Under the bridge, a woman who wants everyone to have breakfast

Josh Johnson can’t have dairy, so his scrambled eggs come without cheese. Bobbie Stevens wants light syrup on her pancakes. Karl Tiller would like a bit of hot sauce on his eggs, please. 

And Lisa Levsen wants everyone to have breakfast, just as they’d like it. 

Levsen, 66, is the board president of Neighbors Feeding Neighbors, the volunteers who feed breakfast to unhoused people underneath the Washington Jefferson Bridge from Wednesdays to Saturdays.

A year on from a dust-up with the police and city that left them operating without a permit, Levsen and company are still serving breakfast in the park.

The breakfasts under the bridge are also controversial with some neighbors. In 2022, the city paid more than $800,000 to clean up the park from the lingering impacts of it being a temporary camp for the unhoused during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Levsen is aware of the controversy, and the challenges of feeding breakfast no questions asked to anyone who’s hungry. It hasn’t stopped her.

She started volunteering in 2020 with Eugene Catholic Workers, which would eventually turn into Neighbors Feeding Neighbors. She said she wanted to do something more immediate after feeling a lack of local impact after spending time canvassing for state and national political candidates. 

Now, impact means knowing people’s names, histories, and how many sugars they’d like in their coffee.

“It makes them feel seen,” Levsen said. “Like when you go to your favorite coffee spot and they remember how you like your coffee. It makes you feel like somebody actually cares about you.”

A day of service

On serving days, work begins at 7 a.m. inside the kitchen at Bethesda Lutheran Church in the Bethel-Danebo neighborhood of Eugene. (“Off days” for Levsen mean coordinating ingredients and volunteers, not to mention working her full-time job in vineyard management software. Her only true day off is Sunday.)

The menu, cooked by Levsen and the kitchen volunteers, is a hot meal, a treat, fruit, coffee, juice and meat-and-cheese sandwiches for later.

Spices and ingredients for specific recipes, not easily available from Food for Lane County or individual donations, are out-of-pocket expenses. Special days mean special ingredients. The third Saturday of every month is blueberry pancakes and scrambled eggs day, with fat juicy berries for the pancakes, and vegetables and cheese in the eggs.

Johnson, 44, from Eugene and unhoused for 28 years, said a medical issue with his throat means he can’t have dairy. Without him asking, Levsen started to prepare eggs without cheese just for him.

“There’s a lot of places that don’t do that,” he said. “There’s a lot of meals I can’t eat.”

On a typical morning, 150 to 200 people line up on the sidewalk along Fifth Avenue under the I-105 overpass. Volunteers set up tables to hand out food and, on outreach days, clothes.

Supporting without enabling troublesome choices can be difficult, and seeps into small choices. Meals are covered with paper plates, not aluminum, so people in active addiction can’t use foil to smoke. Volunteers carry Narcan — which in an emergency can be used to counteract the effects of opioids. Levsen said they have to administer it once or twice a month.

Conflicts are also common, but volunteer Lisa Altonen said Levsen doesn’t mind.

“She cares like they’re family,” Altonen said. “Things break out and it gets tense, where a lot of us want to walk away. She walks towards the battle, to try to soothe people.”

Under the bridge

Part of the battle has been over the ability to work in Washington Jefferson Park at all — and that battle has extended beyond the bridge.

The group’s presence under the bridge continues to be controversial, especially to police and city officials. Though Eugene Catholic Workers served under the bridge for years before Levsen joined, that conflict escalated last fall.

KLCC reported that in late August 2024, the Whiteaker Community Council, which is the official neighborhood association for the area that includes Washington Jefferson Park, sent a letter to the city requesting the permit be pulled and daily food distribution be prohibited in the park. Whiteaker Community Council declined to comment on Neighbors Feeding Neighbors for this story.

The city revoked the group’s permit to operate in the park in September 2024, citing separate concerns over parking and insurance. (Kelly Shadwick, the community engagement manager for Eugene’s Parks and Open Space department, told KLCC that the process to revoke the permit happened before the Whiteaker community letter was sent to the city.)

In December 2024, Eugene Police Department officers warned volunteers they could be cited or arrested. 

In a January press conference this year, Neighbors Feeding Neighbors attorney Matt Watkins argued that as a faith-based group, its food distribution is covered by state and federal constitutional protections for both freedom of speech and religion.

Levsen said the group would serve in more places if it had capacity to expand, but the bridge is a central location providing cover from rain, sleet or heat. 

Since January, Levsen said, the threat of a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds means police have left them alone, despite their continuing to operating without a permit.

The same isn’t true for the people getting food. Police cruisers are a common sight during breakfast.

On this year’s Thanksgiving, police cited some people eating breakfast for unattended property, as they left their belongings elsewhere in the park to line up for a plate. Levsen said Neighbors Feeding Neighbors is looking to send a volunteer to court with the defendant and ask for the $200 fine to be dismissed.

Every day during breakfast, a volunteer peels off to speak with people in the street who police had previously removed from the park, and see what they’d like for breakfast.

If they step on the sidewalk, they could be arrested for reentering somewhere police previously restricted them from, a violation of a Notice of Restriction of Use, according to a statement from Eugene police spokesperson Melinda McLaughlin. The notice restricts them from both the park in question and park boundaries, like the sidewalk.

Bobbie Stevens, the 60-year-old woman who requested light syrup because she’s diabetic, has to wait in the street for her food. Even though she has to place her breakfast order from between parked cars, getting the right amount of syrup is humanizing, she said.

“It makes it feel like it’s personal,” she said.

Why she does this

People who get involved usually have a personal connection driving them, Levsen said. Here is hers: 

In midcentury Walnut Creek, California, east of San Francisco, people knew if they hopped off at one railroad crossing and walked up a specific hill, a woman named Virginia would wash their clothes and give them a meal in exchange for chopping wood.

Levsen watched her mother welcome countless visitors like this. Virginia Levsen was intelligent, a lover of literature and opera, Levsen said. She was also a paranoid schizophrenic. She would bundle her daughters into the car and drive for weeks around the Bay Area. The girls, left alone at night, locked the doors to keep out strangers banging on the car windows.

Levsen and her sisters started living with their father, who divorced Virginia twice. Levsen’s father paid for Virginia to have a place to live — and after he died, Levsen and her sisters did.

It’s hard for Levsen to not think of Virginia, especially when someone is in crisis. Recently, Levsen asked a woman to leave breakfast after she threw hot coffee on someone. 

The woman punched her in the face. The punch didn’t hurt much. Levsen had a bad headache for a couple of days.

Levsen said she thought about Jesus. She thought about her mother. She knows the woman wasn’t angry at her, just scared.

“It makes me love her even more,” Levsen said.