Sandra Comstock F’86: People-Centered Paths to Dignity and Belonging
In Vershire, Sandra Comstock saw the transformative power of collaborative decision-making and genuine listening. Now, she channels those skills into community advocacy alongside unhoused neighbors in Portland.
Sandra Comstock is the Founder and Executive Director of Hygiene4All, a hygiene hub serving East Portland’s unhoused population. Prior to her work at Hygiene4All, Sandra was the Co-founder of Neighbor2Neighbor in Portland. She is a former academic with a doctorate in Development Sociology, and has done teaching and research stints at Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Western Ontario.
Lucretia Penfield (TMS’s Director of Admissions, Enrollment, and Financial Aid) spoke to Sandra about her memories of TMS and how her time here influenced the human rights and design work she’s done since.
“TMS is a place where you’re encouraged to follow your passion, what’s pulling at your heartstrings. For me, the most meaningful work and professional experiences I’ve had have come from chances that I’ve taken to explore something that really struck, unsettled, or intrigued me. And I’d love to see more young people take more chances, and trust in those moments to take them where they’re meant to go.”
How did you find the Mountain School?
I attended TMS in F’86, the third or fourth semester. I had friends in Vermont and one of them had participated in TMS the very first semester it opened. I was studying at Phillips Academy in Andover, and my teachers and peers were talking about this new farm school. The idea of being on a working farm and having my classes interwoven with nature and the environment was really exciting to me. Andover is a big school with a strong emphasis on getting ready for college, and the idea of being in a smaller group and getting to know people deeply really attracted me.
Sandra (left) at TMS in Fall 1986
What stands out to you most about your semester here?
To be honest, when I think about my time at TMS what jumps out was a talent night on a Saturday where the students decided we should host a fake dating show. Arthur Bradford, a classmate of mine at Andover, was emceeing the event. It was hilarious and fun and as I looked around laughing, I really felt a sense of deep appreciation, joy, and belonging. There wasn’t the same sort of hierarchy of what we used to call “the beautiful people” that I had experienced in other schools.
Maybe I remember that event so well because I’ve stayed connected with Arthur. After our time together at TMS, Arthur has gone on to have a successful writing and filmmaking career, and he has emceed a couple of fundraising events for the work that I do. It’s cool to trace his expertise now back to a chance he took to emcee an event so long ago.
Some of my other vivid memories are of the time I spent on the farm. I remember sitting up on Garden Hill and sketching the hills in my art class taught by Sabra Field. I remember the bowling pin-like Runner Ducks that ran around eating ticks. Some of the faculty really made an impression on me. Elliot Coleman, the farm manager, guided us with his quiet wisdom and steady reminders to be present and learn from what’s around you. Mark McKee kept us busy with constructing needed outbuildings. His life story from Harvard football star to Vermont farmer was really inspiring as well.
Can you share more about your professional journey and how it was influenced by the values of nature and community, which we hold so dear at TMS?
At the Mountain School, one of the main skills I developed was paying attention and cultivating a deep sense of curiosity about the people, trees, and creatures around me and how they made me feel in my bones. That’s been a throughline across my academic and professional work.
When I got back to Andover, I heard a reading by the American poet Carolyn Forché, who was then living in El Salvador during the time of civil war. She read some poems that touched me deeply. There was one about a general grinning and casually dropping what looked like peach halves into a glass of water; they turned out to be human ears, taken as trophies. This image so seared my conscience that I became laser-focused on the US role in the violence and desaparecidos in other Latin American countries. That poem, its visceral shock, brought home what we in the US were supporting.
In my life there have been a few additional moments that have really stuck with me. One happened after I graduated from Andover and ended up living on the streets. It was the day I watched my boyfriend at the time (who was Puerto Rican), pop a frisbee off his finger. Moments later, the police collared him and wrote a ticket for "releasing a projectile object" - we didn't pay the fine and months later he was jailed for failure to pay - they locked him up in a new prison for several days, despite my efforts to bail him out. I later learned this tactic was used frequently to boost federal dollars paid to the facility according to occupancy. It was that moment where the realities of two different justice systems for wealthy white people vs people of color - especially those without resources and connections- became viscerally clear.
After a year on the streets I was fortunate that my family supported me in attending Evergreen State College. There I finagled an internship to work in Nicaragua with small farmers. Three years later I returned to the US to pursue a Ph.D., to advance in international work. However, I became enamored with academia, writing, and researching how our institutions are shaped by political, economic, social, and aesthetic forces that reproduce the forces I had seen at work in the US and internationally. I bounced around research and teaching jobs in Ann Arbor, Canada, and Cambridge, MA, until my family came out to Oregon. Two years in, I started a small literary arts cafe called Glyph, in the heart of downtown, where many houseless people get their services. I built strong, positive relationships with my neighbors on the streets. An artist friend of mine, Kaia Sand, was then working with a group called Right to Survive, which is a houseless-led advocacy group. She invited me to lend a hand and I ended up being asked to explain why enhanced service districts were a bad idea for houseless folks.
Opening day at Hygiene4All’s hygiene hub
TMS emphasizes how more abstract knowledge can be applied in real-world ways that benefit all. The reverence and attention to people and place I learned there, combined with my practical and academic work focused on how inequality is manufactured through laws and the built environment. This helped me connect the dots between new rules on governance, surveillance, and use of public space and their impact on the life chances and experiences of those forced to live on the streets. My odd combination of experiences living on the streets, involvement in popular education and environment in Nicaragua, and researching social movements and change helped in organizing across class, color, and interest lines and in helping to articulate an alternative proposal for tackling shared problems like public health, mental health, and waste on the streets.
Enhanced Service districts are a response to defunding public waste clean up and public support for affordable housing, with the false notion that private markets are the best allocators or resources. In fact, privatization in these areas has deepened social inequity and deterioration of the commons and civic health. Enhanced Service Districts do not solve the problem of people with nowhere to live and nowhere to discard of their waste; rather private policing and displacement of unsheltered residents merely make our societal failures less visible within their boundaries - while leaving under-resourced citizens criminalized and in an even worse predicament somewhere else.
As we spoke out on these themes, business owners challenged us with the question, “What’s a better use of this money?” At the Mountain School I was taught to critique the state of the world in ways that generate people-centered ways to improve it. Incorporating a view of our shared public health and hygiene problems from houseless collaborators’ point of view, we set out to collaboratively build, propose, and design new hygiene, sanitation, and sanctuary stations within the district that would reduce misery and enhance health by providing places of belonging, sanctuary, and mutual aid.
Tell us more about the work you do now. How does it express our mission, to know a place and take care of it, and to reach beyond the self to the common good?
Sandra with the Hygiene4All team
The work I do now as Founder and Director of Hygiene4All is all about bringing joy and dignity to a portion of our society that is often mistreated and forgotten. We offer a hygiene hub outdoors under a bridge, operated by a generator, with trucked-in water. The concept is very simple: it’s a place where people can get clean, have clean clothing and bedding, first aid, and a listening, attentive ear. Our priority above all else is to provide a sense of safety and peace and awe that houseless people do not experience often in their encounters with those outside their street families.
There are lots of places that give showers but not many places that nurture community. Most of our staff is unsheltered or unhoused, and watching them work with others in that same condition is really inspiring. They designed our hygiene hub and they manage the resources for the best outcomes for everyone.
Another way we serve the community is by recycling clothes and bedding. During our design process, many houseless people told us how hard it was to do laundry. The lines are long and often at capacity, so people leave dirty clothes and get new ones from clothing closets. This is because it’s too hard to wash those things. So, Hygiene4All started an initiative where we go out and collect all the clothing discarded on the streets and then wash and redistribute it to our patrons and other clothing closets around the city. This cleans up the streets, saves about 10,000 lbs of laundry each year from going in the landfill, and creates a new source of abundance. It’s been a huge win, and saved the county lots of money. That kind of abundance makes a huge difference with people’s warmth, health, and comfort.
We’re a small organization, but a lot of the work we do is to share the stories of houseless people back to the advisory commissions we’re on, and build up the political will on a local level for us to invest in the affordable housing, safety net, and support needed to care for everyone. For example, one of my employees ran away from a shoplifting charge and got warrant checked for putting up a tent, which got him extradited to Washington. He is now facing months in prison, just as he’s celebrating his 1-year anniversary on the job, finally got housing in June, is finally able to pay his child support, and just enrolled in an HVAC job training program. Now all these strides are being disrupted due to a system that automatically imposes a sentence without consideration for the larger public good.
Houselessness is at the intersection of pretty much every type of institutional oppression in our country. Bearing witness to and calling out and seeking to change systemic exclusions is at the heart of our advocacy work at Hygiene4All.
How do you think a semester at TMS is relevant in today’s world?
Most of life is showing up, slowing down, and really listening and tuning into other people. It’s about perspective-taking, what’s the context from which other people are coming. When you bring people together from different perspectives, as at TMS where students are coming from different backgrounds and public and private schools and from across the country, our understanding of the many dimensions of a problem, and the importance of leveraging many communities of knowledge in formulating solutions, can be really transformative. When people from different contexts collaborate, assumptions from within one context or another are more often challenged, opening up the door for new possibilities. That listening and collaborative decision making became deeply ingrained during my time at TMS.
TMS is also a place where you’re encouraged to follow your passion, what’s pulling at your heartstrings. In many contexts, people are usually on a track, on a mission, maybe even suffering from tunnel vision that blinds them to the possibilities for something better right in front of them. But for me, the most meaningful work and professional experiences I’ve had have come from chances that I’ve taken to explore something that really struck, unsettled, or intrigued me. And I’d love to see more young people take more chances, and trust in those moments to take them where they’re meant to go.
To learn more about Sandra’s work with Hygiene4All, please check out their website.