Outside In :: Serving homeless youth and low-income adults in Portland Oregon

Here's a glance at the services Outside In provides to meet our community's growing and changing needs:

The Day Program provides safety off the streets, food, crisis counseling and activities that build skills to promote alternatives to street life.

Case Managers work one on one with youth to identify strengths and create plans that address health, work, housing and educational needs.

The Employment Resource Center works with youth to increase work readiness, obtain and retain employment and build a positive work history. An education component helps youth obtain their GED and enter college.

Transitional Housing provides youth with a home as they move toward independent living. Youth must be working on career or educational goals and save 1/3 of their income. 80% of youth who go through the transitional housing program never return to the streets.

The Medical Clinic is a coalition of medical and naturopathic doctors and interns, acupuncturists, and Chinese herbalists all of whom provide cutting edge multi-disciplinary primary care to homeless youth and low-income individuals lacking health insurance.

Risk Education provides on-street peer outreach, peer education programs for HIV prevention among youth, theater and art programming as well as other recreation activities.

Syringe Exchange works to prevent the spread of HIV and other diseases among adult drug injectors. Participants receive counseling, safer sex information and supplies, free and anonymous HIV testing, free Hepatitis C testing, as well as drug treatment and other referrals. Last year, this program kept nearly 450,000 used syringes off the streets.

The Medical Outreach Program brings medical and health care services directly to the streets. Serving the hardest to reach communities, medical outreach delivers preventative and life-enhancing medical services to individuals that do not typically access primary health care.

Project Erase is an established public service program, operating within the clinic at Outside In, that removes tattoos from people who have experienced gang-involvement or homelessness but who are now interested in going back to school or getting a job and for whom their tattoos are a barrier toward reintegration into society.

The Transgender/Identity Resource Center is the first such program in the state of Oregon. The program provides peer education, counseling, referrals, street and community-based outreach to youth who may otherwise be disconnected from resources due to their gender, gender-identity, sexual orientation, ethnic background, or economic hardships.

The Virginia Woof Dog Daycare is the first dog daycare center in the country to be used as a job training program. A nationally recognized program, Virginia Woof builds on the Juma Ventures model which provides youth jobs in a variety of settings, and uses these training jobs to provide youth a foundation from which to build assets, gain experience and financial skills and move into jobs in career tracks.