SKID ROAD

JOSEPHINE ENSIGN
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  • Society & Culture
  • Semiweekly Series

The Skid Road podcast amplifies a diversity of voices about homelessness and displacement in Seattle and in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia. The podcast series challenges us to learn from the past, from people with the lived experience of homelessness and displacement, and from people tasked with addressing homelessness in order to make more informed policy and program choices.

Episodes

  1. 09/30/2025

    A Conversation with Liz Rambus, RN

    Of all the oral history interviews I've done with people over the years, my conversation back in November 2017 with Liz Rambus best highlights what community health nursing can be, what the work can do to make a difference in the lives of people marginalized by poverty and racism. In this interview, Liz talks about her personal path into community health nursing and her work as a community health nurse with the Seattle Indian Health Board. She stayed in that job for many years and became a highly valued member of the health and social care team. (Her community health nursing position is open in case you know good nurses interested in applying.) Liz speaks of the importance of access to basic health care, respite care, permanent supportive housing, harm reduction services, empathy and community-building efforts. "We need a lot more education for people to learn to live together in this community and stop pushing aside the most vulnerable." It's heartbreaking (and infuriating) to me now to re-listen to her interview and what she says about the positive effects of ACA ("Obamacare") in expanding healthcare access for the Indigenous patients she cared for. Washington State was an early adopter of the Medicaid expansion made possible by the ACA. Those gains in healthcare access are being erased by the current Trump administration. Taking away people's access to healthcare (affordability and enhanced program expansion to health-promoting resources like supportive housing) certainly does not make America healthy again. These rollbacks of Medicaid across our country disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people in our society. It also affects working-class families.

  2. May 25

    Lois Thetford, 1945-2026

    Lois Thetford, PA, was one of the first people I met when I moved to Seattle from Baltimore in late 1994. She worked at the 45th Street Clinic, a longstanding community health clinic that she helped start. At the time I met her, she was running their women's clinic, and later on, I worked alongside her as a provider at their homeless youth clinic. And so much more. Homeless services advocacy, faculty preceptor for the student-run University District Street Medicine program, faculty member at the University of Washington's MEDEX Program. Lois was warm, funny, compassionate, and gifted as a teacher and a healthcare provider. A mother, grandmother, quilter, tap dancer. I remember her tap dancing while singing "When I'm Sixty Four" at the end of a youth clinic staff meeting on her sixty-fourth birthday. She died a few days ago and will be sorely missed by her family, friends, former patients, advocates, and community members. Some years back, I interviewed Lois about her amazing work. You can listen to the interview here. And here are photos I have of Lois over the years.

  3. Aug 5

    The Origin Story of My Skid Road History Project

    As I continue with my Skid Road project and podcast, add more Seattle-based oral history interviews, and segue into the history of homelessness and displacement in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, I want to share this interview recording. Jack Straw Cultural Center's sound engineer, Daniel Guenther, interviewed me about my project on April 10, 2024. Daniel was one of the main sound engineers who assisted me with studio recordings of over sixty individuals between June 2015 and May 2025.

  4. Aug 11

    A Conversation with Tamara Bauman

    I had the pleasure of talking with Tamara Bauman about her work on domestic violence and homelessness, and her advocacy for community-driven solutions. She talks about her lived experience and her insights into how much power struggles, egos, and politics get in the way of meaningful solutions. When I spoke with her in the spring of 2024, she was working at Solid Ground in Seattle. She is currently the founder and director of the Wellbeing Revolution: Leading with Heart and Strategy. Applying her Pasifika cultural values and wellbeing design principles, she consults with nonprofit organizations to assist them with the recalibration work necessary to be more effective in their work. Listen to what she has to say and prepare yourself to be inspired.

  5. Aug 18

    A Conversation with Rev Rick Reynolds

    Here is my Skid Road project interview with Rev Rick Reynolds on March 6, 2017. 'Rev Rick' talks about how he became involved in street ministry and Operation Nightwatch, and what he has learned from his decades of work. One piece of wisdom he shares in this interview, included in my "Listening to Skid Road" 25-minute video (edited by Jill Freidberg in 2018), is this: The housing first model really makes sense, and I think it takes a lot of convincing people who aren't current in the science of it, or haven't thought it through much. Well, even some of the people in recovery that I know sometimes feel as though the Housing First model rewards bad behavior. But I keep thinking there's a lot of folks in housing that still struggle with mental health and addiction disorders. It's a lot easier to deal with when you're inside than when you're sleeping in the jungle or in a sort of tenuous shelter situation." As Housing First continues to be blamed for the increasing number of people experiencing various forms of homelessness in Seattle, it's important to listen to experts like Rev Rick. Also, it's important to remember that Housing First requires ongoing, excellent supportive services, including behavioral health, ideally co-located in the housing. Those services are expensive and too often lose funding or experience high staff and agency turnover. Housing First, done right, works for many people experiencing chronic homelessness. But it is not a panacea, as we are seeing here in Seattle. We still need emergency and longer-term shelter options for people, and much better access to street-based, outpatient, and inpatient behavioral health services.

  6. Aug 26

    Honor Their Stories

    Working on my new narrative nonfiction book, tentatively titled Unbroken Ground: Surviving Displacement in Richmond, I plan to include stories of people and communities resisting erasure and displacement in my original hometown of Richmond, Virginia. This necessitates wrestling with 'how to tell the stories' of, or rather, how to amplify the stories of people and communities too often silenced and ignored. Formerly enslaved Black people living side-by-side with former Union spies and sympathizers, abolitionists in Richmond refugee camps. Traditionally Black Richmond neighborhoods like Jackson Ward and Fulton, as well as the white working-class neighborhood of Oregon Hill fractured in the name of 'urban development.' And the First Virginians, the Powhatan people who first occupied the land, white supremacist and eugenicist (and public health official) Walter Plecker, and the 1924 Racial Integrity Act of 1924, with his 'one drop rule,' anti-miscegenation, and no category for Indigenous people. I know I have to tread carefully. I've negotiated ethically fraught territory when, in my book, Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City, I wrote about Princess Angeline, Kikisoblu, the daughter of Chief Seattle. I made a short video and a voice recording about this, which I share here and return to as I research and write about the First Virginians.

  7. Sep 2

    A Conversation with Ken Kraybill, MSW

    I watched Ken Kraybill in action using de-escalation techniques — unscripted — in a public park in New Orleans during a National Health Care for the Homeless Annual Conference and Policy Symposium, less than a month before Hurricane Katrina. We were at a rally in the park for improved health care, housing, and behavioral health services. I knew of Kraybill's work in Seattle and nationally in motivational interviewing, de-escalation, trauma-informed care, and resiliency for care providers. He now works at C4Innovations, based in Boston. Here is my interview with him about his work and insights into what works for people experiencing homelessness and behavioral health crises.

  8. Sep 8

    A Conversation with Congressman Jim McDermott

    A few months before his retirement, I sat down with Congressman Jim McDermott to talk about his work, both as a child psychiatrist volunteer in the late 1960s at Seattle's Open Door Clinic (our first free clinic) and as a US Congressman for Washington's 7th District from 1989-2017. In this interview, he talks about his direct healthcare experience working with teens with behavioral health issues, and his work in Congress to expand services for foster youth until age 21, his work on the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s-1990s, helping draft the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program and Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS. Since his retirement in 2018, he splits his time between homes in Seattle and near Bordeaux, living mostly in a small farming community in France, caring for goats and fretting about the state of our country. A US Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, he is deeply patriotic and progressive. Listen to what he has to say.

  9. Sep 15

    A Conversation with Sharon Lee

    Sharon Lee is the founding executive director of Seattle-based Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI). Celebrating its 35th year of operation, LIHI has established 4,500 affordable housing units in Washington State. These units include transitional housing, Housing First, and Tiny House villages. In addition, they run the essential Urban Rest Stops in Seattle to provide the too scarce hygiene resources needed by people experiencing homelessness. Here's my conversation with her about her work and what led her to this vital work.

  10. 3d ago

    A Conversation with Rev. Benjamin Campbell

    This past week, I was in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, seeking a better understanding of its non-whitewashed history of displacement and systemic injustices, and how these histories reverberate today. I view this as a continuation of my Skid Road project, just based in Richmond instead of Seattle, where I currently live and work. This project will include oral history interviews, archival research, and immersive site visits and will draw on my experience as a public health nurse in Richmond in the 1980s. First up is this interview I had with the Rev. Benjamin Campbell, pastoral associate at the historic St. Paul's Episcopal Church, pastor emeritus at Richmond Hill, civil rights activist, and author of Richmond's Unhealed History. I interviewed him in the library of St. Paul's, and you can hear church bells in the background. Our conversation covered a lot of territory, from him quoting from "The Second Coming" by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, invoking the White Lion (the English privateer ship in 1619 that is the first documented arrival of enslaved Africans in what became the United States), Richmond's infamous Lumpkin's 'slave jail' known as the Devil's Half Acre (changed to God's Half Acre by his enslaved wife Mary after his death/after the Civil War when she turned the building into a school for Black students), the uncovering of Richmond's prominent role in the domestic slave trade, powerful white Virginians fighting desegrgation of schools, and the white gentrification of the traditially Black neighborhood of Church Hill (where I worked as a field/public health nurse in the turbulent 1980s).

  • 10 Episodes

About

The Skid Road podcast amplifies a diversity of voices about homelessness and displacement in Seattle and in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia. The podcast series challenges us to learn from the past, from people with the lived experience of homelessness and displacement, and from people tasked with addressing homelessness in order to make more informed policy and program choices.

Information

  • Creator
    JOSEPHINE ENSIGN
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2024 JOSEPHINE ENSIGN
  • Show Website
    SKID ROAD