Everyone deserves a home
Cascades Community Placement Services is a Eugene-based startup nonprofit that provides peer-supported networking for housing connections, moving assistance, access to resources of many sorts, and helpful education for underserved people trying to get out of unstable or dangerous living situations.
What do we really mean by that? We don’t want to hide behind language so let’s break it down:
Networking for Housing Connections
Getting people into stable homes is the core of our focus when we assist someone. To do this we are building a network of various temporary housing situations that we match people in need with. Many of these are on a volunteer basis that we vet through an interview and walk-through process at the very least. We are also building connections with more established organizations that have been working this problem already so we can pool our efforts. We try to have multiple different options for those we help to choose from for various significant reasons.
Moving Assistance
Moving is often a frustrating experience, but it’s downright brutal if you are escaping from a dangerous situation or clawing your way out of the poverty trap. You may end up on the streets, only to receive savage and superficial judgment from members of the very community you wanted to call home.
The impact that relocation support has on the mental, physical, and financial well-being of a person can’t be overstated. When you have others to help you plan and achieve, your likelihood of success skyrockets compared to your odds of success going it alone. We assist through the many direct challenges of relocation: transportation, moving belongings, settling affairs, procuring necessary documentation, etc. We are in your court.
Success is not a lonesome act… it is grown from community effort, and this shouldn’t be any different.
Access to Resources and Helpful Education
We live in a world that is arguably designed to overwhelm us. Often we are aware that there are “resources available” that could help with the struggles we are dealing with but actually utilizing such resources can involve so much extra effort that it can feel pointless to even attempt. When things feel dire and you’re in a constant uphill effort to just make it through the day every extra ask contributes to the pile that keeps you feeling smothered.
CCPS helps with this and more. After establishing contact and interviewing (and before, if they consent to us working on their behalf as soon as we get their information) we try to approach their case from all angles. Besides just the activities directly involved in relocation (like arranging transportation, helping with expenses, and having a destination ready) we also aid in connecting people to other organizations/programs that could benefit them, integrate them with the community they’re joining, and when possible provide resources directly from us.
We’re not a large organization. We are not wealthy (far, far from it). We don’t have large grants to bankroll our operations. We are not compensated for what we’re doing. We do what we can whenever we can, and we aren’t shy about seeking support for people we’re assisting through any means necessary elsewhere.
We aren’t in this for prestige and career advancement. Any life uplifted is a world made better. That’s what it’s about. That’s what CCPS is about.
Who are the people of CCPS?
CCPS was founded in 2025 by three local Eugenians who have seen first-hand how brutal and difficult it can be to find safe housing and assistance in modern America. This was our answer to the question “what can we do?”
We’re people who have been involved in other aid efforts and approaches to this problem and wanted to strengthen our work, streamline it, and do more however we can. We have a variety of backgrounds and perspectives we draw upon in our vision for how things can be better… and things can be better.
We know firsthand the struggles we help others with. Between us we’ve grappled with homelessness, addiction, sexual abuse, mental illness, identity issues, and so many other problems that make a person feel like an outsider who doesn’t have a place in our world.
People feel cast out when we treat them as outcasts. The person you avert your gaze from is a human being like every single other soul that walks this world. They have no less worth than anyone else. All of us are just a few bad dice rolls away from ending up in a circumstance that we feel we’ll never escape from.
Every person is valuable. Every life is precious and worthy. That is the baseline of human existence. That is the core of what we believe and the bedrock of our operation.