Accepting a position on the Portland Now Inc. (PNI) board is just the next adventure for Caleb Brooks, a Portland resident of ten years and recent addition to the team at Hand in Hand Ministries at 518 North 26th Street in Portland. Caleb has spent extended periods of his life in Belize, Cambodia, Nicaragua and England (and many other places I couldn’t keep up with), and even saddled up as a sheepherder in the Big Butte Mountain range in Montana.
“The rancher had 10,000 acres,” Caleb said. “I had two dogs and a rifle. That’s where I learned how to read while walking.”
Caleb has been Program Director for Hand in Hand for about a year, heading up projects and coordinating volunteers for a variety of safety, accessibility and repair operations in the West Louisville community, such as installing ramps for handicapped residents. He also helps coordinate the many immersion trips that they schedule throughout the year, with groups coming from as far away as Worcester, Massachusetts.
Caleb notes that the Louisville location is a relatively young sibling to the core Hand in Hand operation, which goes back more than twenty years, as it began in the Buechel area in the early 2000s and developed an unlikely homebase deep in the Eastern Kentucky mountain town of Auxier, which hosts its own immersion trips and has received national media attention. At that point the group had made trips to Nicaragua and established an official base in Belize. Many groups and trips have followed to the present day, providing underserved residents with vital quality of life upgrades, like building homes and orphanages. And for the participants, a life-changing experience that will never leave them. “I was lucky to get to go to Belize, where we can build a house in about four days,” Caleb said. “The local crews down there got it down, they’re very skilled.”
In Nicaragua, he said due to the political instability which results in disadvantaged households, “folks from United States can sponsor kids to keep them in school. It can go to rent, clothes, books, tutoring, play or other wrap-around services.”
Caleb got bitten by the bug in college at the University of Louisville, when he made two trips to Cambodia, where he learned a lot about the “incredible inequality of wealth.” Later, he made lifelong friends from Liberia in a similar cultural immersion program called Where There Be Dragons, which was based in Boulder, Colorado and led him overseas.
Back in the present, while he has attended PNI meetings for years, this is his first time on board, and he credits a prominent Portland resident. “That was good ol’ Larry Stoess. If he asks me to do something I’ll probably do it.” He also notes the positive influence of friend and neighbor Lucas Chase, who’s also Executive Director at Hand in Hand.
“I can walk to work and walk home for lunch,” Caleb said, proud to become part of the texture of the neighborhood. He’s on the PNI revitalization committee and “passionate about solving urban infill. If you look at map, it’s like missing teeth. We need to build housing and develop a land bank that’s accessible.
“What’s the next thing look like?” he said. “We want it to be something to be proud of.”
And in regards to his travels, Caleb doesn’t hesitate when stating their importance to his own identity and worldview.
“When you’re travelling abroad for long periods of time, the taste of those experiences gives you an introspection and objectivity to see who you are and where you stand,” he said, adding that he’d love to get more west end students involved. “Can we build a mixed racial community that lives in harmony? I still believe in it myself. We only benefit from cultural immersion, where we can flourish and make lifelong connections.”
