Multnomah County Library has launched a new initiative to eliminate barriers to access and opportunity to better serve African and African American families living in Multnomah County.
A news release highlights Multnomah County Library’s initiative to strengthen connections with Black families:
This initiative aims to build momentum and capacity for the library to enact systemic changes that better serve Black families through community action research, a methodology that helps researchers work in partnership with community stakeholders to develop solutions to local problems.
Community action research will engage with African and African-American families to understand and address barriers and inequities related to kindergarten readiness and transition. Research has shown that Black children often face disparities in school readiness, which signal disparate educational, economic and social outcomes later in life.
Data and research collection are primary tools in ensuring equitable participation in education systems and improving alignment between communities and education institutions. Meyer's Equitable Education portfolio awarded a $148,000 two-year grant to support Multnomah County Library's efforts to transform its work and strengthen connections with African and African American communities.
Theresa Deibele, director of Meyer's Housing Opportunities portfolio and Kimberly A.C. Wilson, director of communications at Meyer, interviewed Louie Pitt Jr., director of government affairs for The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.
As the director of governmental affairs for The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Mr. Pitt is responsible for maintaining relationships with off-reservation governmental entities regarding the tribe and its interests and ensuring open communications.
Theresa Deibele:
Sovereignty is going to be a major theme of the Treaty Conference. What does it mean when we say that The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs is a sovereign nation?
Louie Pitt:
Of the three tribes, Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute, the Warm Springs and Wasco negotiated a treaty in 1855, and that negotiation has recognized the inherent sovereignty of the Warm Springs and Wasco tribes. Those two tribes have been their own entities, what lawyers call distinct political entities, not a minority but a distinct political entity, for thousands of years. The Creator put those two tribes on the river and all of the places that they've been. That's before the United States; that's before Oregon. That's what's called inherent sovereignty. We're not a creature of the U.S. Constitution either. It predates the Constitution but is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution under Commerce, and treaties are actually in the Constitution, too.
There's a lot of ignorance that exists in the United States about Indian Country, Indians, Native Americans, and what is a distinct political entity versus a minority. Who are these people and how does it work with the laws of the United States, federal, state, local, county and such. Anything that helps educate ourselves, No. 1, then, of course, our neighbors surrounding us, is really important and helps us do what the treaty, I think, was meant to do — which was to help protect and preserve our tribal way of life.
Theresa Deibele:
You mentioned the negotiations that led up to the Treaty of 1855. Could you tell us some more about those negotiations? What was given up in that process? What was gained from the tribe's perspective?
Louie Pitt:
The Warm Springs and Wasco tribes on the big river and the Paiute tribes up on the high desert plateau were living their own tribal way of life — a people with inherent sovereignty. Then the Warm Springs, Wasco and the Paiute people heard about the push westward by a new people. We definitely knew that times were changing and that there were prophets that talked about this new people coming over, that they were going to be different and that they were going to be wanting our land.
We had our own communication system about what happened on the Plains. Really aggressive military action against a really powerful people of the Plains and, also, I think we knew there were numbers [of folks] coming, too. We were wondering how this was going to happen because the Creator had given us these lands and had successfully provided for us — the lands, for thousands of years. When we saw people coming in, pre-treaty, they weren't as respectful as we had hoped they would be. There were trespassers and people setting up land here and there within our — what's called the ceded area. Treaty negotiations started upriver with (Washington Territorial Gov. Isaac) Stevens negotiating for the United States with Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce and the Walla Walla tribes. We heard what happened up there, so we were preparing downriver for negotiations. There were a number of pre-meetings to the treaty conference to figure out, "How is this going to work?"
We had a few English speakers who could understand, but very few of them were prepped for the tremendous communications challenge. Three days of negotiations, Gen. (Joel) Palmer, like Stevens in earlier treaties, representing the United States, showed up in the mid-Columbia area. His whole goal was to clear title to the land. Way back when early contact on the East Coast started, lawyers declared that Indians were subhuman, they only occupied the land, they didn't own the land. We differ with that today.
The Creator gave us those lands, and we've been on those lands. Whatever ownership is, if it is that anybody owns land, it was us for thousands of years. That gives an example of the difference in language, that the challenge was to negotiate a clear title to 10 million acres of land that they said, "We occupied and had sole exclusive authority over." It went back and forth. You had a lot of bands, different bands within tribes, that had different types of leadership. It all had to be discussed, and some tribal people had what they call wild oratory or wild eloquence. It must have been pretty wonderful to hear them talk about mixing who we were for thousands of years, with the challenges we were having at that time, that day, and looking to the future. "How are we going to preserve our Indian way of life?" There was a lot of back and forth and trying to figure that out. "How do you give up land?" "How do you own land?"
The negotiations went on, and probably some of the less desirable lands were decided for the Warm Springs and Wasco Tribes. That's the current land of those tribes now, 640,000 acres. One of the amazing things that happened was the tribes must have been in a pretty strong position. We reserved rights, we didn't have them given to us by the United States, but we reserved them. We brought these rights to the table, and that is the nature of inherent sovereignty. The United States didn't give us those rights. We had those rights previous to the United States and the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
We held on to those, we reserved the rights to fish, hunt, gather roots and berries, and all the other off-reservation rights we had at the time of the treaty. That's the major thing that is different than a lot of other treaties. There are just a couple of tribes that have clear treaty language for off-reservation rights. Warm Springs is one of the four Columbia River treaty tribes. There are just a couple of other tribes with off-reservation rights. That was something that was kept. We didn't give that up; we kept it. We did give up authority to manage the lands the way that we think they should be managed. Fifty percent of that 10 million acres right now is managed and owned by the United States in our ceded area. We ceded to the United States 10 million acres. What about that other 50 percent? What about that other 5 million acres? How do we go about that?
I asked that question to myself. How do we protect our way of life? Is our way of life important as Indian people to the roots? To gather berries, to gather medicine, to gather materials, and fish and hunt? Well, yes it is. We need to figure out a way to work with the private or claimed lands. It's in the Treaty of 1855. If you read the treaty, we have these rights clearly on unclaimed land.
That's the federal lands, but what about the arguably claimed lands? The county, the state, the private property? What do we do about those? One of the things we do is go to Salem, talk to the Legislature about how to better protect certain things that are related to our treaty, like the fish. Fish need water, they need it in quantity, they need cold water and they need it at the right time of year. We work and use our treaty to get us to the table, number 1; that's what the treaty does, it brings us to the table. We are then able to negotiate.
We gave up a lot of management authority, and we have to sit at the table for the planning process of federal agencies. It's pretty long, complex and onerous. But if you hang in there, you do get more protection for your way of life. We can count so many partnerings with council, to use that to help protect elements of our treaty rights, everything from huckleberries, to roots, to deer, elk, habitat and fish, too.
We're able to partner all that. Before we had sole authority to take care of everything; now we have to partner with our folks that manage the resources off the reservation. We have to figure out what their process is, and we can go about suing them for treaty rights and such if it would help bring us to the table. Anytime you go to a court you take your chances, and in Oregon and Washington, the federal courts saw that the answer wasn't in beating your heads against each other and fighting all the time. We needed to figure out a better way of doing business so the federal court ordered the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho to work with the treaty tribes to figure out a better way of doing business.
Before we were the exclusive authority. To control the quality of the environment, too, is something we gave up. We're very dependent upon tribal internal discipline and local respect of taking care of the earth, the waters and the air. Today, there are people everywhere, every inch of our ceded land is being utilized, or so-called not being wasted. They viewed our way of life as one that wastes resources. John Locke, way back when, said, "These people aren't civilized. They let the land be wasted." But that "wasted" approach, we utilized that for thousands of years. You can't say it didn't work. It worked very well for us.
The gains and the losses create a lot of social and legal friction with the state. Here we have the state of Oregon that fought against us and Washington, too, fought against Puget Sound-area fishing rights. If you believe you have these rights, you're going to have to fight for them. We did, and we won. It took a while, and still today we have folks who have no idea about who we are and what rights we have. They think we got everything from the federal government. No, it's the other way around. We gave the federal government 10 million acres. We gave the authority to own the land. We gave the air and the water.
Theresa Deibele:
Yeah, you certainly did, and it's probably a misnomer to say what you gained here because as you pointed out it's really what you reserved of the rights you already had. Well said.
Louie Pitt:
If you look at, I think it's (chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Oregon Robert C.) Belloni's case, the court case that I have taped up to my wall here. "I did not grant the Indians anything. They possessed the right to fish for thousands of years. The Treaty of 1855 simply reserves to the Indians the rights which they already possessed. They traded title to most of the lands in the Northwest in return for their fishing rights. The tribes negotiated long and hard not to be dispossessed of those rights." That's from the 1969 court case, Judge Robert Belloni, not very recent, but very important.
Theresa Deibele:
You spoke about how treaty rights get you to the table. More generally, could you talk about how treaty rights and obligations compare with other rights that might be granted from city, state or federal governments? How did treaty rights differ?
Louie Pitt:
It's a really complicated thing. I was reading court cases, and it didn't get any clearer; if anything, it got more cloudy. Of all people, Supreme Court Justice (Clarence) Thomas was the one who brought some things out. The ending phrase was, "The Federal Indian Policy is, to say the least, schizophrenic." I kind of got a kick out of that. No wonder I've been having trouble with that all these years.
In discussions with some of my Canadian tribal friends, they said (they were) impressed with what we were doing off reservation, and what we were doing with the gorge, working with six counties, 13 urban areas and the U.S. Forest Service. Because they have to pretty much sue or go to the Legislature to get a special bill to do anything that protects their way. In the United States, we can use the treaty to get us to the table, and it does require us having an all-point pressure, or a full court press as they call it in basketball.
We let the senators and representatives know that we are going to be focusing in on a certain area of who we are and we ask them help us do that. Then we start focusing in on the land and water managers, leading with our treaty. We have to use contemporary organizational laws of our tribe. Tribes now are corporate entities, too. A confederacy of three tribes, Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute, and we get Tribal Council to sign a letter to a federal person, a manager, that we believe we have rights per our treaty.
For Warm Springs and Wasco, there's also a treaty of 1865 — the Huntington Treaty — which told tribes,"You gave up your right to leave the reservation, you gave up your right to hunt and fish." What the heck is that all about? The tribes had vehemently stood up and said, "Heck no," to that, and I'll be darned if that 1865 Treaty isn't still on the books.
During the Treaty Conference, we're going to have a portion dedicated to educating people about the 1865 Treaty. That it is our duty as American citizens and it is our duty as tribal members of Warm Springs to correct a major wrong in this nation: that's the Treaty of 1865. It needs to be nullified because the treaty that is in effect is the Treaty of 1855, The Middle Oregon Treaty of 1855.
There are three sovereigns in America: There's the feds, there's the state and there's the tribes. It's always pushing back and forth between those three entities. The feds push the states, the states push back, and the tribes, well, the tribes kind of came late because we didn't have a war chest to fight for our way of life until after we were able to build up our economy on reservations during the '50s, '60s and '70s. We pretty much had to take what we were given, and then through 1968-69, we sued the United States and the state of Oregon to clarify the rights in the treaty, not gain rights.
The treaty is a major part of helping us protect our way of life, and it's the law.
Theresa Deibele:
With a name like the Treaty of 1855, the general public may perceive the treaty to be an outdated document. But the way you're describing it is that it continues to be a living document. It continues to guide the lives of the people today. Could you describe more how that feels like a living document for the tribe?
Louie Pitt:
Every Sunday when we thank the Creator for being Indian, and the water, fish, deer, roots, berries and water again, it's very much a living part of us to be Indian. We know that when we turn around to see who our friends are, one of our biggest friends is a written piece of paper. That's the treaty. It puts in writing, it challenges the good name of the United States of America and the middle Oregon tribes of Wasco and Warm Springs. If it's an out-of-date, old document, there's another one we could maybe throw out, too: It's called the U.S. Constitution, that's an old document. Let's throw that out and see how it works. That is also a living document.
The experiment known as the United States, all the people who were trying to get to their own land, to have religious freedom, and not have to fight for their way of life every single day against the king, or czar, or the queen, or whoever is the chief of the people. It's really powerful. The United States is still a wonderful experiment. I call it an experiment because it's not over with yet. It's a young country. Again, we're proud of being here for thousands of years, as Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute. The United States isn't even in its teenage years, as far as I'm concerned.
When I went to Salem one time on a Tribal Council meeting with Barbara Roberts, Gov. Roberts at that time, Tribal Council said, "Okay Louie, do your thing." I was the new government affairs guy. Like my dad told me, "I don't know where these state people get off because they're the junior government. Our government's been here thousands of years, and theirs has just been here since Valentine's Day 1859." We have a lot of pride in where we are. We declared ourselves to be one of the senior governments in Oregon.
An important subject for Indian people is this dynamic of the old; how do we keep values that got us here and moving into the future? Richard Trudell, who is one of our great attorneys and a great teacher, says, "Proud yesterdays are a valued possession, but progressive todays and tomorrows are the focus of modern tribal leaders." For us, how do we do this? How do we as Indian people do this? It was these tribal values that we were close to the land, and the waters, and their rhythms, and all of the gifts that we had. We also have what's called a Declaration of Sovereignty you need to look at. Our way of life is an important part of that.
We understood that we were here as a major gift from the Creator, and we appreciate that. We've been in the same place for thousands of years. Compare that to the average American. Think of yourself, are you from where you are now? Where did you go to school? Where were you born? Where do you spend your winters? Americans don't have a place. We can go back thousands of years, and it's still just right over there, right up the river.
So, yes, the old document, the U.S. Constitution, there were a lot of treaties made as old documents. All along the East Coast, there were treaties between tribes until a lot of disease took over, some brutality by non-Indians, wars happened between the colonial people and the territorial people, then finally the state people versus the tribes, and such. Treaties were a written document to, so called, peaceably acquire lands.
I think in Oregon, too. Territorial Oregonians tried to move the tribes from the Willamette Valley over to the Warm Springs reservation. No, no, that won't work. How did we stay strong here? Well, we didn't trust anybody. We grouped up and let them know that we were a serious force to be dealt with one way or the other, and pretty much all of those tribes in the Willamette Valley were pretty much torn apart every which way you can. It's pretty sad, they got terminated, and we didn't. I think it was mainly because of our working together, and our tribalism, and being out of the way.
In the Middle Oregon Treaty of 1855 a negotiated legal right was the product. We need to educate people on the legal place that we stand and their understanding of who we are. It's not only the good hearts of fellow American citizens but treaty law that we are here today.
Theresa Deibele:
We understand that six pages of the original Treaty of 1855 are on loan from the National Archives and will be on display at the Museum at Warm Springs in October. What significance does this hold for the people to have those original documents there?
Louie Pitt:
To make the Middle Oregon Treaty of 1855 more real. We've heard nothing but stories, there's no pictures. I'm looking for a map with an X signed on it, and a Joe Palmer signature on the map and thumbprints from some of the tribal Indians, Wasco and Warm Springs signers. The treaty is for real. Tribal members can pick up a copy of the treaty, and see that, yes, it is a real thing that really happened. Thank goodness it did, and it just makes it more real for us.
It is a tool to help us and help protect our way of life.
Here's a right that was written down on paper, and we're living it. It's really neat that I'm living the dreams of those treaty signers. I hope to be able to pass on the same dream to my sons and daughters. To me, they got a chance to grow up tribal and share the home education they received about the treaty. It's just part of our family. Then the Indian way of life, which is just living it, taking it easy, trying to be forgiving of our ignoramus neighbors and the American dream. We have our dream, too, that's a part of that.
Kimberly Wilson:
I wanted to follow up on your last answer about the display of the documents there through October. Are your children going to be coming at some point?
Louie Pitt:
I sure hope so. I took a chance, the museum had a life achievement award and I had two of my children introduce me. They were amazed at how many diverse people I am in contact with. I used to drag them around to meetings when they were little guys. They were known as the best behaved kids in the meeting room. It wasn't until maybe about 10 years ago that they both started integrating the lessons they learned. I didn't tell them what to learn, I just did it the Indian way, whether you like it or not, you're going to see, you're going to learn by seeing and hearing, and occasionally feeling, too.
It was a nice occurrence that, they're good people and they know a lot about Indian Country, and they're very respectful of the lands and waters. They'll do very well wherever they are. They'll be in the minority, working on the tribal viewpoint of things, but that's okay. That's what we need because America is still pushing really hard everywhere it can, and it's like any city that's jam-packed, how are we going to do this? Before it gets too much worse, we need to figure out that there are some places that really do need to be protected for their function to our whole way of life. We set aside wildernesses because of their beauty, but they also have a function to the circle of life. They also got to listen to a lot of my friends here, ecologists and wildlife biologists and co-workers, too. Anyway, they were pretty well advanced into their own tribal environmentalism and ecologism. Everything has a function, everything has its place. I'm very proud of them.
I've got two other kids. My oldest is in Baker City and my youngest is working at Skamania Lodge and he's not quite sure what he wants to do. He reminds me of somebody … I think about the same age. It's a different world when you're responsible for somebody; "My gosh, what do I teach these guys? What do I know?"
In Warm Springs there's a saying, Tiichám, that means the earth or land. But you have to be a part of the Indian way of life for about 30 years before you figure out what it's all about. Tiichám, is not just about the earth. It's a whole process of accepting Tiichám as a gift, then turning around and gifting it to your children. "This is yours. This is the gift of Tiichám. I give to you." It's a gift. It's taken me 30 years to figure that out. It was just a word at one time. Now I know that it is also a big responsibility.
The front entrance to The Museum At Warm Springs, located in the homeland of the Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute Native American Tribes, which stretches from the top of the Cascade Mountains to the banks of the Deschutes River.
This first in a series of blogs will focus on what tech, as a sector and a community, gets right. The three big ideas: how the philanthropic sector can maximize impact with better technology, developing a more generous attitude toward risk and how philanthropy can invest internally by creating an open and mentoring work culture that spreads beyond the bounds of the individual workplace.
In July, I had the opportunity to speak at ACT-W Portland, the annual conference for our city's local ChickTech chapter. My talk, "At The Intersection of Philanthropy & Tech," was about the ways I think the tech industry is ahead of philanthropy, the things it can learn from philanthropy, and areas where both industries need to work together for the betterment of society. Last year, I attended my first ACT-W conference, when I was just beginning to get my head around the idea of being a "techie": I was three months into learning Python and a year or so into developing websites.
I was inspired by the conference and its unique mix of high-tech, person-centered and down-to-earth sessions –– so much so that –– this year I wanted to share my thoughts at this particular conference because I've been working at the intersection of tech and philanthropy, and I see the gaps in-between what each sector wants to accomplish and what they are currently achieving. Furthermore, I wanted to provoke and facilitate a conversation on this subject and felt that ACT-W was the right venue, as it brings together socially-responsible minded people rooted in tech.
The idea of better systems is close to home, because Meyer has maintained an in-house grants management system since 2004, when we decided to move toward digital. Technological advancements within the past decade have provided significant growth in tech products aimed at the philanthropic market and I think the future promises us not just the tools to do our jobs but also tools that will make philanthropy more effective. For example, data visualization platforms and real-time data platforms (as an alternative to traditional grant reporting) are already in the works. Just imagine how the entire conversation about the U.S. 2020 Census and the importance of an accurate census count could be changed if funders didn't need to rely on census data collected once per decade. Additionally, projects such as Grantmakers.io are utilizing APIs and caching tools to create more transparency in our sector, which is great news for nonprofits –– because it's 100 percent free –– and great news for the public, who deserve to know where philanthropic dollars go.
Philanthropy's attitude toward risk needs a shakeup.
As a sector, we tend to be risk-averse, which is funny, since our primary goal is to lose money. Foundations that have roots in tech are modeling the big-bet approach to philanthropy. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is best known for global big bets on eradicating malaria and ensuring family planning and reproductive health care for all women. However, they also invest heavily (if quietly) in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in helping marginalized people secure education that leads to high earnings. They describe this work as "big bets in innovation." I'd call it equity, because it is looking not just at getting marginalized people into the workforce or into traditional university education, but also intentionally striving to build their long-term power. Another example of big-bet philanthropy is Michael & Susan Dell Foundation's annual expenditure of 15 percent of its assets, as opposed to the industry-standard (and legally required) 5 percent. In 2017, Fast Company profiled Dell Foundation's risky spending, their influence and their impact investing strategy as it relates to broader sector trends.
Finally, I think the way that the tech industry invests in people is absolutely phenomenal. From hosting weekly Meetup groups to participating in and supporting conferences like ACT-W, the people of tech are wholeheartedly engaged in sharing knowledge, mentoring and moving folks into the fold. Techies understand that the future success of their sector — and of society — depends on developing more programmers. If that sounds hyperbolic, consider cybersecurity expert and "Future Crimes" author Marc Goodman's warning: reserving high-level knowledge for an elite task force will only ensure that the bad guys stay ahead of us in matters of personal, institutional and national security.
I have personally experienced this supportive culture and learning environment: through groups such as Women Who Code and Latinx Tech PDX; through mentorship, encouragement, and being given advice by tech professionals; through free learning platforms such as Khan Academy, GitHub Labs and edX; as a member of the LaunchCode community; and from organizations such as ChickTech, who provided an interface for me to engage and platform for me to connect and share with peers. All of this has happened free of charge and within the past 18 months.
Philanthropy has nothing on this! I think it's time our sector got strategic about how to recruit, mentor, and retain instead of assuming that there are a finite amount of jobs in grantmaking and no one ever leaves them. I managed GRANTMAKERS of Oregon and Southwest Washington's jobs board for more than three years, and I know that's not the case. People move through our sector from government, academia, nonprofits and for-profits all the time. Philanthropy needs to consider doing more than the occasional diversity pipeline or leadership program (most of which don't result in getting folks of color into leadership).
If the idea of funders stationing a booth at a career fair or hosting a Meetup for folks interested in learning about grantmaking seems totally wild, it says something aboutour sector and the value we place on investing in people. That's not a message I want us to send.
If you're a funder and this blog feels like a total downer or if you're a techie patting yourself on the back for being awesome, stay tuned. I have more thoughts on how our sectors can work together. I think philanthropy has a lot to teach the tech industry about deploying resources for social good, and I think engaging tech in this work is one of our most pressing tasks.
Photo caption: Participants at the 2018 Advancing the Careers of Technical Women (ACT-W) Conference in Portland smile and wave in anticipation of their next workshop activity.
This summer Meyer challenged Oregon experts on innovative housing design, construction and finance to think big: Bring us your best ideas to create 1 million months of affordable housing for as little public subsidy as possible.
Our 1 Million Months Challenge RFP elicited 18 proposals from teams around the state that brought fresh thinking to the basic thrust of our question: How can communities help many more people into housing that's suitable and affordable, given current levels of funding?
We are glad to report that a first look through the proposals validates our hope that there are promising, untested approaches that might well be worth trying. Those who submitted concepts in that first round that seem most impactful and innovative will be invited to submit more detailed full proposals this fall, with funding decisions announced in January 2019.
We look forward to sharing what emerges from this work with you and getting your thoughts on how to channel and support the creativity people have brought to it!
Last May the Healthy Environment portfolio team was honored to sponsor and participate in the University of Oregon Symposium on Environmental Justice, Race and Public Lands. The event organizers at the University Center for Environmental Futures put together an amazing lineup of presenters that included students, practitioners and academics. There were many provocative talks and ideas shared, and we wanted to share a few reflections on several of the themes that we've been talking about since the event.
Decolonization as part of our equity commitment
When Meyer began its equity journey, we started by exploring racism as a systemic, institutional problem of power, and we used this exploration as a foundation for building a shared framework for understanding oppression and privilege and how they operate at individual, institutional and systemic levels. Since then we have continued to expand our analysis by learning about how oppression operates across different identities in addition to race and how different forms of oppression interact with one another. We have also adopted new practices for operationalizing our equity in our work.
In the past couple of years, we have begun to learn more about decolonization and how deeply entrenched colonial language and practices are in the work we do as well as the work we support in communities. Like racial equity work, decolonization requires us to deconstruct thinking, processes and practices that focus on or reinforce the conquering of land and treating nature as a commodity, accumulating wealth at the expense of others, creating a hierarchy of power based on race and identity, and perpetuating a single story of history to support these systems, practices and ways of thinking. Decolonization was a key overarching theme of the UO symposium, and we heard about a number of ways that the environmental movement perpetuates colonial thinking and practices. I offer these takeaways from the symposium in the spirit of shared learning and to support our collective work to elevate the value of indigenous knowledge and leadership as well as to begin to understand the colonial narratives that are deeply entrenched in the mainstream environmental movement.
What's wrong with talking about "our public lands"?
Speakers at the symposium talked about how the dominant public lands discourse and practices used to protect public lands tend to reflect and perpetuate settler colonialism: the replacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society. By talking about "our public lands," we ignore the truth that all land in the U.S. was tribal land first and that these lands we call "public" were stolen from tribes. This mindset erases the history of Native communities' relationship with the land and also reinforces a possessive way of relating to land as being "ours."
Kyle Powys Whyte, one of the keynote speakers, explained that indigenous peoples' relationship with land is understood as being more consensual and viewed as an "ancestral kinship" relationship. This is very different than the dominant culture view in the U.S. and the legal and management practices that govern land as property, which are based on the view that humans are separate from nature and that nature and land are commodities.
Laura Pulido, University of Oregon professor of ethnic studies and geography, talked about how the use of the Antiquities Act to create new national monument designations that expand public lands can also reinforce settler colonialism, even in some cases where tribes and communities of color are involved in creating these new designations, but not leading them. In her analysis, she shared that "monuments" mark victories, versus "memorials," which are about not forgetting the past, including the indigenous trauma of the past. Public lands efforts don't generally include repatriation of land to tribes, which is a crucial element for meaningful decolonization, nor do they lift up the true and complete history of indigenous communities' past and current relationship to the land.
Tribes have much to teach about climate change adaptation
Whyte talked about how the narrative around climate change as a "dystopian future that humans have never experienced" also reinforces settler colonial thinking because it ignores the actual dystopian histories that tribes and indigenous communities have experienced. They were forced from their ancestral lands and displaced to new ecoregions and reservations, and they have been resilient in adapting to these displacements and new climates by developing new ways of living. He described dozens of examples of tribes and indigenous communities that have been taking their deep knowledge and lived experience with climate change, marrying that with traditional governance systems and science, and applying it to climate change adaptation planning. He noted that this experience and planning expertise is not widely understood, and it is not being fully recognized for its potential impact on climate change adaptation efforts.
Healing is a crucial part of diversity, equity and inclusion practice
Diversity, equity and inclusion trainers and practitioners presented a panel on the opening day of the symposium. The need to integrate healing into this work ran through all their remarks. Without thought and attention to healing, the damage and trauma that individuals and communities have experienced as a result of white supremacy and institutional racism can be reinforced and re-experienced. The work of developing trauma-informed, healing practices and tools needs more attention and widespread adoption. Without this essential work, we are likely to replicate tactics and behaviors that are born out of systems of oppression and privilege and not reach transformative change in our society.
Decolonizing collaborations between students, researchers and indigenous communities
Throughout the symposium, participants had the opportunity to hear a number of indigenous leaders, students and researchers work together in collaboration using approaches and practices that support decolonization and indigenous self-determination. Anna Elza Brady shared the story of the tribal-led effort to establish the Bears Ears National Monument. In contrast to other monument designation campaigns, this effort, which has been led by tribes, has centered on tribal culture, spirituality and self-determination from the very beginning. We also heard about a collaborative research effort between researchers and the Karuk Tribe that focuses on the use of traditional wildfire practices — “Fire as medicine” — to create healthier forests and support tribal sovereignty and spiritual health in tribal communities across the West. This project supports the much-needed shift away from the forest management regime emphasizing fire suppression that has dominated the West and is a key driver in fueling the severe megafires that we are experiencing.
The four reflections I’ve shared offer a small glimpse into the many rich ideas and work discussed at the symposium. Much more could be said. If you also attended and left with other key takeaways or new ideas based on what you learned or if you have reactions to this post, please share your comments and ideas.
A link to the keynote presentations by Kyle Powys Whyte and Carolyn Finney can be found here.
For all his adult life, Steve Adelman has been a peony farmer. He grows so many flowers on his 200-acre farm near Salem, it takes a 2000-square-foot walk-in cooler to store them all while they await shipment to customers around the globe.
"It started as a hobby for my mom and just continued to grow over time," he says.
After an unexpected phone call six years ago, Adelman found himself in the river restoration business, too.
A neighboring nursery owner had heard some Willamette Basin restoration groups were looking for a place to store native trees and shrubs before planting them along the basin's rivers and streams. She wanted to know if Adelman would consider renting out his cooler.
"I said, 'Well, I'll at least talk to them,'" he recalled.
As it turned out, the restoration groups' needs perfectly aligned with the Adelman Peony Gardens' growing calendar. The farm used the cooler heavily between May and October. But in January, when the restoration groups needed a home for their plants, the facility sat vacant.
"It was a good way for me to keep one of my employees full time through the winter, get a little more business and utilize our cooler when it would otherwise be empty," Adelman said.
The cooler now spends its winters stuffed with hundreds of thousands of bare-root Willamette Valley plants -- 34 species in all. Its fans hum along at a constant 33 to 36 degrees.
"You want to keep the temperature down low enough so the plants stay dormant, but you want to make sure they don't freeze, either," Adelman said.
Adelman Peony Gardens plays a crucial role in the Willamette Basin restoration movement. By providing a space to store large quantities of saplings, the cooler enables restoration groups to buy plants in bulk from area nurseries through a program run by the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. That makes it easier for them to get the quantity and type of plants they need, which ultimately enables them to get more restoration done, more efficiently.
From January through March, the cooler is a hub of near-daily activity, with planting contractors dropping by early in the morning to pick up orders before they head to the day's work sites.
Adelman tracks the flow of inventory on a spreadsheet. To date, more than 2 million plants have stopped over at his farm on their way to restoring hundreds of acres throughout the Willamette Basin. Some are now growing at Willamette Mission State Park, just a few miles away.
"It's neat to know I was a part of that effort," Adelman said.
By mid-March, the cooler is empty again, ready to absorb the latest crop of fresh-cut flowers and peony root stock.
Steve Adelman poses at his Salem-area peony farm, where a walk-in flower cooler doubles as an essential tool in the Willamette Basin’s river restoration efforts.
Welcome to part two of the Equitable Education portfolio's three-part series focused on Latino male educators.
According to the most recent Oregon Statewide Report Card, 22.6 percent of Oregon's public school students are Latinx while only 4.5 percent of Oregon teachers match these students. That gap in visual and cultural representation in our classrooms contributes to the persistent achievement gap for Latinx students as compared with their white peers. This lack of diverse representation is consistent throughout Oregon's education leadership.
Earlier this year, I sat down with Portland Public Schools' (PPS) new superintendent, Guadalupe Guerrero, just one of three male Latino superintendents scattered across Oregon's 198 districts, to talk about the journey to his current leadership position as well as his hopes for a more diverse and representative Oregon education workforce. The superintendent took the helm of PPS just after the 2017-18 school year began and recently celebrated the completion of his first school year with graduates around the district.
Superintendent Guerrero often shares his belief in student-focused leadership, but for Oregon's Latino boys and young men, he may represent a specific hope for the future. In the Education Week article linked in the first blog of this series, one of the students interviewed said, "You can't be what you can't see." The superintendent is making himself visible and providing a leadership model for all students in the district, with a keen eye on empowering Latinx students.
Like other students of color, Latinx students are lagging behind in achievement and graduation rates across the state and country: 69.4 percent of Latinx students in Oregon graduate on time as compared with 76.6 percent of white students. Recently, as the keynote speaker at the Mente Summit, an event created to inspire male Latino students through role models and mentorship to graduate and pursue higher education, Superintendent Guerrero encouraged the young men in attendance to work hard for their dreams and reassured them that success should never mean leaving behind their culture. In the current political climate, that's a powerful message that is in many ways contradictory to messaging they may receive in some of their schools and greater communities. This interview has been edited.
Bekah Sabzalian:
How did you find support as a young male Latino teacher? Do you think the needs of male Latinos differ from other teacher candidates, teachers and administrators?
Guadalupe Guerrero:
When I entered education, it was as a classroom aide [paraprofessional] and serving in a community where I lived alongside students. I shopped at the same markets, went to the same laundromats, ate at the same places. For me, working in schools was and is about serving the community.
As far as the question around the needs of male Latinos, I think that many of the supports and needs are the same that any new teacher would have. Hopefully, there's mentorship, there's district and building support, there's coaching available to all of our new educators. But hopefully, we're putting an especially mindful eye on our new professionals that may feel more isolated or feel a little bit of a cultural disconnect when they're working in a school where they may represent the only adult of color in that community.
Bekah Sabzalian:
Since moving to Oregon you tweeted, "Can we increase efforts to better ensure there are more teachers and educational leaders of color in the state of Oregon? We need to effectively recruit, prepare, hire and support diverse candidates." What are your ideas for getting this work done?
Guadalupe Guerrero:
There are some proven strategies we should be incorporating, here in Portland Public Schools, everywhere, especially in urban school districts. There's a diversity that exists with support staff or paraprofessionals. This is the group of employees that's the most embedded and familiar with the community; they're very known to the families and the students. We should encourage them to get their certifications, and we should support them.
School districts should be working closely with all of their surrounding higher education institutions. I've made it a real priority to get very familiar with all of the local university presidents and college of education deans. I've now met with all of them, and my line of questioning is similar when I first meet with them: "Tell me about the connective tissue between your institution and PPS. Tell me about your teacher education program. Tell me how you recruit, what kind of candidates you're looking for? How are you promoting diversity in those programs?" Because I well understand, if candidates of color are not completing their programs, then I'm not going to have a pool in the end.
Also, I've led in school districts where we partner with universities to create an urban teacher residency program. That's another pool of folks who, in partnership with the colleges, we're able to embed in our schools and have the benefit of a full-time resident working under a mentor teacher while they're going about their studies. Generally, a principal will have a resident working under a teacher in their school; then something opens up, somebody retires, the resident teacher tends to be the natural candidate for a slot because they're already woven into the fabric of the school. Urban teacher residency programs and other residency programs like that featured in the article are very important components.
We can also start at the high school level. We think of traditional career and technical education (CTE) programs, but you can create one for teachers, too. Here, students are getting that experience while in high school, learning about some of the pedagogy that drives the profession and finding on-ramps into some of those higher education programs. You see a lot of college of education deans now rethinking how you get a four-year education degree and certificate. I think that's forward thinking. I think it's tough for folks that are contemplating the profession to do another year of graduate study. The tuition and the investment of time it takes can be a barrier when you're not necessarily entering a high-paying career. I think if this country had its priorities right, it would emphasize the importance of public education. We would think about how to incentivize the career for talented individuals, those who are fantastic with kids but just can't afford to make teaching a career.
Bekah Sabzalian:
Recently, a PPS high school student of color asked you at City Club about diversifying the teacher workforce before he graduates. You responded that education leaders must move carefully to ensure that implementation is effective. How do you balance the urgency of the issue, clearly demonstrated by this passionate student, with careful implementation that often takes a great deal of time?
Guadalupe Guerrero:
First of all, I applaud that student for bringing it up and for having the agency to say, "I know you're building a school system out, and I want to experience and get a taste of that before I walk across the stage."
How do you balance the urgent with systemic building? There are some pools where educators or support staffs of color do exist. What I would say is, how do we begin to identify some of those individuals and elevate their visibility for our students? We see some small examples of that happening now. I'm very interested in seeing how do we take that paraprofessional who is very dynamic, who has great relationships with the students and the families, and involve them in visible positions? Like student advisers, student success coaches, how can we have them lead culturally specific student unions? We should have them lead affinity groups so that we increase the access that students may have to adults of color who work in their school communities.
That's one immediate mechanism we might be able to move on more rapidly so that the student doesn't have to wait for a chance to work with diverse educators. We have a number of schools that are piloting that work.
Bekah Sabzalian:
The article talked about the barriers male Latino teachers face, one of them being community perceptions of low pay, lack of visibility and a knowledge gap around advancement opportunities. What do you see as significant barriers to creating a steady pipeline of Latino male teachers?
Guadalupe Guerrero:
When you bring up community perceptions of the profession, that doesn't necessarily only apply to future educators of color. I think the education profession in this country certainly doesn't always carry the level of status or commensurate compensation that we say is important when they're serving our children. So there's that, then you layer on top of that educators of color, or college graduates of color, who we already know don't represent a high percentage of those who finish higher ed. They're posed with a question, internally, around, "What are my career choices going to be?" Often times, they're first in their families to graduate college, so when they're faced with making a choice like that, I think, in many families, they tend to lean the conversation toward certain vocations. Teaching doesn't tend to, unfortunately, come up first. For those with a Latino background, we know that in Latin American countries, "El Maestro" carries not just a term of endearment, but a pretty high level of esteem. There is certainly some respect for the profession.
But it is a challenge. How do we not only encourage more college graduates to consider the profession, but how do you attract graduates of color to entertain the idea of serving, often times in an underserved community, with students who perhaps might look like them?
Bekah Sabzalian:
Statistically, there are not many Latinx professionals serving as principals or in district leadership roles. What was the push that made you make that leap into administration?
Guadalupe Guerrero:
I have to say part of what drew me to education was that I didn't generally have a positive K-12 experience. Starting off as a young teacher, I didn't generally have a positive experience. In this profession, one can't help but notice that things could be a lot better. I think what sustained me through those early years is a feeling of fortification and nourishment from the community around me. I was a Spanish bilingual teacher. Naturally, the 30 fourth- and fifth-grade kids in my combination class, they all looked like me as did all of their parents. For me, I felt good about the teaching and learning experience that I was able to provide. Those were sort of the best years of my career in some ways, were my first years as a teacher. I know people often say those are the toughest years. I can tell you my first year as a teacher was by far my best year. I just had a great time. I loved the connections with my students and their families.
When I made the decision to move into administration, there weren't a lot of Latino principals but I knew some and I knew they were doing good work and I appreciated hearing about their experience. I think part of it is, we apply a lot of these characteristics to our Latino students; in many ways they're similar to Latino young professionals. There's a certain tenacity, persistence and grit that exists in the community. We tend to only use those words with people of color, but we're used to modeling those characteristics.
Bekah Sabzalian:
What supports would be helpful as more diverse educators take the leap into administration and district leadership?
Guadalupe Guerrero:
We need monthly dinners for our new administrators. Let's bring together our first-year principals, especially those of color, and make sure they're there. Reach out, give them that personal invite and let's order pizza and talk about how it's going. Let's talk about what the challenges have been, what's going well, and let's talk about some of the "just in time" learning the districts can provide for them. You're coming up on evaluation season or budget development time or hirings. We need to make sure to give you white-glove service all the way through.
Sometimes new educational leaders may be a little shy to raise their hand and express, "I don't know how to do this." Maybe it goes back to some of the persistence mindset like, "I'll just figure it out." We don't want any of our folks to work in isolation. We want them to feel very supported in this already challenging work.
Bekah Sabzalian:
To end things out, I'm wondering, what has kept you in education all these years?
Guadalupe Guerrero:
Well, public education still has not guaranteed the opportunity that it promises to students of color. They continue to represent the bottom end of a very persistent achievement and opportunity gap. There is a lot of important work that remains to be institutionalized. We need to reimagine public education so that it serves all students, all diverse learners. Not just kids of color, kids with disabilities, kids who are language learners, immigrant students, historically underserved kids.
We have not yet delivered on that promise and what keeps me motivated is to do my part, to try to be the best servant leader that I can be to elevate this, both as an important topic and also to concretely do something about it. There's something fundamentally wrong with the system when you see the kind of disproportionality that affects our students of color. They're the most often referred to the office, they're the most often suspended, they're most often the ones who drop out, they're most often the ones who are not prepared when they enter kindergarten.
Our new teachers are less likely to look like our students. It's hard to find principals to lead our communities of color who are themselves diverse. We are in the state of Oregon where out of 198 school districts there are only two other Latino male superintendents in this entire state. It's no different when you look at the 10,000 school districts in America.
I think it's important to make sure that the demographic is more representative of a country where our students are increasingly of diverse backgrounds to raise the lens and sensitivity to the needs of students, to approach this work in a more culturally responsive way. I am here, taking up the challenge, doing my part in a school system that unfortunately demonstrates many of the same patterns and see if we might disrupt that. Key to the work is joining hands with a lot of partners and supporters who are like minded and who see that serving our children is of the greatest importance. That can't be just a conversation, that can't be something that maybe happens 10 years from now, but something we can do today, tomorrow and begin to put into place networks of support for our students and our educators who are motivated to serve our students of color to be more successful. That doesn't mean you have to be a person of color to contribute to that. We just have to share the same equity and social justice commitment.
–– Bekah
In this interview, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero uses the term Latinos when speaking about the entire community. At Meyer, we often use Latinx as an alternative to Latino or Latina to refer to people of Latin American descent. Latino male specifically references males from the Latinx community.
The 2020 U.S. Census is coming, and by now you may have heard that it's slated to include a question about U.S. citizenship status. That question has implications for the accuracy of the count, and the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the count has implications for all of us.
Indeed, census data have a tremendous effect on distribution of resources. In 2015, more than $10 billion of federal funding was allocated to Oregon based on census data. Census data are also used to determine sites of schools and other infrastructure; businesses regularly use the data when deciding where to locate and invest. The shape of our voting districts and allocation of representative seats in government draw upon census data. Perhaps your organization refers to census data, too. Meyer does.
Data collected in 2020 will have far-reaching impact, so anything that gets in the way of a full and accurate count is concerning. It is widely believed that asking about citizenship status will suppress U.S. Census participation. Immigrant communities, who already experience real consequences of harsh public discourse and policy, are very likely to be undercounted as mistrust of the government keeps many folks from answering Census questions, regardless of their own citizenship status. We're hearing this directly from community leaders we've spoken to.
Oregon's attorney general has joined a lawsuit with 17 other states seeking to bar inclusion of the question. And you can take action, too.
The Commerce Department, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau, is accepting public comments about the 2020 survey. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NALEO Educational Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice are working collaboratively to encourage nonprofits and the public to submit comments before the August 7 deadline. They've created a simple portal at CensusCounts.org to make the process as easy as possible. I used it to submit comments myself in just a few minutes.
“It’s Oregon’s Kitchen Table, which is through Portland State University. The city received a grant of $185,000 from the Meyer Memorial Trust for the collective policy or collective process to determine what are the long term best practices for dealing with the watershed in Lincoln County,” said Spencer Nebel, Newport’s city manager. “This is part of the pilot project that’s being funded by the state as well.”
Data collection is crucial to ensuring the well-being of human and natural communities and reducing environmental harm. A two-year grant from Meyer's Healthy Environment portfolio will support this project's efforts to ensure that natural systems are healthy and able to adapt to changing conditions and long-term impacts in the Mid-Coast region.
Meyer will select a small number of projects to develop innovative approaches to housing affordability in Oregon, with initial grants of up to $125,000 available early in 2019 and potential follow-on grants in 2020 to further develop the pilots and broadly share results of the work.
Defining the problem
Meyer prioritizes stable, safe and affordable housing as one foundation of a more equitable Oregon. A shortage of housing generally has driven up rents and home prices across the state, and for those unable to earn enough to pay for even very basic housing without help, the consequences can be life-altering. A growing body of research shows that housing instability contributes directly to poor performance in school, difficulties getting and keeping a good job, and poor health outcomes.
Our tax code and social policies invest billions into housing in the form of property tax deductions (for mortgage interest and property taxes) that mostly benefit affluent households. For poor people, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, and people of color, public investment (outside of prisons and jails) has been rather less lavish.
Even at that, publicly subsidized affordable housing has long been under intense scrutiny around cost. Hardly a week passes without a new article or news segment challenging the ostensibly high cost of new affordable housing. The urgency behind that concern is understandable, as the gap continues to grow between the demand for affordable housing and the public investment necessary to meet the need. There's no doubt we must look for ways to get more from every public dollar going into affordable housing.
Beginning in 2015, Meyer has sought to play a constructive role in this conversation, convening 16 experts as the "Cost Efficiency Work Group" and producing a report aiming to clearly articulate the factors that tend to drive up costs in affordable development and to focus on real opportunities to bring down costs.
Part of this work is a communications challenge. Subsidized affordable housing is different in significant ways from market-driven real estate development, and there are constraints that are beyond developers' control that make it easy to put affordable developments in an unflattering light for those unfamiliar with the special nature of this work. There's also an important conversation about tradeoffs between long-term lifecycle costs and upfront construction costs -- building smart for the long term is not necessarily "inexpensive."
Still, in the face of urgent unmet need and a widespread skepticism about government's ability to respond effectively, it's critical to achieve as much as possible with the limited amount of public subsidy available. Although it's unlikely there's a completely novel "silver bullet" approach to creating affordable housing no one has ever thought about or tried before, it does seem worthwhile to support exploring new ways of looking at these perennial issues.
Changing the frame: focusing on the big-picture outcome
In mid-July 2018, Meyer will release a Request for Proposals that builds on our recent efforts to support innovative work around how to provide more affordable housing by lowering costs. In 2015-16, we awarded funding to five projects looking at different approaches to bringing more housing online at a lower cost, and we continue to follow that work with keen interest.
For this RFP, we wanted to open the doors even wider to innovative ideas and approaches and to focus more clearly on the end goal: creating as much access as possible to affordable housing for as little public subsidy as possible. To that end, we are defining a "moonshot"-style challenge, focusing creativity and energy around a specific, lofty goal.
The 1 Million Months Challenge ("1MM"):
Bring us your best ideas for guaranteeing 1 million months of affordability, using as little public subsidy as possible.
This takes a bit of unpacking. There are many possible paths to 1 million months; here are some potential examples to illustrate the kinds of ideas this could include:
Piloting an approach to build, site and deliver new factory-built units meant to be affordable for 20 years that would aim for just under 4,200 units (240 months x 4,167 units = just over 1,000,000 months of affordability)
Creating affordable units for 60 years with lower rents through cross-subsidy from other income-producing uses in the same properties, aiming to scale up to about 1,400 total units (720 months x 1,389 units = over 1,000,000 months)
Maybe your best idea doesn't involve building any new housing? Exploring a sustainable approach to master-leasing new units in the private-market for five-year increments, staggered over time, to assist nearly 17,000 households five years at a time (60 x 16,667 = over 1,000,000)
The key point is that we are leaving it up to people who know the most about these challenges to define how to reach the goal. We're framing the goal this way to emphasize flexibility and focus on the outcomes:
Flexibility: This is less about developing "projects" than creating a viable model or path; we are explicitly open to purely financial strategies that deliver on the outcome of creating more access to affordable housing.
Outcomes: We are not necessarily focused on production of units (although more housing is important, and some strategies will rightly focus on that), but rather on the end-goal of housing large numbers of people for an extended period of time.
Finally, it's worth highlighting that we're pulling the focus away from the raw total development cost to focus on what really matters most: the amount of public subsidy required to achieve the goal.
Unlike a typical Meyer RFP, we're not looking for affordable housing projects per se, but a model or path that changes the game. You could say we're trying to "get out of the way" of solving these problems, by putting as few limitations as possible on what counts as a solution. We're calling the question for those who insist that the current system doesn't deliver bang-for-the-buck and there are better ways to do things. Ultimately, the point of this RFP is to give you an opportunity (and some resources) to take an idea or a notion or intuition that you've been thinking about and build it out to a full-fledged plan, test it, improve it and share it.
Sharing ideas, results and lessons learned will be a central part of participating in this experiment. Project teams funded under this RFP will be expected to participate in a learning cohort with each other, sharing and critiquing ideas, and helping each other refine and improve each model. Additionally, Meyer will create a variety of platforms and public events to highlight this work, to broaden the circle of folks around the state trying to think about these challenges in a different way and improve upon the ways we help people into housing they can afford, and ultimately to help public funders and other partners identify new models and approaches worth their support.
About the RFP
The strongest proposals will be invited to submit more detailed proposals in the fall, with decisions and grant funding in early 2019. Grantees receiving funding under this RFP will be eligible to request follow-on implementation grants to be awarded in early 2020.
Finally, because it matters who is being helped and how much rent they are able to pay, and because there are distinct challenges in this larger context of cost and efficient use of subsidy, Meyer has defined three categories under the RFP and hopes to make awards in each:
Hard-to-House or Extremely Low Income: Housing solutions affordable to people/households between 0-30% Area Median Income (AMI), and/or designed and specifically intended to assist populations with significant challenges around access to affordable housing:
Transition Age Youth exiting foster care
Immigrants and/or refugees
People of color
Indigenous communities and tribes
People with disabilities (including severe and persistent mental illness)
Domestic violence survivors
People released from incarceration or people with a criminal record
Rural Workforce Housing: Housing solutions intended to serve residents of rural communities up to 100% of the local AMI. "Rural" in this context means any community not located within one of the federally defined "Metropolitan Statistical Areas": Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, Salem, Eugene-Springfield, Medford, Corvallis, and Bend.
The Open Challenge: Housing solutions affordable to households at or below 60% AMI that do not fit in the other two categories.
Applicants will be asked to specify one of the above categories when they apply. Meyer's intent is to make at least one award in each category, depending on the quality of proposals received.
For more answers, check out this recording from our 1 Million Month Challenge Information Sessions or contact me directly at michael [at] mmt.org (michael[at]mmt[dot]org) or (503) 228-5512.
–– Michael
The application deadline for this RFP was 5 p.m., on Tuesday, August 13, 2018.
Cost Efficiencies: 1 Million Month Challenge RFP details
For Concept Development, Meyer expects to award grants ranging from $75,000 to $125,000 (up to $550,000 in funding will be available in this stage.)
Grantees awarded Concept Development funds under this RFP will be eligible to for Implementation grants (up to $1.2 million in funding will be available.)
Final award decisions are expected in January 2019, with first-year payments released in February 2019.
Meyer staff will present an overview of the RFP and be available to answer questions at two information sessions:
Tuesday, July 24, 9:30-11 a.m.
Monday, July 30, 3:20-5 p.m.
Both information sessions will be held in Portland at Meyer’s office (425 NW 10th Avenue, 4th floor); interested parties may also participate by telephone conference. Visit our official event page to RSVP.
