Happy 4th Day of Christmas!

For this 4th day, I’m supporting Outside In, a Portland organization which works to provide services to local homeless youth and other marginalized folks. For 50 years, they’ve been providing housing, education, employment, medical care, counseling, and a variety of other services. They do a good job of understanding the variety of experiences that lead people into bad situations, meeting people where they are, and working with them as individuals. They also don’t ignore the systemic issues which leave people in vulnerable positions in the first place, and work to address those through advocacy and education.

And just in case you’re done with humans as a concept (I’d urge you to reconsider, although sometimes I get where you’re coming from), they also run Portland’s only non-profit dog daycare - and it’s called Virginia Woof! And if you love dogs and are also still okay with humans, you might like to know that they use the daycare as a job training program for their human friends.