Jett Angus, left, and Mallory Harper, center, both 20, learn how to use an automated screen printing machine from Iain Ogilvie, right, the production manager at New Avenues INK, a nonprofit-owned print shop in Southeast Portland.Allison Barr/The Oregonian
Wednesday was Mallory Harper’s first day at her new job as an intern at New Avenues INK, a print-making shop in Southeast Portland, a few blocks from the Hawthorne Bridge.
Asked why she took the job, Harper, 20, laughed a bit.
“Not being homeless,” she said. “That’s what brought me here.”
It’s not hyperbole. Until a few months ago, Harper was living in a tent struggling to get and stay sober after two years of things in her life going from bad – no one left willing to let her crash on their couch – to worse – spending all day figuring out where to shower and what to eat.
“I’m now living inside and I feel like I should have a real adult job and do real adult things,” Harper said. “I have bills to pay.”
New Avenues INK is a fully functional screen printing shop. The New Seasons grocery store chain orders its uniforms there, just to name one of about 100 annual customers. It’s one of two businesses owned by New Avenues for Youth, a homeless youth services nonprofit, that are staffed primarily by interns who are homeless, were recently homeless or are at immediate risk of becoming homeless.
The idea is to offer at-risk teenagers and young adults, ages 16 to 24, training in both hard and soft jobs skills along with an experience they can put on their resume as a step toward landing a next job. About 35 young people are interns for 12 to 24 weeks each year, earning $17 an hour. A few get promoted to shift lead and earn up to another year of employment, plus a raise.
“What we know about reducing homelessness is that if we can provide opportunities to young people, they’re less likely to be homeless as adults,” said Jennie Vinson, director of social enterprises for New Avenues.
Myah Macias Perez, 19, accepts a payment from a Ben & Jerry’s customer at the ice cream store’s downtown Portland location Wednesday. Macias Perez is a shift leader at the store, where she’s worked for about a year and a half.Allison Barr/The Oregonian
A year after participating, 83% of young people who completed the intern program in 2024 were either in school or working, according to New Avenues data. That’s a big deal, because low educational attainment and unemployment are among the top risk factors for homelessness, according to a review of 116 studies on factors that lead to homelessness in high-income countries.
Oregon has among the highest incidences of youth homelessness in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. A federally mandated count from January 2023 found that more than 5,000 people under age 15 were homeless in Oregon. That number has almost certainly risen, but more recent statewide data is not yet available.
A separate database, managed by Multnomah County, shows that 2,175 people under age 25 were homeless in the county as of April.
In addition to the print shop, New Avenues owns Portland’s last Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop, on Southwest Yamhill Street between 5th and 6th avenues. Youth interns have been serving up scoops at that location since 2004 and most customers have no idea that buying a cone also means helping young people get off, and stay off, the streets.
Myel Gilkerson, who stopped in for a cone with two of his colleagues on their lunch break Wednesday, said he was there for the “phenomenal” ice cream, but said it was “awesome” to hear about the connection to helping homeless youth.
Together, the two businesses bring in about $500,000 a year in annual revenue, which nearly covers the cost of operating them and supporting and training the young people they employ, Vinson said. Ben & Jerry’s is closer to being self-sustaining than New Avenues INK, Vinson said.
Every intern who becomes a shift lead or assistant manager at the New Avenues Ben & Jerry’s is able to leave their handprint when their program is done. Allison Barr/The Oregonian
Getting both businesses to operate in the black could make good fiscal sense for the nonprofit, given the downtick in public funding for homeless services.
Lauren Eads, a spokesperson for New Avenues, said their programs have taken a hit for the new fiscal year, as have many local programs. Multnomah County, which administers a significant chunk of homeless services funding in Portland, had to tighten its belt this year as pandemic era funding ran out and the revenue coming in from the regional homeless services tax failed to increase as dramatically as it has in recent times.
An effort to significantly increase funding for youth homeless services died in the state Legislature this session as well, though there is still more money in that bucket now than there was a few years ago. Lawmakers approved $25.3 million for youth homeless services for the new biennium, maintaining current funding.
“Given the cuts that other programs took, … getting a ‘flatline’ amount was a victory and we make the best of it,” said Doug Riggs, director of Alliance4Kids and an advocate who worked on the bill.
Federal money for youth homeless services is also under threat from the current administration, according to reporting by The Oregonian/OregonLive. That’s especially true if the funding is explicitly meant to help two groups who are overrepresented within the homeless population: children of color and LGBTQ+ young people.
The Republican bill that passed Congress Thursday will further limit food assistance and medical care for anyone who is not working, which would include a lot of young people who are homeless. The new rules requiring more frequent eligibility checks could also make it much harder to access benefits even for people who are working.
Mallory Harper, pictured here on her first day of her new job at New Avenues INK, was homeless for two and a half years before getting sober and applying to the internship program at the suggestion of her health care provider.Allison Barr/The Oregonian
“Funding cuts push homeless youth further to the margins — especially LGBTQIA2S+ youth and youth of color — by cutting vital resources when stability, support and shelter are needed most,” said Sean Suib, executive director of New Avenues for Youth, in a statement emailed to The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Despite the political headwinds, Vinson said the primary mission at both the ice cream store and the print shop remains consistent: Give young people facing immense challenges an opportunity to steer their own ship. The concrete skills they learn, like running an autopress at the screen shop or making and decorating an ice cream cake at Ben & Jerry’s, should make them more employable, she said.
Offering these job training opportunities specifically to young people who have high barriers to employment could be especially key as jobs for teenagers become harder and harder to get. The unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds in June was 14%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That rate has risen steadily in the last several months and is the highest it has been since the pandemic.
A good deal of the benefit from working at this age also comes in learning softer job skills, like how to show up on time, fill out a time card and get along with colleagues, Vinson said.
“Our goal is to meet youth where they are and define success based on their goals,” she said. “We give a lot of second chances here. And third and fourth chances.”
Myah Macias Perez decorates a cake in the back room at Ben & Jerry’s. Cake sales at the downtown location have quadrupled since the second to last local Ben & Jerry’s shop in Portland recently closed.Allison Barr/The Oregonian
Among their other duties at New Avenues INK, a Southeast Portland screen-printing shop, interns learn to mix ink in Pantone colors to be used in custom designs. Allison Barr/The Oregonian
A note taped to the counter behind the cash register at the downtown Ben & Jerry’s reminds workers to be friendly. Learning customer service and how to get along with colleagues are among the key skills gained by participants in the New Avenues for Youth internship program.Allison Barr/The Oregonian
Sometimes the reasons behind poor job performance are pretty unexpected, Vinson said. She recalled one young man who didn’t show up to his job as a Ben & Jerry’s scooper for three days with no explanation. Most ice cream shops might have let him go for being unreliable. But when Vinson and her staff finally tracked him down – he was living in a shelter and had no cellphone – it turned out he hadn’t been to work because someone had stolen his shoes. They got him new shoes. He showed back up.
Myah Macias Perez, 19, is the current shift leader at Ben & Jerry’s. She said something people often don’t understand about her and many of her colleagues is that they are essentially on their own. Even though many, like Macias Perez, do have living parents, they can’t always or don’t always feel like they can rely on those adults for help.
“It’s like you have to become an adult,” said Macias Perez, who moved back to Oregon from Las Vegas two years ago when she felt she could no longer live with her father. She lives with her older sister now.
As a shift leader, it’s now Macias Perez’s job to help the new scoopers learn what it means to be a reliable grown up.
“Not everyone gets along,” she said when asked about the biggest challenge of managing a team. “If any problems do arise, I tell them to be mature about it. You don’t want to give customers a bad example.”
Myah Macias Perez, a formerly homeless 19-year-old, scoops a cone for a Ben & Jerry’s customer while Erica Olson, her supervisor, takes a new order.Allison Barr/The Oregonian
The adult managers of both the ice cream shop and the screen printing shop are hired because they know how to do the work and are interested in the extra teaching that comes with the role. Erica Olson, who manages the Ben & Jerry’s, said she now considers herself something of a social worker as well as an ice cream shop manager.
“Coming here I had to learn a lot more patience and grace and how to be more of a teacher,” she said. But despite that, Olson said she loves her job and the rewards that come every time a former intern comes back through, just to say hello.
Back at the screen printing shop Wednesday afternoon, Harper, Jett Angus, her fellow intern, and their supervisor had spent most of the work day setting up an autopress to create a run of University of Portland T-shirts. It’s a complicated collage of a design with a lot of Oregon-ish things – Mt. Hood, crabs, wildflowers, clouds and lots and lots of trees – making up a map of the state with “Pilots Pre-College” printed across the southern border. There are five screens, each of which gets layered with a different color of ink.
Despite the press being somewhat automated, the ink has to be applied, in big goopy swirls, by hand. Then each screen has to be checked for alignment. Then someone has to manually enter a program to describe what the machine should do for each new pattern.
“I’m learning a lot of it is manual,” said Harper with a smile as she leaned forward to watch her manager, Iain Ogilvie, spread on some teal ink.
A first-day intern at New Avenues INK, Mallory Harper, left, watches her supervisor, Iain Ogilvie, right, adjust a screen to be in just the right place for an overlapping design with five layers of ink.Allison Barr/The Oregonian
Angus was quieter, just watching Ogilvie and not saying much. He grew up in Portland and, at 20, is a few credits away from graduating from an alternative high school in Northeast Portland.
“I’ve never had to be homeless, but I’ve spent a lot of time being outside,” Angus said.
He has collected cans to get enough money to eat sometimes. And while he still lives with his parents for the most part, he’s been feeling the push to figure out a way to be on his own for good. He has had other jobs, but struggled to hold them.
Angus said he’d realized he had to find a way to incorporate art into his work if he was going to stick with it. That had seemed a big leap from the fast food jobs he’d held so far. Then a school counselor told him about the screen-printing internship with New Avenues.
“(Screen-printing) seemed like a perfect balance to me” of art and paid work, Angus said. “This is the perfect middle ground.”
He hopes the internship helps him pave a path toward full employment so that he can finally move out of his parents’ house and into his own place. He hopes it can help him earn some respect back from his parents too, he said, since he knows he’s “pushed their limits a bit.”
“I was kind of prepared at one point to live off cans,” Angus said, “but just the fact that this is available is enough inspiration.”
Jett Angus, 20, is one of the newest interns in the New Avenues for Youth social enterprise program.Allison Barr/The Oregonian
Lillian Mongeau Hughes covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian. Email her with tips or questions at lmhughes@oregonian.com. Or follow her on Bluesky @lmonghughes.bsky.social or X at @lrmongeau.
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