BY CATHERINE PAGLIN
ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPHER STINE

P ORTLAND, Oregon— Vicky Martell works behind the scenes-in outer northeast Portland, just off one of the city's rawest commercial thoroughfares, on a mostly deserted second floor above a red brick vocational high school, at the end of a hallway piled with boxes.

Here Martell plies her trade as a community organizer. She doesn't grab headlines, rouse rabble, file lawsuits, or call press conferences. Hers is the unsung task of oiling social service machinery-improving programs by connecting people to other people, information, ideas, and opportunities.

Martell coordinates one of Multnomah County's eight Caring Communities. These collaborative programs are all dedicated to a goal of 100 percent high school completion. Funded in part by the county, with matching dollars from a variety of other public programs and private supporters, Caring Communities involve participants from social service agencies and schools, as well as neighbors who have energy to share.

"We're not necessarily about creating more programs. We want to make existing programs better through service integration and collaboration," says Martell, an energetic 28-year-old. Through discussion and information-sharing, Caring Community members form "action teams" around issues-mentoring, healthy activities for youth during nonschool times, violence prevention, truancy-that are directly or indirectly linked to a child's ability to finish high school and begin work or further education.

The Caring Communities are loosely based on high school attendance areas. Martell's territory-Grant/Madison-takes in 11,000 students in two Portland high schools, four middle schools, and 12 elementary schools. It stretches from the inner city out east to the 82nd Avenue commercial strip; from the industrial area at the north to leafy Laurelhurst at the south. Its residents live in stately homes along the sweeping curves of Alameda Ridge, in unheated campers on Northeast Killingsworth, and everywhere in between.

"I feel like by developing Caring Communities around high school attendance areas we're trying to recreate what already exists in small towns. We are trying to get back that small-town feeling," says Martell, who speaks wistfully of the previous summer she spent working in eastern Oregon.

Faces of people she met at a recent church social adorn her office wall. There's smiling, white-haired Eunice who likes to cook and bake and wants to learn quilting. There's A.J., a slim teenage boy who's good at basketball and interested in history. There's beefy, bearded, T-shirt-wearing Dale-proud father, and satisfied customer of the local convenience store-curly forelock falling from his otherwise shaved head. He's flanked by two beaming little girls holding potted flowers.

"I talked to 40 neighbors, all ages and all races," says Martell. She and staff from Lutheran Family Services also photographed these folks, surveyed them, and gave each a plant donated by a local nursery. The joint effort, which has been repeated in other neighborhoods, is called "Community Snapshots."

BUILDING A BASE
Getting out into the community helps Martell build a base of neighbors. Researchers would call what she does "creating a community asset map." To Martell, it just makes good sense. "What this does for me is I know that Eunice is good at cooking and baking, so if we ever have an activity involving cooking and baking we could call Eunice," she says.

Just such a conjunction in Mar- tell's mental database (she keeps an electronic one as well) resulted in one of her most successful community-building efforts to date.

At one of many meetings that fill her calendar, she crossed paths with former Portland School Board member Bill Scott, now Oregon Economic Development Director. Scott lives and works elsewhere, but attends church in Portland's Irvington neighborhood in the Grant High School attendance area.

"He came over and handed me his card with his home number on it and said: 'I'm interested in my church becoming connected to your Caring Community. I'm interested in doing something with my church,'" says Martell.

She tucked the card away. Six months later a member of another church-a former teacher-approached her for the same reason. Martell asked if that church, also in the Irvington neighborhood, would like to host a lunch for neigh- borhood pastors. Representatives from five churches, including Scott's and the former teacher's, came to the meeting Martell dubbed "Pizza with the Pastors."

"It's a delightful idea," says Portland Public Schools' Pat Burk, Assistant to the Superintendent. "It takes a really creative person to take a simple idea and snowball it."

Snowball it did. Out of the lunch meetings grew Faith in Youth, an action team that now has 15 core members. In September, the group organized a Back to School Fair attended by more than 650 students from more than nine schools. Organizers and sponsors checked kids for head lice and lead poisoning, sold low-priced bicycle helmets, dispensed immunizations, and gave away school supplies and alarm clocks to help students get back to school on time and prepared to learn. A Grant High School student and teacher organized a talent show.

After its efforts to get the year off to a good start, Faith in Youth is looking for ongoing ways churches can support schools and families in the Grant area. "This was seen as the first action of a long-term partnership. It wasn't a one-shot deal," says Mark Knutsen, pastor of Augustana Lutheran Church. One idea is for churches to provide activities for children on teacher inservice and planning days. Another is to help parents navigate through the annual flood of program flyers to plan their children's summer schedule.

Martell quietly supports Faith in Youth by helping the meeting facilitator draw up the agenda, taking minutes, and lining up just the right outside person to attend a particular meeting. "I try to make it easy for them to be the visionary people," she says. She also makes sure that the good feelings and intentions generated at meetings don't evaporate from lack of follow through, says Knutsen.

MAKING THE CONNECTION
When the Caring Communities began forming in 1991, the schoolhouse doors did not immediately swing open. "Sometimes the hardest thing was to engage school people or to have them understand that it was good for the community to be involved," says Maxine Thomp- son, coordinator of The Leaders Roundtable, an ad hoc group of county leaders from business, education, government, and the nonprofit sector. The Leaders Roundtable started the Caring Communities as part of its effort to help poor and minority youth succeed in school and society.
But that early resistance seems to be giving way. Thompson explains, "As the schools lost resources [to budget cuts], they began to see the Caring Communities as a vehicle to bring resources back into the schools."
The Caring Community coordinators enable school principals to reach out into the community and become more involved, Burk says, explaining why the program appeals to the district.
James Brannon, Principal of Whitaker Middle School, sees the Caring Community performing dual roles: outreach arm and funnel for resources.
"Vicky [Martell] seems to have her hands in just about everything that could help the school," says Brannon. "I rely on her to keep me apprised of discussions around the city. She's a very valuable resource." He also praises the Caring Community's role in making the school's new Family Resource Center a reality: "They've been at the table since the planning began," he says. "I remember when this was just a thought."
Opening Whitaker's Family Resource Center in 1998 after three years of planning is one of the Grant/ Madison Caring Community's most tangible achievements. The center is a collaborative partnership between the county's departments of Health and of Community and Family Services, Whitaker's administrators and counselors, the state's Adult and Family Services, and Portland Parks and Recreation, among others. It offers health, education, and social services to children and families, all in one convenient location, with the school at the center of the service hub.
Establishing family resource centers was a first accomplishment for many of the Caring Communities. Each collaborative, however, has its own particular emphases. East County Caring Community, for instance, which takes in three entire school districts, focuses heavily on early childhood intervention.
"By the time a child is truant and hanging out in Pioneer Square [a popular gathering place in downtown Portland], you have your work cut out for you," says Lorena Camp- bell, East County Caring Community Director. "We chose a long-range focus of providing the services to young children and their families that would allow them to be successful and maintain success, rather than remedial programs."
Through the East County Caring Community, Head Start, the county health department, the school districts, and others cooperate to put on an annual developmental screening for children ages birth through five.
"The money it saves in staff and planning time is really significant," says Campbell. "What we really do is give the widest range of services for the least amount of money. No one has to dip into extra pots." This year more than 300 children were screened. Parents have to fill out only one set of forms to have children checked for immunizations, hearing, speech, fine and gross motor development, vision, and anemia. Through the screening, Head Start identifies younger children most in need of its program. Other agencies in the Caring Community's early childhood action team locate older children who need early intervention so they can start kindergarten ready to learn.
After the screening, the service providers in the early childhood action team go over the files to make sure they follow up on problems. The agencies either provide the assistance or, with parents' permission, notify the school. "We never just hand the parents information and say, 'See ya,'" says Campbell.
The Caring Communities are by nature low profile. They try to support the efforts of other groups and help them work together, not compete with them for funding or recognition. For instance, nowhere in the publicity or press coverage of the Back to School Fair was the Grant/Madison Caring Community mentioned. "I think you are most effective when you say, 'Who cares who gets the credit? Let's just get it done,'" says Martell.
The devotion to work rather than glory has its downside. "We struggle to try to point people in the direction of the Caring Communities as a place to go when you want to do work with schools," says Thompson. Well-established networks like the Caring Communities sometimes get bypassed in a political world where elected officials prefer to start their own initiatives. "There may be less interest in supporting something that somebody else started," says Thompson.
External forces are not the only challenge. When there is staff or steering committee turnover, Caring Communities risk losing their sense of direction and institutional memory. Conflicts in leadership style can arise between the coordinator and the chair of the steering committee. Sometimes a person comes to the group with an agenda and drops out when the group or coordinator does not want to take on a particular project.
Yet those in the know sing the praises of this deliberately low-key approach. "None of us can operate in isolation," says Chris Bekemeier of Lutheran Family Services. "The Caring Community provides a link so we're doing things together on a local level."

"The Caring Communities are an incredible bargain," says Burk. "The coordinators are some of the most hard-working people. They work on a shoe string, put in very long hours, and do tremendous work."

MEETINGS AND MORE
On a recent Thursday, Martell's long hours begin when she arrives at 7:15 a.m. at a high-rise near downtown for a Caring Community Steering Committee meeting. This is a group that oversees all eight of the Caring Communities. Despite the early hour and lack of coffee and donuts, the conference room is packed. It's the first meeting after the summer break. All the big agencies and supporters of the Caring Communities are there-from city, county, school districts-61 people to discuss a new county truancy initiative.

When the meeting ends at 8:45 a.m., Martell jumps in her brown 1986 Jetta and drives five miles to Whitaker Middle School for another meeting at the Family Resource Center. She comes bearing gifts from the first meeting-in addition to a promising resume there's information about an immunization clinic, a reading program in an area with a population like Whitaker's, and a head lice resource center. "I get the information and give it out right away," she says.

Four families are on the agenda. Their problems include difficulty securing eligibility for Aid to Dependent Children, poor school attendance, and fighting at school. Ma- rtell, the Family Resource Center coordinator, a welfare worker, a state protective services worker, and representatives from the Police Activities League, a housing agency, and the city's parks and recreation department zero in on ways to help these families solve the complex problems that may not have simple solutions.

It's at meetings like this one and church socials and neighborhood forums that Martell takes the community pulse. "I listen for the issues that bubble up," she says. Lately she's hearing about head lice, grandparents doing parenting, truancy, and a lack of recreational facilities in the Madison area.

From Whitaker, Martell heads back toward the center of town to St. Philip the Deacon Episcopal Church on a quiet neighborhood corner. A lunch meeting with Faith in Youth begins with a prayer. The group reviews the Back to School Fair, noting how it can be improved next year, and follows with a rich discussion of ways they can keep focused on building community, beyond hosting events.

In the afternoon Martell is back at her office at the far edge of the Grant/Madison area, typing up the meeting notes and sending them out, answering the eight phone calls on her voice mail, most of them requests for information.

During a week filled with meetings, phone calls, and paperwork, Martell recharges with some hands-on volunteer work. "Otherwise I'll go crazy," she says. Fluent in Spanish, she mentors a nine-year-old Spanish-speaking girl who is unsure of her English but was told at a previous school that it was bad to speak her own language. "We speak a lot of Spanglish," says Martell.

"Are the Caring Communities making a difference?" asks Thompson. She wants to know and she's pushed for an evaluation, anticipating it will bring about learning and improvement. She's aware it will have limitations. "The factors that influence kids staying in school are so complex," she says, "that it is very difficult to point to any one thing that happened. And because the Caring Communities are more catalysts and facilitators -bringing people to the table-and less about programs, they may have greater impact on the effectiveness of other organizations."

"Good things happen, but it's hard to track who or what is responsible," says Martell. Some forces are too big to control directly. For example, in a strong economy more students drop out to go to work; in bad times they're more likely to stay in school, she points out. "Things like that we're never going to be able to tackle. But you have to have faith that what we do is good. And I do.

I really believe in it."

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