United Community Partners / Ucp Inc

The Pine Valley 2050 project is a community project of Working together for a vibrant Pine Valley Community. It is a visioning process and community-lead project oriented process of creating the things in our community that we feel are needed to have a thriving vibrant place to live and work. The project has brought together community members local nonprofits and businesses to work together to create this vision. PV2050 surveyed the community to find out what they liked about the community and what sorts of projects they would like to work on to make and keep our area a good place to live and raise their families. We had +20% response rate to the survey. Based on the survey result we got folks get together to work on various projects which so far include an Emergency Operations Plan set up a Red Cross team held a cleanup day held a grant writing class held a meeting with Foundations for non-profits to present project ideas for grant funding helped local museum with plans for archiving their materials started a Main St. project to beautify it and help businesses thrive started a Dark Skies project to protect our dark skies and promote astro-tourism held community meetings to present information on Solar power and local Forest Trail maintenance project opportunities. This work was mostly carried out by local volunteers. We had a contractor to facilitate the process. We held 18 community meetings with 435 folks attending. The Main St Dark Skies School Track projects are continuing & others will be started as community interest dictates. This project is predicted to proceed into the future as funds are available and community interest is maintained.

The Pine Valley Firewise project is a nationally recognized effort to educate and assist local property owners with creating a fire resilient property especially for folks located in the wildland urban interface. Pine Valley Firewise received recognition in 2021 and as been carrying out educational events and fuels reduction treatments in our community. In 2023 we received a large grant from the Oregon State Fire Marshall's Community Wildfire Risk Reduction program to hold cleanup days this spring and fall and do fuels reduction work on local propertied for the next three years. This year we've held two cleanup days where folks brought garbage metal junk and yard debris to an area where we had dumpsters. We had 120 vehicles 33,590 lbs. trash in 9 dumpsters 17,150 lbs. metal in 5 dumpsters. We removed fuels on thirteen properties. We held three community educational meetings had an information table at the county fair did activities at the local school during their field day.

The Village Fund is a project that provides grants of up to $500 for those with a financial emergency. The applicant submits an application with the requested information and a committee determines if it meets the criteria and either awards or declines. Funds are then used to pay a bill directly rather than giving funds to the recipient. This project was started in 2020 due to the COVID crisis and has continued since. This tax year we received ten applications of which seven were awarded two declined one canceled. This year was different in that we had 2 families which lost family on the same day. This became a rallying cry for more EMT support plus additional funds were raised for the two families above the $500 minimum. These funds were placed in an account at a local bank for their use. This project will into the future.