Something that inspires me about the work Our Just Future does is that we don’t just address immediate and short term needs, we also address the policies and practices that perpetuate poverty.

Dawn joined the board at Our Just Future (formerly known as Human Solutions) in 2021 because she believes that no one should worry if they will have a safe stable housing. She moved from South Carolina to Portland seven years prior, and she resonates with a poem by Richard Wright from his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy: “I was leaving the South / To fling myself into the unknown. … / I was taking a part of the South / To transplant in alien soil, / To see if it could grow differently, / If it could drink of new and cool rains, / Bend in strange winds, / Respond to the warmth of other suns / And, perhaps, to bloom.”

Favorite place in Oregon: Yachats.