Story
Keystone Commons is a commercial building in the Gateway District of East Portland created to support radical and transformative counseling work. We are a group of independently-practicing mental health counselors and social workers who hold a deep desire to support our clients and each other. We have our offices at Keystone Commons to create a culture of genuine support among each other and a cozy environment for our clients.
Location
Keystone Commons is located in the Gateway district of East Portland. It is located between NE Glisan and NE Halsey on 102ND AVE. Easily accessible from I-84 and I-205 (and many surface streets will get you here), it is conveniently located yet out of mix of close-in Portland. The Gateway Transit Center is right around the corner, too, so we’re easily accessible by public transit. We have on-site parking and there is additional parking in the neighborhood on NE Oregon.
Values
Collaboration: To reduce alienated labor and build a collaborative community who are inspired to create projects that expand beyond what is currently imaginable.
Healing: To create a space that serves as protection from oppressive forces and that uses its collective resources to challenge power structures and reduce harm in relationships, groups, institutions, and systems.
Community: To curate activities, events, and gatherings that are in solidarity with the workers of Keystone Commons, the visitors to the building, and within the neighborhood as a whole.
Ethics of Relational Care: To create a community culture that values relationships, care, connection, and accountability above competition and professionalism.
Actively Anti-Racist: To cultivate a culture and ongoing practice of challenging the dominance of white supremacy and holding ourselves accountable when we struggle.
Why the name Keystone Commons?
I am from the Keystone State of Pennsylvania.
As teenagers, we often start dreaming of leaving our hometowns. You find your way out and forge a new life for yourself. You plant new roots. Your complicated feelings about where you are from linger. Then time passes, and you more deeply understand what that birthplace fortified in you. It then becomes much easier to appreciate parts of it. Growing up in an emotionally and economically depressed place (aka the rust belt) one must learn some serious survival skills—a “whatever it takes” sort of existence. You learn to hustle to get your needs met. Emotional needs. Economic needs. Educational needs. And that hustle, that tenacity, was bred into me by a place that I desperately had to leave. But I want to keep parts of this place with me. It’s complicated, ya know?
A foundation of US settler colonialism, Pennsylvania was the middle colony of the 13 original colonies which is why it was named the “Keystone State.” These were the ancestral lands of the Osage Nation and the Shawnee Tribe. Pennsylvania is also the site of the first Native American Boarding School in Carlisle, PA.
Southwestern Pennsylvania was the keystone in this life I’ve built in Pacific Northwest. I will take what has been useful to me from that place and fight like hell to change, influence, or bring awareness to the parts that were harmful.
-Dr. K Hixson
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