Timothy Desper

Director of Burnside Services for Portland Rescue Mission

Responsibilities and accomplishments include:

  • Serving the Portland Rescue Mission since February 2007, Desper has led and implemented numerous safety and health improvements.
  • He leads the Burnside Shelter, overseeing operations and supervising 21 staff members.
  • He led the design and implementation of a new drug overdose alert system.
  • Desper established an emergency cooling/warming center at the Burnside Shelter to prevent weather-related injuries.
  • Desper has also created and designed the community card system, bringing a culture of safety and community to services within the meal and shelter environment.
  • In 2023, he received the Homeless Alcohol and Drug Treatment Intervention Network Annual Award.

The most important thing I’ve learned about safety and health is:

Safety in homeless services is only possible with the involvement of all parts of the community. It’s critically important that our clients, as well as our staff and volunteers, participate in a culture and environment that prioritizes safety, not only physically, but also in community with each other to create places where individuals feel safe, in order to focus on stabilization and growth.

My best advice for workplace safety and health practitioners is:

Just because there may not already be a solution to a safety challenge in your environment does not mean that it cannot be created. I’ve often found that a creative idea around how to do something safer would foster a way of serving our clients that no one else in our area has done. With the extreme challenges of the presence of synthetic drugs like fentanyl, and the nature of serving individuals with significantly more challenging behaviors, we had to think of new ways to offer services to our clients that could emphasize safety, and reduce incidents of violence or medical intervention for them, as well as for our staff. Our restroom alert system, as well as our community card system, which we established ourselves, have changed the entirety of our work, and established best practices that other agencies are now actively learning from and incorporating into their operations.