This Must Mean Revolution
written by Cifer, based on conversations with current and former White Bird workers. Thank you to Miles, Swift and many others for your ideas and contributions.
Starting in 1969, White Bird Clinic has been promising dedicated, client-centered care “until the revolution”, an offer that will theoretically expire when our community sheds its dependence on government and nonprofits, and fully invests in providing this comprehensive care for one another. Revolution is born out of struggle and often, the desperation of having no other options. As the city of Eugene grieves the loss of CAHOOTS, yet another blow to our increasingly fragile network of life-saving services, the question must be asked - have we reached the moment for revolution?
The iconic white CAHOOTS vans responded to their final Eugene call in the early hours of Monday, April 5th. A small subset of the same CAHOOTS workers will continue responding to calls in Springfield from 11am to 11pm daily, but 80% of their staff have been laid off, and there is no way to summon them in Eugene. On the same day, the White Bird Crisis Line, which has offered 24/7 compassionate crisis intervention over the phone for over 50 years, reduced their hours to only 8a-8p Monday-Friday.
Eugenians are becoming quite familiar with the abrupt closures of services we depend on. In just a few short years, we’ve seen the closure of Peacehealth University District Hospital (UDH), the only Emergency Room in Eugene and on this side of the Willamette River; Hourglass, the only low-barrier walk-in crisis center accepting patients throughout the night; and Front Rooms, the “heart of and soul” of White Bird. The narratives behind these closures have been opaque and convoluted. Yet to those who are most impacted by the losses, it is obvious that this capitalist system continues to protect the interests of the wealthy by any means necessary: disregarding the needs of the poor and marginalized, busting unionized and collective power, silencing resistance, and manipulating narratives to deflect blame.
All these services primarily existed to serve people who are pushed to the margins of our society - those who are unhoused, poor, disabled, isolated, psychotic, suicidal, etc. These people and therefore the services that meet them in their most challenging moments are invisibilized by a society that centers greed and profits above humanity. In December 2023 Peacehealth explained its decision to close UDH as a necessary money-saving measure, because despite being “heavily utilized” (according to a 2022-2025 Community Health Needs Assessment), UDH was not bringing in the profits needed to satisfy its corporate owners. UDH served as a walk-up service for many people living on the streets in downtown Eugene, who now have to depend on ambulances to transport them 15 minutes to the nearest hospital, and then have to figure out a way back home. With 12 psychiatric stabilization rooms, UDH had been a primary resource for people experiencing acute mental health crises. Following the closure, the Eugene/Springfield metro area only had two such rooms, which resulted in people waiting many hours in the ER lobbies while they were immersed in severe crises that could endanger themselves or others.
In April 2024 ColumbiaCare closed Hourglass, which was the only low-barrier walk-in space providing immediate, free counseling through the night when other resources were unavailable. Hourglass was one of the only places (aside from jail or an emergency room) that people in extreme crisis could go and receive compassionate support. Like Peacehealth’s statements about the closure of UDH, ColumbiaCare cited a large financial deficit and difficulty staffing as the reasons for the shutdown. At the time of the shutdown, Hourglass employees were not unionized, but ColumbiaCare union spokespeople from other facilities said they intended to include Hourglass employees in unionization efforts in the “near future”. At UDH, the staff had only just settled a four-year contract agreement with the hospital when it announced its closure. According to a statement released by the Oregon Nurses Association, the closure was only announced after the “lengthy and contentious contract negotiations”. Every White Bird Clinic program mentioned above also closed during union contract negotiations or within a year of a finalized union contract. As described in an open letter from the CAHOOTS union, unionization is critical “to prevent the further exploitation of current and future workers of being tasked with the near impossible responsibility of alleviating the harsh realities of racism, homelessness, decreasing access to mental health and medical care, and state violence”. The pattern of swift union busting undermines people’s ability to continue professionalized care work for each other in safe and sustainable ways, and concentrates decision-making power in distant bureaucrats with virtually no experience or knowledge in the kinds of work they oversee.
The moments workers have brought their organizing outside of the workplace, inviting the support of the broader community, they’ve been silenced and criminalized. During a peaceful vigil mourning the Front Rooms closure held outside a White Bird Board meeting on December 17, the Board cancelled the meeting and the venue called for law enforcement to respond, accusing the people gathered of “incidents of vandalism and threats of violence.” After being pressed for details, White Bird leadership could only point to the placement of a few stickers reading “People Over Profit” on the venue’s front window as reasons for their response. White Bird leadership then told its staff that it was investigating, in collaboration with law enforcement, if any staff participated. When White Bird surprised its next wave of employees with layoffs less than three months later, it doubled down on these suppression tactics by explicitly warning employees that the administration wouldn’t hesitate to respond to any “inappropriate behavior” with discipline, including termination.
The loss of CAHOOTS was only possible through the actions (and inactions) of this same White Bird leadership, the Oregon legislature, and Eugene City Council. CAHOOTS had as much social and political protections as a humble, grassroots service can ask for, which makes it one of the most baffling pieces of this storyline. CAHOOTS was nationally lauded as the kind of alternate police response that this country demanded following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many more. Protections were supposedly written into federal law via the CAHOOTS Act proposed by Senator Wyden in February 2021, which provides Medicaid support for states to implement “multidisciplinary mobile crisis teams” modeled after CAHOOTS. Yet less than two years later, Lane County notified CAHOOTS that their contract was ending, and funding would be redirected to a new program, the Mobile Crisis Services of Lane County (MCS). CAHOOTS was told MCS was able to better fulfill the criteria laid out in the 2019 Senate Bill 973, which built on the 30+ year reputation of CAHOOTS. Yet, this legislation failed to capture and replicate some of the most central tenants of CAHOOTS crisis response work, which are lost in the current MCS model. CAHOOTS revolutionized the integrated health model of pairing medical and mental health workers on the vans, but MCS only responds to “behavioral health” calls that don’t require care for related medical issues or for people showing any signs of substance use. MCS will not provide housing support or transportation to services (outside of the hospital) or respond to anyone under the age of 18. MCS has also developed a reputation for quickly involving police in escalated mental health crises and for defaulting to a strategy of forced institutionalization. As best described in a recent letter released by the CAHOOTS union, “the federal legislation created guidelines for insurance-funded programs with an insurance-guided scope of services that include giving crisis responders the dangerous capacity to force involuntary treatment on community members in crisis.” As one former CAHOOTS worker explains at a recent townhall presentation, CAHOOTS centered the need for clients to maintain as much agency over their own process and recovery as possible, “working with their will, not against their will”. The MCS resulting from bureaucrats’ distorted understanding of what CAHOOTS really is may be filling a necessary service gap in Lane County at large, but is far from an acceptable replacement for Eugene CAHOOTS.
On April 14, at the first city council meeting since Eugene CAHOOTS was defunded, public defenders, firefighters, local business owners, social service workers, parents, librarians, teenagers, and so many more testified about this community’s dependance on CAHOOTS. City councilors unanimously responded that they were convinced of the merits of CAHOOTS, but claimed White Bird had cancelled the contract so there was nothing they could do. Not only does this deception absolve city counselors of the central role they played in CAHOOTS’ closure, it also reveals there will be no initiative from those in power to save a program they claim to understand as essential.
As announced by CAHOOTS workers at the townhall presentation the week prior, Eugene hasn’t increased the money it spends on CAHOOTS for years, despite the demands of inflation and newly instated living wages. In their last contract negotiations, the city of Eugene only agreed to pay 40% of CAHOOTS’ operating costs, while the city of Springfield agreed to pay 100%. It’s not hard to understand why Springfield, not Eugene, is the remaining city with CAHOOTS. CAHOOTS diverts an average of 17% of all dispatch calls and prevents immeasurably more crises from ever escalating to a point of involving law enforcement. In 2024, CAHOOTS saw over 10,000 individuals who otherwise would have received police or paramedic contact, a visit to the ER, or a night in jail with a court date in the morning. All these other pieces of the public safety web cost the city far more than two employees riding around in a van. And still, the city of Eugene increases its 80+ million dollar police budget annually - the last available data revealing a 20% budget increase in 2023 - and doesn’t question the efficiency of this spending. The city’s argument that there is no money for CAHOOTS is a denial of this broader financial picture. As posed at the townhall, the question is truly, “can this city afford not to have CAHOOTS?” Redirecting funds away from police and towards CAHOOTS is completely within the power of the city council, and we should refuse to accept any other narrative from them.
We are embedded in a capitalist system that prioritizes wealth accumulation for the elite few over all forms of community well-being, and those in financial and political power cannot be relied on to fund or regulate systems of care. We must take control of our own care - fighting for the services we deserve, redefining them into what we most need, and developing our own skills to show up for each other in times of crisis. We can find inspiration in a new grassroots group, Raven, founded by former Front Rooms workers continuing the work they love. There is also a strong team of CAHOOTS workers exploring the possibility of other fiscal sponsors in order to formally break away from White Bird, a confine that has clearly deprioritized and discarded them. These former CAHOOTS workers are asking the city council to meet with them to discuss additional collaboration and funding, and they are asking the community to keep up the pressure. In this moment of transition, we can together imagine a CAHOOTS that is more shaped by and responsive to community than to the corporations and governments that fund it.
As former CAHOOTS workers call on us to fight for their funding, they have also been reminding us to take care of each other. The loss of these formal programs reveals that the expertise of these CAHOOTians and other crisis and care workers is not owned by and should no longer be controlled by the bureaucracy that chewed them up and spit them out. There is immense skill and knowledge living on in the former workers and the community that forged them into the comprehensive crisis responders they’ve become. In decentralizing this care work and redistributing the responsibility to a broader community, we are not just meeting the momentary needs of our neighbors in times of crisis, we are increasing our capacity and resiliency for the revolutionary moment that is upon us.