Think Out Loud

The very first Voices Rock choir started in Denver in 2014 by a music teacher who heard from her students’ parents and her own  friends that they wished they had some kind of musical outlet. Jill Teas obliged with a small group of adults who met for several weeks, rehearsing popular songs and performing them at local bars. But the no-audition “come one, come all” ethos of the choir quickly spread to other Colorado cities. And after a few years, Teas chose to quit her teaching job to run the Voices Rock organization full time. This year, three Northwest cities began their own Voice Rock chapters: Seattle, Tacoma and Portland.  We hear from the Voices Rock founder about the idea behind the choir — and from two Portland participants, director Caley Barstow and soloist Courtney Upton, about what they get out of it.

Grandparents for Vaccines is a nationwide nonprofit that aims to educate the current generation of parents about vaccine-preventable diseases. Launched in September, the group has produced videos of grandparents describing what it was like to endure or witness their friends, classmates and relatives battle illnesses such as polio, measles and pertussis before vaccines for them existed.

The group’s launch comes amid rising vaccine skepticism fueled by misinformation about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.  A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post showed that 1 in 6 parents in the US have delayed or skipped vaccines for their children. Teri Mills is a founding member of Grandparents for Vaccines and a retired public health nurse who was named "Oregon Nurse of the Year" in 2019 by the Oregon Nurse Foundation. She joins us along with Sheri Schouten, a retired public health nurse and former Oregon state lawmaker, to talk about their work with Grandparents for Vaccines.

Over the past decade, the Oregon Department of Justice has tried shifting blame to parents in wrongful death and negligence claims against the Department of Human Services , new reporting from The Oregonian/OregonLive shows. The publication found 10 cases where this was happening. But in half of those, parents were not accused of any crimes yet were still sued by the state . Sami Edge is the assistant breaking news editor for the Oregonian. She joins us to share more on why this is happening and what it means for parents.

It's not the first time that the Northwest Classical Theatre Collaborative has performed at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, the state’s only women’s prison. But the November performances of the Greek tragedy “Elektra” does mark the first time that the play has been selected and performed by the women in custody themselves. Patrick Walsh is the executive artistic director of the Northwest Classical Theatre Collaborative. He and production manager Lyndsay Hogland co-facilitated the theatre project, which began in March. After the women signed up for the theatre program, they were given four classic plays to consider: “Elektra,” “Three Sisters,” “Our Town”  and “Measure for Measure.” After reading and discussing all the plays over many weeks, the women finally chose “Elektra” and began rehearsals in May. The show opened on Friday, Nov. 14, with one other public performance on Nov. 21, as well as two separate shows for the women in custody. We’re joined by Walsh and Hogland to learn more about the impact of the program and performances, along with two of the actors at Coffee Creek: Nistasha Tate plays Elektra, and Fahlynn Nix is the assistant stage manager and also plays the part of Aegisthus.

The Newport Fishermen’s Wives, a nonprofit organization focusing on building community and improving safety in the local fishing industry, faced a long legal battle in 2013 to ensure Newport’s Coast Guard helicopter would stay in the coastal town. Recently, the helicopter was removed from Newport and relocated to North Bend, with no public warning or preliminary risk assessments. 

Its relocation is linked to the rumors of a possible new ICE facility in the coastal town, along with job postings for ICE detention officers in Newport and a federal contractor looking to lease space at the Newport Municipal Airport. At a city council meeting last Wednesday, residents raised concerns about the possible ICE facility and raised alarm about the safety of fishermen prior to crabbing season on the Oregon coast. Taunette Dixon of the Newport Fishermen’s Wives joins us to discuss the helicopter’s removal.

Mental health conditions, including substance use disorder, caused more pregnancy-related deaths in Oregon between 2018 and 2021 than any other factor. That’s according to the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, which assesses deaths that occur during pregnancy, childbirth and the first year postpartum. As reported in InvestigateWest, nearly all of the deaths attributed to mental health conditions were deemed potentially preventable by the committee. InvestigateWest reporter Kaylee Tornay joins us with more details.

The Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice began more than 20 years ago as an extension of the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition. Its shorthand is IMIrJ (pronounced “emerge”) with the r standing for refugee. IMIrJ has become an independent nonprofit, drawing “faith communities and people of conscience” into the effort to protect the civil rights and well-being of immigrant families. Members and volunteers provide accompaniment for immigrants to appointments with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, financial support and other resources to immigrants. We talk with IMIrJ organizer and Methodist pastor Keren Rodriguez and IMIrJ board member Bob Brown, who is a long time member of Havurah Shalom, about how their work is going now as the Trump administration pursues mass deportation.

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history ended last Wednesday, but many federal workers, including air traffic controllers, are still waiting to receive full backpay. The government shutdown left roughly 13,000 air traffic controllers without pay for 43 days, leading many to take on second jobs. Many say the shortages during the government shutdown only amplified current issues caused by a long-term staffing shortage. Lyle Clingman, a retired air traffic controller from Eugene, joins us to share more about the long-term staffing shortage as well as the repercussions air traffic controllers faced during the recent government shutdown.

Earlier this month, Liv Rainey-Smith became the first Oregonian to win a World Fantasy Award for “Best Artist.” Rainey-Smith now joins a pantheon of World Fantasy Award-winning writers and visual artists that includes Stephen King, Edward Gorey and fellow Oregonian Ursula K. LeGuin.

Oregon ArtsWatch recently profiled Rainey-Smith, whose achievement is all the more notable for the thousand-year-old artistic craft the Portlander specializes in. Rainey-Smith uses blocks of wood that she carves by hand, coats in ink, covers with paper and then rolls through an etching press to make prints featuring mythological creatures or otherworldly scenes laden with skulls, ravens and other macabre symbolism. 

Six of her original woodcut prints and descriptions she wrote for them are included in “The Dagon Collection,” an anthology published last year that was nominated for a 2025 World Fantasy Award and inspired by a short story from pioneering horror and fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft. Rainey-Smith talks to us about her award-winning art and the childhood health struggles she overcame that inform and inspire her work.

Oregon lawmakers passed the Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act in 2021, but the changes just went into effect on July 1, 2025. It’s a sweeping, multi-pronged approach to reduce waste, and many of the changes the law drives are the responsibility of producers and manufacturers. New recycling centers are one element of the Act, the first of which came online this fall. At the RecycleOn Center in Ashland, more kinds of plastic can be recycled, along with shredded paper, aluminum foil and other material that often ends up in landfills or contaminating recycling picked up by curbside collectors. Kim Holmes is the executive director of Oregon’s Circular Action Alliance, the producer responsibility organization that co-operates the Ashland facility. She joins us to tell us more about the impact of this center and the other 143 planned for the state.

Vancouver-based Educational Opportunities for Children and Families serves more than 400 participants enrolled in Head Start. The free federal program provides child care, early learning, nutrition and health screenings for low-income children and their families. Nearly 300 children in Southwest Washington either lost access to their Head Start programs or had their hours cut back on Nov. 1 because of the government shutdown, which ended on Wednesday evening. 

On Monday, EOCF’s board of directors and its parent policy council voted to approve accepting a private donation to replenish the nonprofit’s savings it had been using to keep open three Head Start centers in Vancouver for families with the highest needs. EOCF has now reopened its Head Start center in Yacolt, four centers in Vancouver and restored program hours cut at five other centers. The donation has also helped EOCF to bring back more than 90 employees who were partially or fully furloughed on Nov. 1 when it didn’t get its scheduled federal funding. 

EOCF CEO Rekah Strong says it could take weeks before its grant funding resumes because of the backlog in grant applications from other Head Start providers across the nation who also had to cut services during the shutdown. She joins us to share the struggles her organization has recently faced, along with Chantel Martin, a Head Start parent whose 5-year-old daughter attends the reopened EOCF center in Yacolt.

In 2020, the Almeda Fire ripped through Jackson County. The catastrophic blaze destroyed more than 2,600 homes between Ashland, Talent, Phoenix and Medford, according to Jefferson Public Radio.

The “Think Out Loud” team traveled to Southern Oregon during the spring of 2025 and talked to residents about how they’re thinking about fire in their communities now.

In Ashland, the city and the forest are tied together. The watershed, which provides the source of Ashland’s drinking water, is more than 15,000 acres of potentially combustible forestland. Chris Chambers is the city’s forestry officer. He’s been a member of Ashland Fire And Rescue since 2002 and has worked on the city’s wildfire planning efforts.

Along with city, federal and tribal partners, the Ashland-based Lomakatsi Restoration Project focuses on ecological resilience in Oregon and Northern California. Its restoration projects are spread throughout the region. Marko Bey is the executive director and founder of the organization. Belinda Brown is the tribal partnerships director.

Chambers, Bey and Brown shared how they think about wildfire resilience and how they approach their work in their communities during a conversation we recorded with them and first aired in June 2025.

Percival Everett has made a career out of exploring the nature of absurdity. You may have become aware of Everett in the last few years when his novel “Erasure” was adapted into the movie “American Fiction” in 2023, or when his book “James” won the Pulitzer prize last year. But Everett has written 24 novels since 1983 along with several books of poetry and short story collections, each of them tackling a different genre of writing and a different angle on nonsense, absurdity or irony. As he says, “to accept the absurdity of a situation is to accept the humanness of it.” We talk to Percival Everett in front of an audience of students at McDaniel High School in Portland.

Floyd Skloot’s newest collection of poetry, "Dancing in the Cosmos, New & Selected Poems, 1973-2024," covers the span of his career, including the best of his previously published poems and a section of new poems about his experience living with Parkinson's disease. We spoke to Skloot along with his daughter, the author Rebecca Skloot, in front of an audience at Powells.

A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association lays out a range of evidence-based initiatives to reduce firearms deaths in the U.S. by 2040. The article comes out of a large interdisciplinary conference earlier this year that was chaired by researcher Fred Rivara, pediatrics professor in the University of Washington’s Medical School. He says professionals in the fields of public health, criminology, public policy and gun manufacturing discussed what has worked all over the country to bring gun deaths down. He says the idea was not to do away with guns or the Second Amendment, but to encourage the wider implementation of policies that have already been proven effective — and use emerging technologies — to reduce deaths.

Rivara joins us to tell us more about the research into gun violence as a public health crisis, and what he hopes policy makers and the general public take from it.

Twenty years ago, Third Rail Repertory Theatre launched itself onto the Portland theatre scene with a production called “Recent Tragic Events,” set just after the attacks of 9/11. That play, written by Craig Wright, put Third Rail Rep on the map, winning a number of local theatre honors. While many theatres have come and gone in that time, Third Rail is among those that were able to survive the pandemic and other economic pressures. It’s celebrating 20 years by reprising that first show, “Recent Tragic Events.” We talk with director Scott Yarbrough, who was also the company’s founding artistic director, about how the play resonates today.

Last Friday morning, Oregonians were able to begin accessing their full monthly benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to fully fund the federal food aid program which serves more than 42 million Americans. But many of those households face new uncertainty after the Supreme Court granted on Friday night the Trump administration’s emergency appeal of the ruling. In a statement, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said the state had acted lawfully in sending out the SNAP payments and vowed to fight the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s demand that states “undo any steps” they took to issue  the full November SNAP benefits.

Food pantries across Oregon, including at William Temple House in Portland, have mobilized in recent weeks to help people like Elaine, one of the more than 750,000 Oregonians who are SNAP recipients. To protect her privacy, OPB is identifying Elaine only by her first name. She says SNAP has been a lifeline to her for nearly 20 years while being unable to work fulltime because of a disability and experiencing periods of homelessness. Elaine joins us to discuss the restoration of her SNAP benefits after nearly a week without them, and the uncertainty about the program’s future. 

The leading cause of death for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers is COVID-19 followed by cancer linked to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center,according to a Mother Jones report. ICE data reviewed by the outlet showed that deaths and assaults at the agency are not outsized compared to other law enforcement, despite the Trump administration’s claims that their work is exceptionally dangerous. Noah Lanard is a reporter for Mother Jones and covered the story. He joins us with details of what he found in the data.

New data from Downtown Clean & Safe shows a growing number of pedestrians visiting Portland’s downtown. Compared to last year, the total number of visitors from January to August was up by 5.6%, making it the strongest year for downtown since the pandemic. But those numbers still have not caught up to what they were pre-lockdowns -- and are still just half of what they were in 2019. We’ll hear from various community leaders to hear how they view downtown. Todd Zarnitz is the president of the Northwest District Association. Sarah Shaoul is the founder and CEO of Bricks Need Mortar. And Ryan Hashagen is the founder of Icicle Tricycles, director of the Steel Bridge Skatepark Coalition and an adjunct professor at PSU. And we get thoughts from community members, visitors and business owners we gathered on a recent visit to downtown.

Protests at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in South Portland have been largely peaceful, despite President Trump’s attempts to send National Guard troops to the site. Local law enforcement has successfully managed conflicts among protesters and counter-protesters and made arrests for those who commit property or other crimes.

In September, Portland Police Chief Bob Day said on “Think Out Loud” that the bureau’s approach to these protests is consciously different from the one it took in 2020. He cited the use of Dialogue Liaison Officers who are “embedded” early on. “These are officers that are clearly identifiable with white shirts,” he said. “They’ve had additional training, and they go early on and try to establish communication and understanding.”

We learn more about this approach from Sergeant Daniel DiMatteo and Officer Jessica Ruch. They are among the approximately 10 Dialogue Liaison Officers the bureau deploys to protests.

There are more than 150 parks, and over 11,000 acres of land maintained by Portland Parks and Recreation. Parks play a role in providing a community gathering space, an area for exercise and more for communities. And recently, Portland voters cast their ballots on whether they support an increase to the Portland Parks levy. But how have parks changed over the years and which ones have we lost along the way? To answer these questions and more, Catherine McNeur joins us. She is a history professor at Portland State University and the author of two books, “Taming Manhattan” and "Mischievous Creatures." Her new course, Parks & Portland, will be offered this spring and explores the history of the city’s parks and the ways they have changed culturally, physically and environmentally over the last two centuries.