The State of Oregon has been asked for one thing:integrity.
Every system was tested for it.And every system came back with silence.This archive is the permanent record.
For Volunteers
In early 2025, I served as an unpaid volunteer at Honeyman State Park.
What began as a routine volunteer assignment quickly escalated into two months of systematic psychological pressure, coercive tactics, and institutional retaliation, followed by dismissal and expulsion from all Oregon State Parks.
This archive is not a story about me.
It is a story about them — the choices they made when given evidence of abuse, when given the opportunity to stop, when given time to self-correct. And every mechanism of accountability instead used to shield themselves.
Why I built this archive: to correct an epistemic violation.
It is not designed to win attention.
It is designed to outlast denial.
Oregon Parks & Recreation Department325 documentsFully documented. Wholly unaccountable.→Oregon State Police45 documentsAwaiting substantive response.→Department of Administrative Services32 documentsAwaiting public records.→The Oregon Legislature2 documentsNo response yet.→U.S. Forest Service23 documentsFully accountable.→
WHAT IT MEANS TO VOLUNTEER
The word smuggles something in. It suggests that because you are there by choice, you need no protection. That whatever happens to you, you chose it, and can simply choose otherwise. It treats the decision to arrive as proof that you are free to leave.
That is not what volunteering in a public agency is.
Volunteers provide a public service to public institutions that need them. It is civic participation. It is how a citizen engages directly with the function of government, on public land, in the open, for no pay.
For the institution, it is labor they could not otherwise afford. Volunteers cover the shortfall. We clean the facilities, maintain the trails, meet the visitors, and hold the ground the agency cannot staff. The work is not incidental to how these places operate. In many parks and forests, it is how they operate.
And we receive none of the benefits or protections that the people supervising us receive.
No union. No human resources access. No grievance process. No appeal. No progressive discipline. No requirement that a reason be given. A supervisor’s account of you is the only account, and there is no mechanism by which it can be questioned.
You cannot always leave
The idea that a volunteer can simply walk away assumes a relationship that ends at the property line. Many of these do not.
We live on the land we steward. The position comes with a site, a hookup, a place to live. It is arranged months in advance and often built around a long-term commitment. Leaving is not resignation from a role. It is losing your housing, on a date you did not choose, with somewhere to be next and no time to arrange it.
Every park and every forest is different. What does not vary is the dependence. Your entire experience, and often your entire situation, rests on fair supervision. On the assumption that the person with authority over your placement will not use that authority against you.
When that assumption fails, there is nothing underneath it.
What happened to me
I served as an unpaid volunteer at Honeyman State Park in early 2025. I asked an operational question during a power outage and followed up with an email that named a dismissive tone. That email created a record, and the record is what everything after it responded to.
I was confronted alone. Personal disclosures were drawn out of me and passed up the chain. I was held at a picnic table for sixty-two minutes and told to chew glass and swallow it. My sexuality was used against me. I was pressured to resign and I did not.
I was dismissed by phone six days before my term ended. The park manager arrived at my RV within the hour to collect keys and gave me twenty-four hours to vacate. Two days later I was permanently expelled from every Oregon State Parks volunteer program, in writing, on agency letterhead, for documenting my treatment.
A year later, on the anniversary of that dismissal, armed officers arrived at a locked gate where I live and work. My date of birth reached the police record from a volunteer file.
Every mechanism that could have protected me was pointed the other way.
The instrument
Oregon has a statewide policy, 50.010.02, Violence-Free Workplace. It applies to every executive branch agency.
Section 7 names volunteers among those who may be barred and terminated under it.
Section 8 prohibits retaliation against those who report workplace violence. It names employees only.
The same document brings volunteers inside its enforcement reach and leaves them outside its protection. It can be pointed at us. It offers us nothing pointed back.
Twice I reported conduct that meets that policy’s own definition of workplace violence. Once in writing. Once on the call where I was dismissed. Both times, the half of the instrument that would have protected me did not reach me. The half that could remove me did.
Why this is here
This is not a claim that volunteers deserve special treatment. It is a claim that we are inside the structure, doing the work the structure depends on, and that the protections stop at a line drawn around the people who are paid.
That line is not an oversight in one park. It is written into a policy that governs an entire executive branch, and it has been in force since at least November 1, 2024.
I am one volunteer who kept the records, and that is the only reason this archive is possible.
If you volunteer for a public agency, document what happens to you, and do it with integrity, and you will already be on the right side of any action they take against you.
COMMON QUESTIONS ANSWERED HERE
Why didn't you sue them?Why would they target you?Why didn't you leave?Why not move on?Have they responded to any of this?How can people verify this documentation?What do you want to happen?Aren't you worried about retaliation?Why make this public instead of going through proper channels?What does their silence mean?Why is your tone so direct?What is an epistemic violation?What made this case particularly egregious?What happens next?
THE DISPLACEMENT FRAMEWORK
This is not a story about one park. It is about the architecture that made it possible. The structure underneath the individual choices. The mechanism that runs on volunteers at state parks and libraries and hospitals and schools — anywhere unpaid labor meets institutional authority and there is no one whose job it is to protect the person giving the labor freely.
This archive is not for revenge.
It is for those who have been told they imagined it.
It is for those about to walk into something similar.
It is for the future, when denial no longer holds.
It does not ask for apology.
It does not ask for repair.