City Repair Project

Placemaking: Communities interested in street paintings, ecological landscaping, and natural building receive help through workshops, one-on-one meetings, and on site consultations to develop plans to be able to install public benefit projects with their community. Projects also receive help from community partners that City Repair is connected to for technical assistance, funding, and donations. Installations typically occur in summer with planning and development in winter and spring. 14 community sites this year installed street paintings. Custom services expanded on this program to install 50+ painted plazas for businesses and community agencies, projects specific to Black cultural art, 6 events led by Youth activists, and various one time speaking engagements to educate community groups, schools, and other agencies. To help this work, volunteers gave 8000 hours of service.

UPDC: an educational course that delves even into broadly-applicable and hyper-local strategies for personal, collective and land-based resiliency and wellness. This is especially valuable as we are being called to respond to these demanding and uncertain times and realize the need for us to radically reimagine our relationship to place and purpose. The UPDC unfolds over an 8-month duration with classes occurring 1 weekend per month. There were over 30 students and almost 20 guest instructors. QTBIPOC and low-income community members were offered scholarships to make attending accessible.

Fiscal Sponsorships: We work with grassroots projects so that they can leverage our nonprofit status for name recognition, grant technical support and donations to accomplish their goals. Sometimes this is a one-time project. Other times they grow into their own nonprofit, like Depave. This year, several community members and partners reached out to us to use our non-profit status to support their work in frontline communities. We distributed Village Coalition funds to transitional housing villages and COVID-19 relief funds to QTBIPOC healing justice groups working to reclaim wellness practices in queer, trans and BIPOC communities. We also had two graduates from our Urban Permaculture Design Course (UPDC), Cecile and Linnea start the Reparations and Earth Restoration initiative (RAER) and win a grant to fund an Anti-oppression Permaculture Garden for Argyle Gardens (AP Garden), a new affordable housing community in North Portland. This project is being fiscally sponsored by City Repair and demonstrates the incredible outcomes that are possible when we prioritize QTBIPOC leadership and education. Other Fiscal Sponsorship projects included Columbia River Creative Initiatives (CRCI), AfroVillage PDX, Humans of Color Movement Alliance (HoCMA), Village Coalition and Tigard Universal Plaza. This program has quadrupled in size from the previous program year and we expect it to continue to grow.