Master Builder
by Meg Daly
Portland Monthly, May 2005
As if she did not have enough repair work to do helping homeless teens get their lives on track, last winter Beth Burns bought a fixer-upper that she plans to transform into a home. The house’s blue-gray aluminum siding frames a porch littered with drop cloths, random pieces of lumber and dog toys.
“I told my neighbors I’m not really a slob,” Burns said on the day we met. Clad in a mismatched flag-red T-shirt and tomato-red cardigan, the lanky 33-year-old had just returned from her hometown, Chicago, where she caught a cold. But under the weather for her looked like most people’s caffeinated. She jumped up to show me around while regaling me with tales from the Windy City.
Burns’ voice is an earthy contralto that dips deeper when expressing sympathy or disbelief. She speaks with a rat-a-tat rhythm and is not averse to using the well-placed profanity. As the executive director of p:ear, an educational day program for homeless young adults, her real-world conversational style goes a long way toward earning teenagers’ trust.
Burns co-founded p:ear with artist Pippa Arend and social worker Joy Cartier three years ago. Particularly attuned to the needs of those in their late teens and early 20s, p:ear is best known for mentoring youth in art-making.
While access to art supplies and time with local artists offer a creative outlet, they also get kids in the door. What p:ear is really about, Burns says, is building community and providing young adults with the tools for growth and learning. The needs are as varied as the youth themselves: a straight-A student kicked out of his West Hills home because he is gay, a heroin-addicted girl who crashes at her mom’s one-room apartment, a young woman whose parents raised her in a tent outside Salem.
Burns wonders whether her idea of home would be different if she were in another line of work. She chose her Southeast abode precisely for its nonclamorous environs, two blocks from any major street and surrounded by relatively affluent young families.
“I need a tranquil space,” she said.
Tranquility is not readily apparent in the two-story, three-bedroom 1913 structure she’s leading me through. In fact, the lone item of furniture is a couch, which Burns says is the first she has ever owned that “people can actually sit on.” (I try to overlook the wood plank lying haphazardly on the cushions, currently making any sitting impossible.) For the time being, she and her partner, Jen, are confined to the upstairs bedroom and bath.
But retreating to even a quirky personal space is nothing new for the otherwise gregarious Burns.
“I was a strange kid,” she said. “I grew up among extremely boisterous, funny, big people. “I was the runt, the bookworm off holding class with my dolls in the basement.”
Her parents, a cop and a schoolteacher, raised their three children on Chicago’s Irish-Catholic south side, where people did not knock on one another’s doors, they shouted from the street. She likens p:ear to the antique store her mother currently runs, The Cluttered Cupboard, which serves as a de facto community gathering place.
“Half the time nobody buys things,” said Burns. “They just come in to talk to my mother and get advice.” Likewise, she sees p:ear as “a place where the kids are treated as individuals no matter where they are at in their lives.”
The rub is that Burns has to show up for work each day as the individual she is. Any less will not pass muster. So while she is tearing down and rebuilding walls at home, she also finds herself rearranging them internally.
“The kids have brought me closer to myself by demanding from me that I interact without all of the walls that keep things stoic, that define the ‘social work’ perspective.”
It is just the sort of demand on which she thrives.
“Hey, if it’s not helping me grow,” she said, “I don’t want to do it anymore."