serious issue humanity faces.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recovers American service members who were listed as prisoners of war or missing in action during their service. Earlier this year, the agency recovered U.S. Navy Aviation Ordnanceman First Class Anthony Di Petta, who was killed during World War II. His remains were located in the Republic of Palau. The federal agency partnered with Project Recover, an organization that uses science and technology to find missing service members around the world. Derek Abbey is the president and CEO of Project Recover. He is based in Bend but travels around the world working on missions for the organization. He joins us with details of his work and why he continues to locate service members that have been missing for

Earlier this year, conservative activists put pressure on the Crook County public library to segregate books that depict LGBTQ experiences. Now, one of the leaders of that effort is on a slate of candidates running for the Crook County school board in the May 16 election. OPB’s Joni Auden Land spoke to LGBTQ residents of Crook County about what living through this political moment there is like.

As a part of our new series, we’re taking a deep dive into people’s work lives. We’ll learn what it takes to do different kinds of jobs and how these professions change us.

David Beer is Portland’s Squeezebox Surgeon. He has studied the inner workings of accordions in Italy as well as at A World of Accordions Museum in Wisconsin. He operates on all different kinds of free reed instruments. He shares with us how he got into this business and gives us an inside look of how accordions work and what it takes to get them singing again.