Published Friday, July 31, 2009 at 6:52 pm | Permalink
by Jared Gardner
The Real Wealth of Portland
jared@realwealthpdx.org
We, of the Real Wealth of Portland (Oregon) at First Unitarian Church of Portland, believe food is central to creating community. We also know we have only nibbled at the potential for including food in our events.
Our Community Commons, a monthly gathering of 40-80 attendees with 4-10 organizations represented to explore topics like grassroots economy, alternative exchange, gardening, and local food. We always have snacks and a desert (evening forum) with coffee, tea and water. We create a time in the program to pause, eat some food and chat with others. It has worked ok and is a nice break for people to digest the first half of the content. It’s often hard to get people back to focus, but one of our goals is helping people make connections with others so we just flow with it.
At some of our larger, speaker events 100-300, etc we are more intentional about food. Since we have limited to know funds we invite community partners to have a presence at our events and ask for donations. We have usually had a good diverse spread. We like to have organizations that build real wealth in our town have a presence so it works well to invite local restaurants and producers to bring food/drink. It also helps us accomplish our goal of building connections in town.
As for content, one of our best received events was last November. We did a “100 mile thanksgiving” based on http://100milediet.org/thanksgiving. Attached is the promotional piece that outlines the four themes of the evening: Where to buy, where to dine, do it yourself, share the wealth. We highlighted a locally owned grocer committed to our bioregion, a couple food coops, some CSAs, locally owned restaurants that source locally, resources to grow your own food (became a separate forum in early spring), and a couple social justice organizations that deal with food. Our group is small, so rather than pull off content ourselves we focus on creating the space for the community dialogue to happen and we moderate the evening.
