By Jesse Coronado
It’s 6 am, and the silence of the cool morning dies as a bus rolls in and Sarah Koski arrives at the Lane Transit District’s Customer Service Building with storage bins in her hands.
On almost every block near the downtown LTD station, people sleep bundled in sleeping bags or blankets; others, not so lucky, have little to shield them. As soon as the sun rises, Koski will be able to provide outreach services to them.
Koski was hired as LTD’s homelessness and community resource liaison in November 2023. Before dedicating herself to help people experiencing homelessness, Koski worked in a global multi-agency collective at the American Red Cross. Now, as someone who creates solutions for this community, she spends most of her time providing outreach to people living on the streets.
Before LTD, Koski was hired at a St. Vincent de Paul Safe Sleep Site on Garfield, a shelter made up of tents. Koski says she “wanted the whole experience of working minimum wage” to understand people who help the unhoused community.
Last year, Koski was recognized with an Oregon Woman of Achievement Award from the Oregon Commission for Women, and gave a TedX talk on homelessness at Edmonds College in Washington. “Doing this has been the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s where I found my true calling,” she says.
The LTD community resource liaison position is possibly the first of its kind in the nation. Places such as Los Angeles and Portland have similar roles, but they typically operate through the lens of public safety. Koski’s job takes a broader approach.
“I bring information back to LTD, and what I’ve noticed is that about 70 percent of the projects I’ve been able to pitch have been green-lit, which is astronomical,” Koski says. She says it’s a “Sarah statistic” — an estimation.
Before walking the areas where she does outreach, Koski attempts to unlock her office door. The scanner declines the keycard. It’s too early for entry, so she walks to the opposite side of the station and, like the folks she does outreach to, stashes her empty bins behind a bush.
Stashing items in bushes is common for unhoused individuals. Sweeps, or camp cleanups, from the city and no storage opportunities often require stashing belongings. Someone losing their belongings equates to losing livelihood, autonomy and starting from scratch.
Koski wears a backpack and a dark brown jacket, her long dark brown hair draping down her side. She smiles a lot and has what her friends describe as “11 laughs,” that boom.
Koski uses research-based statistics to report back to LTD to build programs.
She came from an upper-middle-class family in Salem. Very early in her academic career, she was labeled “double certified talented and gifted,” testing in the top 6 percent in the nation.
“I was raised with a very elitist mentality,” Koski says. “I basically had become this academic elite. What happens with that is, it means there’s a hierarchy that because of my intellect or my schooling, I am therefore better than you.”
She describes feeling “heartbroken” that she held these beliefs and remembered how she felt a loss of identity in college. She says she would drink alcohol almost every night at the University of Oregon. She struggled with depression and “dystopic” feelings. The feelings were enough for UO Health Services to assign a clinician to support her each week.
“It was such a hard time because I don’t know if a lot of people knew how bad it was for me,” Koski says. “I was taught at a very young age to not say something was wrong.”
Koski felt no one understood her experience. Now, she sees how this experience helps her relate to the unhoused people she helps.
“They might not be saying all the right things, or it might take 10 minutes of them mumbling to really ask for help.” Koski says. “That is something relatable to me because it took a lot of courage for me to ask for help.”
Koski came to the Christian faith in 2007 after she graduated from the UO. She says her faith helped her find meaning in life and understand “what love is,” and it also gave her a sense of freedom from what she describes as a Kafkian “never ending labyrinth.”
“I was learning myself through my newfound faith which was telling me that I can’t be a pathological liar. I was a pathological liar because I didn’t know what the truth was anymore. I didn’t know who I was,” she says.
Koski met Theresa Boudreau, White Bird Clinic’s Navigation Empowerment Services Team interim coordinator, in August 2021. NEST connects unhoused folks to services and resources in Eugene.
“They are the ones who launched me into the work I do now. They are like my fairy godmothers,” Koski says. “What I didn’t realize is that they understood the two critical universes. The universe we are operating in now and the reality of the universe for people on the street.”
For unhoused people living in the alternate reality, “seconds and minutes matter,” according to Koski. Mental health crises require specialized care, there is the possibility of heatstroke under scorching heat or death in freezing weather.
“It takes courage to change one’s perception and then act upon that new found knowledge,” Boudreau says. “Sarah is an excellent example to those who think perceptions can’t change.”
In light of recent incidents on Hwy 99 in which drivers hit unhoused pedestrians, Koski has been considering ways city officials can use Vision Zero, an initiative used to prevent pedestrian injuries from vehicles, to focus on unhoused folks. She is also currently having conversations about how to bring public restrooms to Eugene. And phone charging stations are coming to encampments 2025 because of Koski.
“The most important thing to remember with community intent on solving homelessness is that there is not one thing we can do. It’s the spirit of innovation that can help vulnerable communities, and bringing people who are experts in their field and not necessarily social work to birth new programs,” Koski says.