Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 20 - Denise Piza & Lisa Finkle, SEIU 503 Reform Slate

Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 20 - Denise Piza & Lisa Finkle, SEIU 503 Reform Slate

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/fan_mail/new] This week on Oregon Voices Podcast, we sit down with Denise Piza and Lisa Finkle, two women running to change the direction of SEIU 503, Oregon's largest public employee union. Denise came to this country from Guadalajara as a young child, learned English fast enough to become her family's interpreter by age eight, and built a path through advocacy that started in the only place advocacy ever really starts. A school meeting where someone tried to tell her that her son's autism was her fault for being a young mother. She fought that fight until she won it, then kept fighting, landing on the Jefferson County Education Service District Board, then becoming the first Mexican woman elected to the Madras City Council, winning her seat as a write in candidate after the ballots had already gone out. Lisa was born and raised in Oregon, has worked for the state for over a decade, and became the chief union steward for SEIU 503 after discovering, the way most people discover it, that nobody was there for her when she needed a union to actually show up. Together, Denise and Lisa lay out exactly what is broken inside their own union. Town halls where the chat gets disabled before members can ask questions. Financial transparency that exists on paper and nowhere else. A culture where Robert's Rules of Order gets used as a tool to keep people quiet rather than a tool to let them speak. Where racism, discrimination, and sexual harassment get processed through channels controlled by the very people accused of causing harm. Denise talks about being invited to coffee by a former city councilman so he could explain, politely, how unqualified she was. She talks about what it means to build power with your community instead of hoarding it. And she and Lisa both talk about what it looks like when 46,000 union members realize the table they have been sitting at was never built to hold them, and what happens when they finally stand up. #OregonVoicesPodcast #DenisePiza #LisaFinkle #SEIU503 #UnionReform #MemberLedUnion #MadrasOregon #WoodburnOregon #LatinaLeadership #UnionTransparency #UnionDemocracy #OregonHealthAuthority #LanguageAccess #AutismAdvocacy #WriteInCampaign #ImmigrantStory #WorkerPower #PublicSectorUnion #UnionAccountability #OregonLabor #FutureSlate #McKenzieReyes #OregonPolitics #LivedExperience Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast [https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast] Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast [https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast] Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599] Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/ [https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/]

Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 19 - Juan Carlos Ordoñez, Oregon Center for Public Policy

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/fan_mail/new] This week on Oregon Voices Podcast, we sit with Juan Carlos Ordoñez, Communications Director for the Oregon Center for Public Policy and host of the syndicated radio show and podcast Policy for the People. Juan Carlos was born in Guatemala during the longest civil war in Central America, came to the United States with his family in the 1980s, went on to Harvard Law School, and practiced commercial litigation in New York City before walking away from that life and landing, eventually, in Oregon. Now he spends his days doing something most lawyers never do with their training. He explains this state's tax system to the people it is burying. Eric McGuire hosts alongside State Representative Lesly Munoz, who serves Oregon House District 22, filling in while Katherine attends a Rural Organizing Project retreat. Together they dig into what it would actually take to build a millionaire's tax in Oregon, why the legislature's disconnect from the federal tax bill left hundreds of millions on the table, and how Oregon's much vaunted progressive reputation hides a tax structure that asks more of the poor than the rich. Juan Carlos breaks down workforce standards boards, the fight to renew and expand the Oregon Kids Credit, the long overdue push for universal preschool, and why subsidizing data centers and corporate research credits often amounts to handing money to companies for doing what they were going to do anyway. Lesly brings her own story into the conversation, the daughter of a landscaper and a homemaker, the first in her family to walk the halls of the Capitol, carrying the failed 2025 farmworker standards board bill and a promise to bring it back in 2027. Between the two of them, this episode lays out exactly what it would take to turn Oregon's tax system right side up, and why the people with the least are still paying the most. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast [https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast] Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast [https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast] Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599] Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/ [https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/]

Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 18 - Toni Lopez, Community Organizer & Public Defense Advocate

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/fan_mail/new] Toni Lopez came to this country at three years old, moved to Cornelius, Oregon at fourteen with a bag of clothes and no warning, dropped out of Forest Grove High School because the racism was relentless, became a mother young, spent eight years working inside the Washington County Sheriff's Office, and was told by every system she encountered that she was not going to make it. She made it. More than that, she became the person who walks into rooms where power is comfortable and makes it uncomfortable, who shows up to city council meetings and commissioner hearings and police department lobbies and asks the questions that people in authority have never had to answer from someone who already knows the answers. When an ICE operation moved on one of the largest Latino-owned businesses in Washington County, Toni was there helping families in crisis for eight hours while a political candidate came through for a photo. When the Beaverton City Council said they were afraid to act, Toni pointed out that fear never stopped them from sending officers into domestic violence calls where someone had a gun. When police departments posted that their hands were tied, Toni pulled the restraining order, pulled the incident recording, highlighted the statute, and walked back in. She has been doing this since the late 1990s, when she volunteered at the Domestic Violence Resource Center and watched law enforcement refuse to enforce a restraining order against a dangerous abuser while a Latina mother stood there waiting for help that never came. This conversation, recorded at Capital Community Media in Salem, Oregon, covers what it costs to live a life where you cannot unsee injustice, the difference between allyship and performance, why Oregon has violated its own sanctuary law for decades, what happened inside a Washington County Democrats meeting when a white woman said ICE had helped immigrants, and why Toni Lopez is making it her work to ensure that when the next community member is murdered, the politicians who did nothing are on record saying nothing. #ToniLopez #WashingtonCountyOregon #CommunityOrganizer #PublicDefenseAdvocate #ImmigrantRightsOregon #ICEAccountability #SanctuaryOregon #HillsboroOregon #CorneliusOregon #BeavertonOregon #LatinoOregon #MigraWatch #OregonPoliceAccountability #LawEnforcementAccountability #WashingtonCountyDems #OregonPolitics #OregonVoicesPodcast #EricMcGuire #KatherineWatkins #CapitalCommunityMedia #SalemOregon #CommunityVoices #OregonAccountability #AbolishICE #QuietMurders #SilveroVillegas #MiramarMartinez #BlackLivesMatter #NeurodivergentAdvocacy #OregonJustice Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast [https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast] Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast [https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast] Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599] Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/ [https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/]

Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 17- John Lenssen: Identity, Whiteness, and What Was Lost

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/fan_mail/new] Before you can know where you stand, you have to know what was taken from you to get you here. John Lenssen has spent a lifetime studying how identity forms, deforms, and finds its way back to something true. In this second conversation, he walks through the frameworks that shaped his thinking, from Erik Erikson's Eurocentric model taught as universal truth, to William Cross's stages of identity development for people of color, to his own pointed critique of white racial identity theory and why he refuses to let privilege acknowledgment be the finish line. The real work, he argues, is not about unlearning. It is about showing up. The conversation moves into territory most people never get the language for. Katherine traces what it means to spend your whole life defending your existence before you even understand why. Eric describes the moment in 2020 when the lens turned on his own history and he found a Union officer on the census who owned five human beings, a fact his family had always known and never once told him. John connects it all to the European immigrants who surrendered their languages, their names, their cultures, and their solidarity with other working people, all to purchase the protection of whiteness. That bargain hollowed something out. This episode is about what was lost inside it. They move through Bacon's Rebellion, the St. Patrick's Brigade, how the Irish became white, and why multiracial solidarity keeps getting dismantled the moment it starts to take root. Katherine names the cycle from the Fourth Turning, eighty years of the same fear in new clothes, the same dog whistles, the same contraction after every brief opening. John draws the thread back to where it always leads: when people actually know each other, love each other, build something together, history does not have to repeat. This episode is about identity as survival, as loss, and as the thing that might actually save us if we let it. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast [https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast] Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast [https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast] Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599] Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/ [https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/]

Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 16 - John Lenssen: Multiracial Solidarity & the Untold Rules

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/fan_mail/new] There is a reason you were never taught this history. That reason is the history. John Lenssen has spent decades working at the intersection of civil rights, education, and multiracial solidarity across the Pacific Northwest. He did not arrive at this work through theory. He arrived through a locker assignment in 1960s Seattle, a basketball game that ended with a neighbor he respected hurling slurs at his Black friend, and a boy named Ted who looked at him afterward and said, don't let it get you down. It happens all the time. That sentence changed John's life. This episode is about what he did with it. Eric McGuire and Katherine Watkins sit down with John to talk about Oregon's deliberate history of Black exclusion, the structural design of racism as a tool to keep working class people from recognizing each other, and what actually happens to leaders of color when institutions finally let them in the door. They pull in Derrick Bell's interest convergence theory, trace the moment SNCC voted on whether white people belonged in the movement at all, and follow Malcolm X and Dr. King as they moved closer together in the final years of their lives before both were killed. Katherine talks about what it costs to keep fighting inside systems built to destroy you. Eric talks about the Oregon institutions he has watched for three decades and what it looked like when hope arrived and then got quietly suffocated. John talks about who builds these rules, who reproduces them, and why the achievement gap keeps showing up like it's a mystery when it was always a design. Nobody in this conversation is performing outrage. They have all lived too close to this to perform anything. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast [https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast] Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast [https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast] Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599] Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/ [https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/]