THE PORTLAND ADVOCATE — Issue 11
A Letter from Atiim Boykin · Candidate, Portland City Council At-Large 2026
Issue 11 · Thursday, August 20, 2026 · atiim.org
“I’m here to amplify your voice.”
A quick note before this week’s letter: the deeper piece I owe you — the one built from the Homeless Voices for Justice survey — is taking longer to get right than I expected. Doing it properly means going back to people, and that takes more than a week. So it’s coming, and it’s coming right.
What follows is longer, and it’s been sitting on my mind since a porch conversation a few days ago.
WHO CARRIES THIS FORWARD
Ellen asked me a question on her porch last week that I haven’t stopped thinking about: who’s going to carry this work forward?
My hand is still raised.
Throughout my week — meeting my daughter’s new teacher, making calls and sending emails for work, knocking on doors, sitting in meetings — I heard echoes of Ellen’s question from people who’ve never met each other, all over this city.
A few doors down, a neighbor named Nancy told me she wants homelessness addressed and panhandling reduced. Another neighbor, who grew up on that very street, told me he wants to see more services for people experiencing substance use disorder and mental illness, not fewer. And back in early June, in the Rosemont district, someone brought up a day center before I even asked the question — unprompted, like it was the obvious missing piece.
It isn’t fully missing. It’s just not scaled to meet the need this city has.
This isn’t one person’s opinion. It’s the same need, resurfacing on its own, on every street I’ve walked all summer.
And on Congress Street — where families and visitors walk, perhaps not so confidently — the same crisis looks different. Businesses watching people linger in doorways. Empty storefronts. Owners struggling to bring customers downtown, caught between compassion and exhaustion. Coffee, clothes, a place to sleep for the night. All necessary. None of them a pathway. A Band-Aid.
We have a new program that is genuinely rebuilding some trust: the Constables, who walk and meet with our unhoused neighbors, point them toward other services — as scarce as those are downtown — and try to ease the tension business owners carry about losing customers to fear, and losing their businesses altogether.
Yet it still seems like a game of whack-a-mole. Where do we direct people seeking community, support, and services when we don’t have a central place to direct them to?
LISTENING IS THE PATH
I’ve spent twenty-plus years doing this work, and if there’s one thing clinical work and case management taught me, it’s that prescription isn’t the path. Listening is.
I don’t walk in and tell someone what I believe they need to do, even when I have a reasonable answer — or several. The work is in identifying the actual barriers in front of them. Build trust first. Then, and only then, can you build a relationship that bridges gaps. Agency is paramount in anyone’s growth, health, and stability.
I ask questions like: Do you remember a time in your life when you were happy, or healthy, or stable? That question, and others like it, are good for teasing out what worked and for creating a spark of hope to reach toward something greater than what someone currently has.
That’s true one person at a time. It’s just as true at the scale of a city.
Which means the same principle applies to the people who run our shelters and service organizations, not just the people they serve. Real accountability isn’t imposed from outside — it’s built through the same relationships that make any intervention work. Without that trust, you can’t collaborate with the providers doing this work daily, and you can’t build the bridges to Augusta or the county that regional solutions actually require.
More than 400 people who sought help at Portland’s Homelessness Services Center came from other Maine towns. This was never a problem Portland could solve alone, and pretending otherwise has cost us time we don’t have.
THE MODEL ALREADY EXISTS HERE
Ellen spent many years doing the kind of work most people only read about. She helped build care through partnerships like the MaineHealth–Preble Street Learning Collaborative, where medicine doesn’t wait for someone to walk into a clinic. It goes to them — co-locating case managers, nurse practitioners, a place to rest, wash clothes, and shower, alongside walk-in medical care and mental health outreach, built specifically for people the traditional system keeps missing.
That’s not charity work. That’s clinical work, done at the hardest possible intersection of medicine and poverty — and it’s exactly why her question landed on listening ears.
What Ellen described isn’t rare in Portland. It’s proof the model already exists and works, at a small scale. The Collaborative exists because the need was already there and something had to answer it. The answer was two institutions deciding to coordinate rather than duplicate.
The question isn’t whether this approach works. It’s why we’ve let it stay so small.
Portland already has pieces of something bigger, scattered across the city instead of working as one. Preble Street and MaineHealth do medical coordination. Greater Portland Health runs a federally qualified health center built specifically for people without stable housing. Commonspace runs recovery housing and a formal reentry partnership with Cumberland County Jail. Avesta Housing has already proven Housing First works here — Logan Place, Florence House, Huston Commons, each one a site where housing came first and stability followed, not the other way around.
None of these organizations are failing. They’re just not standing in the same room.
A day center built around this model wouldn’t replace any of them. It would give them one door to work through together, each showing up in their strongest lane: medical care from one table, housing placement from another, recovery support from a third, case management tying it together. Someone walking in doesn’t need to know which of six organizations to trust. They need one door, and a plan waiting on the other side of it.
THE PART THAT EARNS TRUST BACK
The key is transparency. It has to be clear, or none of this means anything.
Every dollar spent, every outcome tracked, published where the public — and the funders willing to invest in something proven — can actually see it, understand the impact, and see the alignment of intention.
Congress Street businesses don’t need another program they’re told to trust. They need to see, in plain numbers, that people are moving toward stability — not cycling through the same doors over and over, forever, or until they overdose for the last time.
That’s not a harder standard to meet. It’s the only standard that earns the public’s confidence back.
WHAT I’VE SEEN WORK
When I worked as a Forensic Intensive Case Manager through DHHS, I covered both York and Cumberland County. I had to know as many providers as I could — from detox to aftercare for substance misuse, from housing for people on the sex offender registry to shelters for people with no housing at all. I met with police chiefs in many towns to ask what support they needed. I met with jail staff to coordinate transports for people who had sat with counselors while incarcerated and said they wanted to end their cycles of use.
I’ve sat in committees in Biddeford and here in Portland where multiple partners discussed the same unhoused neighbors bouncing between two cities. I’ve watched organizations that compete for the same funding streams coordinate anyway, so people could share crumbs of stability.
And when the opioid crisis became undeniable, providers from across the state met — and still meet — to discuss what’s offered statewide, where the gaps are, and how to intervene. That brought state agencies to the table, where first-line providers, some with lived experience and others with decades in mental health, recovery counseling, and health care, convened weekly to strategize, share resources, and push for legislative change.
They are hard to ignore when they make a thread easy to see, understand, and solve.
CORE COUNTY
Twenty-some years ago I was a young case manager in Kern County, California. Filing reports. Chasing state agents on the phone. Advocating for people to get the Social Security Disability benefits that would pay their rent and their medication.
I took very descriptive notes. I documented everything. I put my clients in front of psychiatrists for evaluations, transported them to housing, and supported them every step of the way. I called state agencies, talked with agents, said please and thank you, followed up — and got people granted in three months when it usually took six.
Everyone thought I was a wiz. The truth was simpler: I built relationships with my clients, with community providers, with state funders, and I followed through on what I started.
I didn’t know it then, but I was standing at the beginning of something.
Kern County kept building on that work, year after year, long after I’d left Bakersfield for Oakland, and long before I ever thought about Maine. And in January 2021, Bakersfield and Kern County became the fifth community in the entire United States — and the first in California — certified at “functional zero” for chronic homelessness.
Let me be precise about what that means, because it’s a narrow term and it deserves an honest definition. Functional zero for chronic homelessness means the community can consistently keep fewer than three people in the condition of long-term homelessness with a disabling condition — the population that is hardest to reach and most often left behind. It does not mean nobody in Bakersfield is homeless. It means that for the people who’d been outside the longest, the system finally worked faster than the crisis did.
I think about that a lot. Not because I get to take credit for it — I don’t. I was one small piece of something that took two decades to build. But because it proves something I need Portland to believe: this isn’t a hopeful theory. It’s a place that did it.
And here’s the part that should make Portland impatient rather than intimidated. Kern County has just under a million people — roughly fourteen times Portland’s population. Bakersfield alone is about five times our size. An entire county, a far more scattered service population, more agencies to align, more distance between every door.
If a system that size could get mental health, housing, case management, and benefits access all pointed in the same direction, a city Portland’s size has no excuse for taking longer. We have fewer players to coordinate and a shorter walk between every door.
The size that looks like our disadvantage is actually our advantage.
SANTA MONICA
If Kern County proves this works at scale, Santa Monica proves it works at Portland’s size.
Santa Monica has about 90,000 residents — a small beach city built on tourism, not unlike Portland. In 2016, it didn’t build a sprawling new system. It built one coordinated team: a program manager; case managers for wellness, housing, and substance use; plus a physician, a psychiatrist, and a peer support specialist. All of them worked with the same short list of people who most needed help and most strained city services.
RAND studied it. The program offset 17 to 43 percent of its own cost through reduced police contact, fewer emergency room visits, and less strain on city services. A $600,000 investment that paid a real share of itself back.
Portland doesn’t need California’s budget to do this. It needs California’s willingness to put the right people in the same room.
WHAT A CONSTABLE CAN’T DO
The constable program is popular, and I understand why. Business owners feel safer. Neighbors like seeing it.
But a constable can tell someone to move along. A constable cannot treat a psychiatric crisis, get someone into detox, or file the paperwork that connects a person to disability benefits and stable housing.
They’re valuable — and they should be one part of a larger system that assesses each person who walks through a day center’s door, gauges their readiness to change, and moves them toward housing, stability, and thriving.
Right now, we have a system that is dis-membered.
Portland’s Behavioral Health Unit does this work today with seven people, in a city of more than 70,000, handling more than 1,300 calls in a partial year. That’s not criticism of the unit. It’s a description of what happens when the workload outgrows the team.
WHY PEOPLE COME HERE
There are many services in Portland, and I believe that during the pandemic — when remote work suddenly became possible — word got out that this was a good place to be. People returned, moved here, bought homes, planted roots, grew families. That was a time of displacement and rising costs.
And it’s also a place people come because Portland has services. A bus ticket from a small town. A place where needs can be met.
Portland is a place other cities send people to, without chipping in to shoulder what those people bring with them. It’s a place that cares. It’s also a place that needs help helping.
This isn’t a radical ask. It’s a conversation I’ve already started at City Hall — the other half of the same investment, not a competing one.
TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW
Picture Portland twenty years from now.
A place connected regionally, with transportation linking people to downtown, to Westbrook, to South Portland and Scarborough. Where those same cities chip in to share the financial responsibility for housing essential workers, artists, teachers, nurses, service and hospitality workers, and the working waterfront.
A place that chipped away at homelessness until it was certified at functional zero for chronic homelessness.
Picture a councilor — maybe someone who wasn’t even born when Ellen asked me her question — telling a room full of neighbors that Portland is one of a handful of American cities that got this right. Not because we cared more than anyone else. Every city cares.
Because we built the door, and the accountability behind it, and we didn’t stop until the numbers actually moved.
That’s not a fantasy. That’s Kern County’s own timeline. I got to watch the first chapter of it in person.
I want Portland to write its own.
A POEM — RE-MEMBER
Can you remember a time when you were happy?
A time when your needs were met, and you felt seen and heard?
Do you remember what you felt like then?
Were you able, stable, and capable of taking care of yourself?
Can you remember a time when you didn’t worry about losing your housing,
your job, your family, your mind?
Do you remember a time when you felt loved and cared for,
and believed that things would work out for the better?
Can you recall a time when you had everything you needed
to survive, thrive, and feel truly alive?
Did you panic then?
Did you mask the fears, the pains, the anxieties of loss?
Did you ever believe you’d experience that at all?
Can you remember joy?
Has there been anyone in your life you could count on —
someone who didn’t judge you for your mistakes, your missteps,
someone who would push you toward greatness?
Has anyone ever believed in you?
Have they held you accountable to who you truly are?
When was the last time someone said I believe in you?
Do you remember what that felt like?
Do you believe in yourself?
What would help you believe in yourself?
What would support your remembering the parts of your joy,
your dreams, your ambitions?
Do you believe you are worthy of your successes when you achieve them?
Can you remember yourself?
Do you need help doing that work?
What would motivate you to reach back toward a hand reaching toward yours?
Are you willing to do the work necessary to stand up and walk?
What if I told you we have been looking for you?
What if I told you that we can help you remember?
Will you take my hand and walk with me to remember?
📣 SHARE: If this letter named something you’ve been thinking about, send it to one person who’d recognize it too.
CHIP IN: $4,500 by August 31, and the month is closing fast. I’m running a traditional campaign — capped by law, funded by neighbors. Lawn signs, shirts, door hangers, postcards. Nothing else.
Every Voice Matters. Atiim Boykin · Portland City Council, At-Large 2026 · atiim.org
Paid for by the Atiim for Portland City Council Group · P.O. Box 1992, Portland, ME 04104
SOURCES
MaineHealth–Preble Street Learning Collaborative: MaineHealth.org and Preble Street reporting, Jan. 2025 · Regional homelessness figure: NewsCenter Maine, 2025 · Greater Portland Health: greaterportlandhealth.org · Commonspace: commonspacemaine.org · Avesta Housing First sites: Preble Street, June 2024 · Bakersfield/Kern County functional zero certification: Built for Zero / Community Solutions, January 2021 · Santa Monica program outcomes: RAND Corporation, June 2019 (RR2848) · Portland Behavioral Health Unit staffing: Portland Public Health, 2025 · Population figures: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024–2025 estimates