In her 12 years as an elementary school teacher in Portland Public Schools, Tiffany Koyama Lane has seen children bring bags of dirty clothes to school because they don’t have access to a washing machine and a family evicted from their home in the middle of the school year.
Koyama Lane, 38, wants to do something about the city outside the school walls. She’s running to represent District 3 (Inner Southeast) in Portland’s all-new city council.
Besides teaching her third grade class at Sunnyside K-12, Koyama Lane served as lead external organizer for Portland Association of Teachers for two years. In that role, she developed relationships with outside groups and helped fellow PAT members talk to parent-teacher associations, community groups and others about conditions in the schools. Koyama Lane said the public support teachers felt during last year’s 26-day strike was the culmination of months and years of deliberate efforts by the union to build support among parents.
That organizing experience prepared her for a seat on the new city council, she says, along the lines of “city councilor as a community organizer.” After the teachers strike ended in November, Koyama Lane launched a run for city council.
Koyama Lane said candidates and constituents are talking about housing, homelessness, and the need for substance use treatment.
“Something that we’re not talking about enough is the workers that are doing that work. We have a dangerous level of burnout among the social workers, the housing navigators,” Koyama Lane said. As local leaders develop plans to expand social service programs, they need to ensure that those program workers are well-paid, union-represented, and given adequate training, Koyama Lane said.
Koyama Lane supports the Renters’ Bill of Rights, the Portland Clean Energy Fund, and increasing funding for Portland Street Response and TriMet’s Safety Response Team.
Koyama Lane moved around frequently growing up in California. Her second grade teacher inspired her to pursue teaching. At 17, Koyama Lane moved to Eugene to attend University of Oregon.
When COVID closed schools in 2020, Koyama Lane masked up, grabbed her clipboard and collected 1,000 signatures in support of the universal preschool ballot measure. Multnomah County voters passed a modified version of the measure in November 2020, with 64% in favor.
With her love for teaching and her stable union-protected job, Koyama Lane wasn’t initially interested in leaving to run for office. Opportunity to shape an entirely new city council eventually tempted Koyama Lane, particularly after witnessing the success of the Preschool for All campaign.
If elected, Koyama Lane said she would be the first known Asian-American member of Portland City Council. She is Yonsei, which means fourth generation Japanese-American. During World War II, the U.S. government imprisoned more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, including Koyama Lane’s grandparents and great-grandparents. Koyama Lane’s family members were held at the Topaz internment camp in Utah, stripped of their Southern California farmland and their dignity. After they were released from the camp, her family was able to rebuild by working together on a plot of land with other Japanese-American families in Guadalupe, California, Koyama Lane said.
“I believe that this history lives with me, knowing that dignity is a basic human right, and that through policy decisions, we show who we believe is deserving of dignity,” Koyama Lane said.
