Our 11,000+ Acre Gym

PPF Board Member Charlie Baker playing baseball at Scavone Field in Westmoreland Park. Charlie is a supporter of recreation both at work at Nike and at play where he participates in a championship-winning local baseball team.

May is National Fitness Month and it only takes a moment in Portland’s parks to see their importance in our exercise routines.  On one sunny evening this spring a stroll into to my neighborhood park looked like an introduction scene from a fitness video.  People were walking dogs, playing basketball, jogging, stretching, and children were biking and playing on the playground structure.

When it comes to providing safe places for youth to exercise, parks are an especially important resource in our city.  Many studies have found that if children have easy access to safe parks and playgrounds, they are more likely to engage in physical activity and less likely to be overweight.

The Office of Disease Control and Health Promotion states that youth should get 1 hour of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day.  Unfortunately, today many children aren’t getting the exercise they need and about 12.7 million children in America are overweight or obese.

One of PPF’s board members, Charlie Baker, can testify to the powerful role parks have made in his pursuit of life-long fitness and recreation. “I’ve been an athlete my entire life.  The very first place I learned to play tee-ball was in a park.  In fact, I still play baseball 40+ years later at places like Lents Park, Gabriel Park, and Pier Park.”

Unfortunately, some areas of east and northeast Portland still lack a fully developed park within reasonable walking distance, and many streets still do not have sidewalks for children to get to park locations. As a 2014 Portland Parks & Recreation press release stated, “Two out of every five households in this part of town do not have easy access to a City of Portland park, in stark contrast to the rest of Portland where four out of every five households live within a half-mile of a park or natural area. . . Demand for recreational services is high, and closing this “play gap” is a priority for Portland Parks & Recreation and Commissioner Fritz.”

The path forward seems simple. As Charlie puts it, “If you have a body, you are an athlete. . . athletes need safe and well maintained places to play.” The current effort to help build Cully Park by our nonprofit partner Verde is a good example of what we can do to help children access the recreational opportunities they need to stay healthy.  The Portland Parks Foundation is committed to help fundraise to build Cully Park and we look forward to partnering further with park supporters until every Portland child can access the outdoor recreation they need.

Souvlaki Coyote and Other Tales of Urban Wildlife

It is hard to miss the life bursting forth in Portland's parks in the spring.  Flowers are blooming, people are out getting vitamin D, and wildlife are enjoying the bounty spring brings. Parks are important habitat for wildlife in our urban core, and whether they pose a joy or a challenge, wildlife are permanent citizens here in Portland. The blog below is reprinted with permission from The Nature of Cities blog and is written by Bob Sallinger.

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About the Writer:
Bob Sallinger

Bob Sallinger has worked for Audubon Society of Portland since 1992 and currently serves as the Society’s conservation director. He lives in Northeast Portland with his wife Elisabeth Neely, two children, a dog, cat, goats and chickens.

Much of the fabulous writing on The Nature of Cities blog site to date has focused on integrating the built and natural environment, erasing, or at least softening the lines that separate the natural and the manmade. I would like to shift focus a bit and explore the intersection between people and wildlife and suggest that we would also be wise to consider how we integrate animals into our urban stories, poems, art, culture and collective narrative. We need to bring the same level of creativity and imagination that we are currently investing in transforming our physical landscape into repopulating our mental landscape with the diversity of life that surrounds us.

In short, we need to do a better job telling animal stories — urban animal stories.

I am not talking here necessarily of ecology, biology and natural history, although ecological literacy is of critical importance. I am taking at least one step further back into the realm of mythology, legend and folklore, about how we tell and retell our own story in a way that truly recognizes wild beings as fellow travelers on our urban landscapes.

For many years I ran Portland Audubon Society’s wildlife hospital. There we treated upwards of 3,000 injured wild animals and responded to more than 15,000 wildlife related phone calls each year. The vast majority of both calls and animals emanated from the urban and suburban landscape. One of the indelible impressions from those years was how often somebody would walk into our center having taken significant time out of their busy day to deliver an injured animal, and ask us some variation on “what is it and why is it here?” They would insist that until that very morning, when the animal was dragged in by the cat or slammed into their kitchen window or collided with their car, they had never seen this creature in their neighborhood before. We would slowly open the box only to find ourselves eye to eye with…a crow…or a robin…or a scrub jay…or a fox squirrel. Often however, when the same people returned a few weeks later to pick-up the repaired animals for release, they would tell us that their neighborhood was suddenly teaming with never before seen wildlife. A connection was made…eyes were opened.

Fish art on downtown Portland, Oregon (USA) building, Photo by Bob Sallinger.

The human mind is good at filtering information and more than 35,000 years after humans first painted wild animals on cave walls, we have done a remarkable job of exorcizing wildlife from our consciousness. We don’t expect to see wildlife in our cities and therefore we don’t…until something or someone alters our expectations.

Those animals we treated at our hospital were sad and broken, but at the same time they also painted a rich tapestry of stories about how wild animals live and die in our urban landscape and how they interact with one another and with us. These stories are not the stuff of field guides, PhDs or wildlife management plans. They are funny and sad and weird and mysterious…sometimes they are mystical.

They are messy too.

Raccoon as urban trickster. Photo by Michael Durham.

If we restore it, critters will come, but we are not always sure what to do with them when they get here. Coyotes run off with cats, raccoons roll garbage cans, birds slam into windows, deer browse grandma’s flower beds, otters crack shellfish on the decks of high priced yachts…they are our own modern day tricksters.

Throw a high concentration of humans into the mix and the opportunities for mayhem increase exponentially. Among my favorite vignettes: the woman who wanted me to suggest a natural area to release her pet alligator. It was cute, apparently, when she bought it, but now it is three feet long, won’t stay in the bathtub and seems inclined to eat the kids and Chihuahua.

Apparently they don’t read the signs. Photo by Bob Sallinger.

The gentleman who graciously shared his hot tub with the neighborhood raccoons because “all the wetlands have been filled” and could not understand why the ungrateful little beasties decided to dismantle it one day while he was at work.

The lady from the Greek restaurant who delivered leftover souvlaki to a street corner in an upscale Portland neighborhood each morning to feed the local coyotes who promptly began associating all people with restaurant handouts.

Nursing moms who suckle orphaned raccoons (yes, really… and it happens more often than you might think!). Working on urban wildlife management issues is sometimes a bit like living inside of an extended “Far Side” cartoon.

A friend who works as an urban natural resource planner once told me that 90% of her job was trying to get people comfortable with “messiness.” She is right. A big part of the challenge before us is integrating messiness into a culture that increasingly prioritizes higher and higher levels of organization.

Souvlaki Coyote on the prowl in downtown Portland, Oregon (USA)

Over time I came to realize that wildlife rehabilitation was about fixing broken animals, but it also was just as much about being a chronicler of the animals in our midst. I slowly realized that the succession of stories that I heard day in and day out were indelibly transforming my own mental map of the city. As I move about Portland now I can’t help but transpose those stories onto the landscape. That corner is where coyote loped across the highway and disappeared behind a bar….this fire escape is home to a pair of red-tails that sometimes bop high-rise construction workers that intrude upon their airspace…that bridge is where a pair of Peregrines have nested since 1994 and fledged 58 young…and so on.

Peregrine nesting on Portland Bridge. Photo by Bob Sallinger.

I can already hear the lamentations of my friends on the scientific community: “you are talking about anthropomorphizing wildlife—that’s the last thing we need.”

Actually I am not.

I am after something different here.

How do we create stories that fundamentally reconnect our communities with the life forms that surround us? The types of stories that imbue our urban landscape with the magic, mystery, ambiguity, messiness…inspiration that comes with a recognition that we are not alone…we weren’t even here first.

Fledgling Peregrine exploring Portland’s industrial landscape on foot. Photo by William Hall.

Our lack of awareness plays out subtly as we consider policies to re-green our landscape. Too often our decision-makers and the community at large view wildlife as something we should consider adding as opposed to recognizing wild animals as something that has always been and will always be part of our urban landscape. In a city like Portland, which sits at the confluence of two great rivers, wild animals will continue to live upon and migrate through our landscape. The only question is whether we will provide for their needs when they are here.

There are signs of progress. I am intrigued by the proliferation of urban wildlife webcams. Several years back, Portland Audubon collaborated with a local television station and placed one above a pair or Red-tails that nest on a downtown fire escape and “Raptor Cam” was born. As something of a Luddite, I was initially skeptical and frankly appalled by the substitution of digital experience for direct experience.

Raptor Cam Red-tail on nest. Photo by Dieter Waiblinger.

Half a decade later, I see it differently. Each year the site gets nearly a million hits as people track these birds like a soap opera. They anticipate and celebrate and grieve and discuss and opine on line with one another. I hope and wonder if perhaps it causes them to look skyward more often when they actually are outdoors.

My friend Mike Houck of the Urban Greenspaces Institute (and who also writes on this blog) was after the same type of awareness when he commissioned a giant mural of our urban birds on an bare mausoleum wall overlooking Portland’s first natural area at Oaks Bottom and when he convinced a local brewery to name a microbrew after Portland’s official city bird, the Great Blue Heron.

Oaks Bottom Mural, Portland, Oregon, commissioned by Mike Houck. Photo by Nelson Photography.

I see it as well in books like Wildwood by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis which transforms Portland’s Forest Park into an impassible wilderness occupied by baby snatching crows and scheming coyotes. Even the television show Portlandia, with its ubiquitously referenced (at least in Portland) “Put a bird on it” sketch edges towards what I am after.

Wildwood by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis.

Restoring ecologically healthy cities will require the participation of a far broader cross-section of the urban population than is currently engaged, whether that is naturescaping backyards, reducing nighttime lighting to prevent migratory bird strikes, housing cats indoors, or funding green infrastructure. At Audubon we often talk about the conservation continuum of appreciation, understanding and action, but I think sometimes we skip a step, perhaps the most vital step, of simple awareness. I think we underestimate the degree to which the concept of “urban wildlife” remains an anomaly for much of the populace. People can’t care if they are not aware…

Wildlife of Portland Poster produced by Portland Bureau of Environmental Services to raise awareness of urban biodiversity.

This site has attracted an amazing array of experts already but I hope as it continues to expand it can perhaps pull in some poets and storytellers. To that end I will leave those who have read this far with one of may favorite urban wildlife stories. It involves a crow named “Havoc” that I came to know several years ago. It has been more than a decade since I last saw him, but he has forever altered the way I look at crows.

One of Portland’s more unique residents was a crow appropriately dubbed “Havoc.” Havoc was discovered in downtown Portland where he spent his days drinking out of the Benson bubblers, dodging traffic and barking at blond women. Our best guess is that he had been illegally raised as a pet and then set free.

Eventually his antics resulted in his capture and delivery to Audubon’s Wildlife Care Center. Upon arrival, he immediately released himself from the confines of the pet carrier in which he found himself imprisoned, flew to nearest sink, turned on the faucet and had himself a nice, long, cool drink. Once satiated, he turned to the assembled staff and volunteers, gave three high pitched barks, “whoop, whoop, whoop,” and bowed.

Havoc lived at Audubon’s Care Center for a year during which he served as an education bird teaching kids about the importance of keeping wild animals wild. With a penchant for blondes, bathes, mice and mealworms, he quickly became a favorite of the general public. Generally he had the run of the place during the day but was caged at night—something he openly and vocally despised. He would greet us each morning by springing up and down in his cage like some manic, feathered pogo stick. Failure to satiate his ever-changing desires quickly resulted in what only can be described as a vindictive temper-tantrum, a full-fledged squawking, shrieking, food flying, ankle pecking, crow freak-out. His tastes were expensive too—one day I turned to find him removing the prism from a five hundred dollar ophthalmoscope.  

Several months after arriving Havoc decided to test out what it was like to be free again—my suspicion is that he was thinking about it for quite some time because he waited until several doors were simultaneously open and then launched himself through a succession doorways and out into our sanctuary. A short while later we began receiving reports of an oddly vocal crow down by the creek that runs through our property.

The creek was running high and muddy from winter rains and perched in the middle on a barely exposed rock was Havoc. Upon seeing us, he immediately leapt off the rock and made like some sort of mutant dipper, dunking himself completely below the surface and then reappearing to preen and make sure that we were still there watching. Each time we moved toward him, he inched away. It was about the time that we were about to leave him to his freedom that a particularly large swell in the creek caught him off-guard. The sight of the distraught crow tumbling beak over claw down the creek surfacing occasionally to gurgle out a forlorn shriek was matched in absurdity only by the foolish human who dove in after him and emerged on the opposite bank muddy, drenched, ungrateful biting crow firmly in hand.

He was sent for a short time to live at Oregon State University where he participated in a study of captive crows. The professor in charge arranged for a cohort of blond coeds to visit Havoc on a daily basis to keep him reasonably entertained. I have always wondered about how many times the professor in charge got turned down before he found students willing to participate. “So, I have this crow that likes blonds and I was hoping you might be able to swing by my lab about 3 pm…” Havoc eventually returned to Audubon, irascible as ever.

Eventually Havoc was set free on a property at the edge of the urban growth boundary where the neighbors were apprised and accepting of a somewhat odd bird. He spent many months in the vicinity perfecting the art of pushing azalea pots off porches and showing up uninvited at local barbecues.

One day Havoc was sighted keeping company with other crows. However, when the flock left to roost Havoc was left behind, apparently absorbed in watching a man fly his model airplane in the field below. As time wore on his interactions with the flock increased. The last known Havoc sighting was at a local school. A man working in the school basement turned to find Havoc barking at him from the window well. That was just around sunset. The next morning the flock had moved on and Havoc was nowhere to be found.

Bob Sallinger
Portland, Oregon
USA

Parks are the Natural Classroom

Header photo courtesy Portland Parks & Recreation

Wendy Thompson, MFA, is a freelance writer and education specialist.  As an integrated arts educator, she taught at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics in Washington State and worked with Saturday Academy and The Right Brain Initiative. She specializes in STEM to STEAM curriculum design, creating fully integrated units like Fern Frenzy, River Voices, and Story of the Snag. Her award winning poetry has been published in a variety of local and regional anthologies and she has also published articles in Teaching Tolerance, Science & Children, and Chrysalis: Journal of Transformative Language Arts.

Environmental education in the outdoors is a stepping stone to a healthy and well-educated society. It allows people of all ages to explore their curiosity and consider their place in the world. Our connectedness and diversity rise into great relief surrounded by layers of ancient soil and biota. Children’s self-esteem improves when they direct their own learning and challenge themselves both cognitively and physically. A student in a North American Association for Environmental Education video said it best, “In the classroom you’re just sitting at your desk learning about it; out here you actually get to go out and do it.”
 
With the many benefits of outside environmental education, it is no wonder that Portland enjoys many outlets for environmental education from pre-k through adulthood.  Portland Parks & Recreation alone offers at least 17 different programs to Portlanders ages 3-22, helping over 16,000 children each year learn in our public parks. I interviewed a local educator and artist, Wendy Thompson of Wahkeena Arts and of Springwater Studio, about her experiences in environmental education in Portland. Wendy has taught using hands-on and placed-based experiential learning techniques in the Metro region for over 25 years.
 
Do you think urban parks are an important resource for educators?
 
Whether as expansive as Forest Park or as minuscule as Mill Ends Park, urban parks are a vital resource for educators. Many classroom teachers, particularly on the elementary end, are generalists who are required to teach in a variety of subjects with minimal time for planning. The parks and related services not only provide opportunities for hands-on, experiential learning, but an abundance of professional development resources, training, and even lesson plans for a myriad of subject area connections.

What do you think children get in a natural setting that they can't get in a classroom?  
 
Why limit a child's experience of a Douglas fir to a text book photograph and facts when she can go to a local park and discover how many of her friends it takes to hug the trunk. She can find the mouse tail in the pine cone and write a legend, compare and contrast the needles to neighboring pine in her science journal, or peer under the bark with her magnifying lens and discover an entire micro community. She can make suppositions about growth patterns and life cycles, adaptations, and interdependence all while breathing in the health benefits of time outdoors. Research demonstrates the value of experiential, contextual, inquiry-based, integrated learning. In a natural park setting, children get the added benefit of full-on 3-D, sensory stimulation so lacking in our electronic 2-D classrooms.

What is one of your favorite memories of combining education and public parks or nature areas?
 
Through Saturday Academy, I was able to take a group of César Chávez elementary students to their neighborhood Columbia Park to Geocache. Not only did they learn about GPS coordinates, longitude/latitude, following directions, and ethics of geocache, they also learned about respect for their park. How could they find the cache deep under an azalea bush without hurting one single limb or leaving one footprint hint for the next geocacher? Some of the hints for the caches introduced them to botanical names and the students were sprinting from tree to tree, crawling in the grass, grinning throughout their learning experience. These inner city kids, who may never have explored the park beyond the playground or pool, were excited to show their friends the secret mysteries of the park, both inanimate and living.

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Let’s give thanks for the wonderful public parks and the teachers that help us unlock the secrets that unfold daily in nature.  The Portland Parks Foundation understands that environmental education is best conducted in nature, and we’re committed to supporting our 200+ natural classrooms across Portland.

Parks Seed Portland Business

Many studies have documented the economic benefits of public parks and nature spaces in cities. Increases in property values, tourism, capital investments and jobs all benefit citizens that live near public parks and natural recreation areas. A 2015 study by the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA), estimated that local and regional parks generated nearly $2 billion in economic activity in Oregon in 2013 alone.

Portland’s park system is nationally recognized for excellence and has created a buzz that helps Portland businesses recruit some of the best workers in the nation. As one of our board members, David Thompson, Vice President at the Portland Business Alliance said, “Anytime you talk about the region you mention our parks. Companies are looking to locate here because Portland has a high quality of life and parks are one of the most prominent pieces of our quality of life.  Parks add direct value to our community and make it a great place to grow your business.”

“. . . Portland has a high quality of life and parks are one of the most prominent pieces of our quality of life.”

— David Thompson

David grew up in Portland near Grant Park, and as he said, “Growing up here, parks were my back yard.  I learned how to ride a bike and swim in Grant Park.”  Now with a family of his own, David’s family spends a lot of time in April Hill and Gabriel Parks near his home. “When a friend approached me to join the Portland Parks Foundation board I jumped at the chance because parks are so valuable to me and my family.”

Portland’s parks are valuable assets for economic activity and bring the city valuable tourist dollars. The same NRPA study aforementioned noted that Waterfront Park generated over $1 million in economic activity in 2013. In 2009 the Portland Parks Foundation helped the Naito family build the Bill Legacy Naito Fountain in Waterfront Park.  The fountain continues attract people to the park to gather and play throughout the year. As David Thompson said, “I use parks a lot more than I pay for them. Donating to the Parks Foundation, you can invest in something very specific that the entire community benefits from.”

The Foundation is grateful to our business partners who make parks a priority for their philanthropic investment each year. Those contributions have a measurable impact on park quality and leverage further investment by others through PPF’s campaigns.

Header photo by M.O. Stevens

Native Plants in our Natural Areas

Photos courtesy David Grandfield

Spring has sprung around Portland and it is the time of year to emerge from the house and get outside.  Whether it be just in your yard or out for a hike, Portland is home to natural areas that can help you get your wilderness fix.  We asked David Grandfield, a Horticulturist working seasonally with Portland Parks & Recreation, and regular Portland Parks Foundation Instagram follower (see David’s beautiful pictures @davidgrandfield), to share some of his favorite natural area parks and native species that you can pick up at local nurseries this spring.

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          David Grandfield

One of the benefits of living in Portland is our access to natural area parks. ‘Natural area parks’ are the wilder cousins of our typical neighborhood parks; they are larger, have a wild aesthetic, and are managed to promote growth of native plant species.  They are also great showrooms for displaying the native trees and shrubs that could work in the little piece of nature in your front or back yard.

Why plant natives? Native trees and shrubs provide food and refuge for wildlife, and best of all pad your pocketbook because after establishment do not require water in hot summer months. Here are a list of 5 Pacific Northwest native shrubs and where you can see them growing in their natural habitat at Portland natural area parks:

Red Flowering Currant [shown above]

This fragrant shrub is one of the first to bloom in late winter, it's pink flowers attract hummingbirds and bumblebees. It can grow up to 8 feet, and will survive in full sun with little to no water in the summer. This is one of the most widespread plants in Portland natural area parks, and can be found in Southeast Portland alongside walking trails in Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.

Douglas Spirea

This shrub usually stays about 5 feet tall and has deep pink blooms in midsummer. Although this plant can handle dry landscapes, it does best in wet areas in full sun. Its brown seed heads add texture to landscapes in winter months. It can be found in East Portland growing at Tideman Johnson Natural Area and near Powell Butte Nature Park.

Indian Plum ­or­ Osoberry

This versatile shrub can grow in full shade or full sun and has drooping white blooms in early February. It’s small, raisin sized fruit are a favorite food for birds in late summer. Whitaker Ponds Natural Area in Northeast Portland is a great place to see Osoberry shrubs.

Blue Elderberry

This large shrub is widespread in Pacific Northwest landscapes. Its large clusters of creamy white blooms emerge in early spring and then turn into small powdery blue berries toward late summer. Although it naturally grows up to 30 feet tall, it can be kept around 10 feet tall in home landscapes with regular pruning. One great place to see Blue Elderberry is Foster Floodplain Natural Area in Southeast Portland.

Big Leaf Lupine

This plant is not as large as the others listed above, it stays about 1­2 inches tall and produces a tall spike of purple flowers in late spring. It does best on stream banks and open meadows in full sun. Many species of lupine can be found on the hillsides of Madrona Natural Area Park in North Portland.

Portland Parks Foundation encourages you to visit your Portland natural areas and sign up to volunteer for the many planting and clean-up parties throughout the year or at Parke Diem.  It is amazing that we have such wild areas that provide recreation, habitat and solace so close to the city, and we need your support to keep them beautiful!

Parks Part of the Urban Ecology Web

Dr. Alan Yeakley, Director of the School for the Environment at Portland State University

Parks and open space provide an environmental support system for Portland to thrive. According to a Portland Parks & Recreation report, parks and street trees alone provide nearly 414 million gallons of storm water filtration and remove more than 25 million pounds of carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide from the air each year in Portland. This green infrastructure benefits people and wildlife alike and raises the quality of life for everyone in the area.
 
To better understand how parks contribute to the environmental health of our city, last month I attended the Urban Ecosystem Research Consortium’s (UERC) Symposium at Portland State University and sat down with one of the group leaders, Dr. Alan Yeakley, Director of the School for the Environment at Portland State University.
 
For those who haven’t heard of UERC, it is a group of people from all backgrounds and disciplines working together in the Portland and Vancouver area “. . . to advance the state of the science of urban ecosystems and improve our understanding of them. . .” They host free brown-bag talks throughout the year and an annual symposium each winter.
 
The UERC Symposium harkened back to the ‘web of life’ lessons we all learned in elementary school except with one very important twist - it was evident at UERC that it takes a web of humans from a large number of disciplines, as well as the right combination of plants, animals, soil and streams to maintain a positive relationship with nature in our urban landscape.
 
I asked Dr. Yeakley about this emphasis on cross-disciplinary work in environmental research today. “Urban ecology is becoming more and more integrated, connecting natural scientists with social scientists,” said Dr. Yeakley. Especially in urban areas, the part that humans play in the conservation or degradation of natural resources is large.  “There is so much research going on and it is important to understand the political and economic factors that influence the conservation effort,” said Dr. Yeakley
 
In the Portland area, economic impacts of flooding events and governmental regulations, especially around endangered species, have spurred much of the habitat restoration investment in the past several decades. Citizens have increasingly advocated for green infrastructure and voted to provide tax dollars for projects and research to make our city’s environment healthy for future generations.
 
From the work of the agencies, universities, non-profits as well as private citizens, a sample of which was provided in the research presentations at UERC, it is evident that Portland’s parks are an important resource for understanding and maintaining the environmental health of our city.  Private funding from individuals and organizations is an important ingredient to enhance sustainable management of our urban environment. The Portland Parks Foundation is committed to a thriving park system for a healthy Portland, and research from local scientists affirm the importance of our mission.

Read the UERC Symposium materials at: http://www.uercportland.org/annual-symposium

Parks Building Community

Som Nath Subedi, Parks for New Portlanders manager, accepting a 2015 Spirit of Portland award with Commissioner Amanda Fritz.

To find out more about how you can get involved, contact Som Nath Subedi at som.subedi@portlandoregon.gov or visit the program’s website.

According to a recent report by the City Budget Office, roughly 15% of Portlanders were born in countries other than the United States– that puts the Rose City right in line with about 50 other large U.S. cities. Unfortunately, for many of our newest Portland citizens, parks and community centers are literally a foreign concept.  That is where one of Portland Parks & Recreation (PP&R)’s newest programs, Parks for New Portlanders, steps up to welcome immigrant and refugee families into our public park spaces and programs.

The Parks for New Portlanders program started about a year ago to help immigrant and refugee families engage with and to utilize their city’s parks and recreational programs via PP&R.  Since its inception, it has conducted soccer and basketball tournaments which cater to immigrants and refugees, along with culturally-specific community gatherings in Portland’s parks.  The program also hired seven Community Youth Ambassadors to help organize culturally-specific recreational activities for their communities.  In the Parks for New Portlanders Program’s first year, it attracted youth and families from around 40 countries and their disparate cultures, gaining important momentum for this year’s goals. The program made a welcome video in 10 different languages watched by 50,000 people last summer.

Why is culturally-specific programming in parks and recreation so important? Parks are one of a handful of places that belong to all citizens, and are one of the hallmarks of America’s democracy.

“Our community lives, eats and invests together. They are our valued partners, rather than just some needy population,” says Som Nath Subedi, PP&R Program Coordinator for Parks for New Portlanders.  “Parks for New Portlanders is a way for our city’s immigrant communities to connect to their new home. It shows them that even though they are newcomers, that the city and all it offers belongs to them.  City activities belong to them.  City resources belong to them.   We believe in recreation and access for ALL Portlanders. And PP&R is leading that effort.”

Regardless of economic status and backgrounds, people come to parks to be social and to meet neighbors, celebrate with family, to exercise and take needed respite from worries; to connect with nature.  However, if parks and recreational activities are an entirely new concept, it can be difficult to access or enjoy these public gathering spaces.

“Many refugee families come from very difficult and dangerous circumstances to start their new lives in Portland.  Parks can help with the healing process and show them that they are welcomed in their new home,” adds Subedi. “This program bridges the recreational gaps and provides opportunities for access to Portland Parks & Recreation services and activities.”

Subedi knows this experience first-hand. He immigrated to the U.S. in 2008 after living 20 years in a Bhutanese refugee camp in Nepal after being forced out of his native country of Bhutan. As he said in a recent Oregonian article, when he first came, “Daily life was very unpredictable. From using a bus to grocery shopping, and being unemployed and trying to find a job, made each day overwhelming for us. We would easily become lost on big crowded streets filled with cars and big buildings. Anxious and tired, we realized that we had no idea how complex living in America would be." Som hopes his work with PP&R will help new families integrate and flourish in Portland.

This coming year the Parks for New Portlanders program hopes to expand its programs to reach even more families.  The Portland Parks Foundation looks forward to following this program’s successes and supporting our local parks that are the center of our communities.  To find out more about how you can get involved, contact Som Nath Subedi at som.subedi@portlandoregon.gov or visit the program’s website.

Coaching in the Community

It is impossible to refrain from cheering on the sidelines as coaches Brian Christiansen and Curt Miller guide their 3rd grade basketball team through a series of drills, play and even antics at practice.  Every Thursday and Saturday this winter you will find these two unsung heroes focusing the unbound energy of their 10-child team into positive recreation and teambuilding.

Brian and Curt are two of the nearly 475 volunteer coaches that lead about 3,750 children each year through Portland Parks & Recreation’s sports team programs.  The basketball and volleyball leagues are just a few of the recreational programs Portland Parks & Recreation runs throughout the year in its network of community centers.  As parent Greg Rice put it, “Coaches like Brian have the skill set, and love what they do.  The kids gain confidence and you can tell.”

Just like his father, Brian started coaching over 4 years ago when his son Colby began playing basketball.  While Brian went on to play with other teams all the way through college, he still remembers his youth league days, “To this day, my dad was my best coach.”
Out of all of the basketball teams in Portland, Brian picked coaching with the Portland Parks & Recreation leagues because, “Everyone here gets to play and develop skills.  We keep it light and fun so the kids see playing sports and exercise as something they can do the rest of their lives.”

While the teams change each season, Brian still sees some of his previous players around East Portland Community Center.  “I’ll never forget my first year coaching.  One of my team members was such a sweet kid with a huge passion for basketball, but he didn’t really get the team concept.  It was wonderful seeing him pass the ball and enjoy being part of the team by the end of the season.”

Brian enjoys working at Nike where employees are encouraged to support the communities where they live, work and play.  “We believe in supporting our communities, and to especially help our kids enjoy being active.  I love seeing kids have fun and also grow through these experiences. As a volunteer coach, I also get to show kids how much we care about their growth and wellbeing.”

Portland Parks & Recreation is continually seeking qualified coaches for its sports leagues. Interested volunteers can sign up through the Portland Parks Foundation in the WE Portal or contact Rick Cantu at 503-823-5126 or rick.cantu@portlandoregon.gov to get more information and sign up.