2024-Present Day
Grant funding changes cause our organization to shift to mostly volunteer leadership. We are fortunate to retain Angelica Cortes Mejia to lead our Latinx Community Projects. Focusing on building our Board with community members who are passionate about Lents and East Portland, we continue to manage programs like the Malden Court Community Orchard, Community Tool Library, Garden Swaps, and others! We assemble a grant writing working group to secure funding for our programs, and partner with businesses and the community to fund raise to support or operations and programs.
2019-2023
We make efforts to increase equitable access and leadership over environmental resources and benefits to those most impacted by gentrification, development, climate change, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Examples include:
1) Creation of pollinator habitats at the Latinx-serving church of San Pedro
2) Spanish-language workshops on Renter's Rights, Worker's Rights, home repairs, weatherization, air pollution, Community Tool Library tours, Malden Court Community Orchard work parties, Russian-language Tool Library tours, printed materials in Lents 6 most common languages.
3) Intersection painting designed by residents of NAYA Generations affordable housing who are mostly Black and/or Indigenous/Native American.
4) Distribution of hundreds of N95 masks and DIY home air filters to help houseless and housed residents protect themselves from air pollution.
5) Expansion of our Garden Swap to be ongoing at the Tool Library, providing free garden resources like soil, compost, seeds, and plants after our COVID-19 survey showed 80%+ of residents planned to grow food in 2020.
2015-2019
We engage in deep community listening to guide our work. We emphasize communities most impacted by the neighborhood's emerging housing and homelessness crises. Our engagement in 6 different languages reveals the importance of improving livability while preserving affordability. We acknowledge the gentrifying impacts of our work, and seek to organize around housing issues such as projects that address expensive flood insurance, home repairs, and community-led advocacy to win an additional 30-50 affordable housing units in the Lents Town Center.
2012-2014
On October 3, 2012, Green Lents receives its 501(c)(3) designation. That same year, we establish a free-to-use Community Tool Library that now serves more than 1200 members in 7 different neighborhoods. Residents and Green Lents partner to transform a city-owned vacant property filled with invasive plants and garbage into the abundant food-growing Malden Court Community Orchard. Over the next several years, we enriched the soil, cultivate a variety of plants and trees, install drip irrigation, a tool shed, benches, and an accessible gravel path. Monthly work parties are established to care for the orchard.
2009
Lents is culturally diverse, rapidly gentrifying, and historically disinvested neighborhood in East Portland.
The seeds of Green Lents begin at a Johnson Creek cleanup in 2009 when someone says "you can't do green in Lents."
Several volunteers leave that day determined to build an organization that focuses on the neighborhood and carry out projects to provide leadership, education, and environmental assets. Initial projects begin in 2010 - creating pollinator habitats and establishing little free libraries in the neighborhood.
