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Monday Mailing

Year 23 • Issue 01 12 September 2016 1.

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Creating Great Places One Main Street at a Time – Recorded Webinar Restore Oregon’s Preservation Toolkit Orton Family Foundation – Community Heart & Soul Four Characteristics of Active, Healthy Neighborhoods 2016 Northwest Nonprofit Capacity Report Urban Sanity: Understanding Urban Mental Health Impacts and How to Create Saner, Happier Cities 8 Takeaways From 'Draining Oregon': The Big Water Giveaway Reedsport Boatbuilders Get Big State Grant The Morbid and Mortal Toll of Sprawl Destination Huntington Community-Based Water Resiliency Tool

1. Creating Great Places One Main Street at a Time – Recorded Webinar In this webinar, Matt Wagner from the National Main Street Center shares inisght into their work with main street organizations around the U.S. He provides background on the main street movement and discusses current trends that are affecting main streets nationally.

Quote of the Week: “Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth, and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world.” ~Brenda Peterson Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon's state flag pictures a beaver on its reverse side. It is the only state flag to carry two separate designs.

We are also joined by Shay Coburn, Coordinator for the Colorado Main Street Program, who provides detail about how state and local organizaitons partner with the National Main Street Center to create great places in their communities. In addition, she provides a brief overview of a project in partnership with Community Builders focusing on the issue of when main street is a state highway.

To access this recorded webinar, click here.

2. Restore Oregon’s Preservation Toolkit Restore Oregon’s Preservation Toolkit provides a high level guide to the process and decisions one needs to make when approaching the restoration and reuse of a historic building. It is oriented toward smallto-medium commercial properties, but much of the content will apply to homes, barns, and other types of structures.

Each module corresponds to a particular aspect of the process. You may download individual modules or the entire Preservation Toolkit.

To access the Toolkit, click here.

3. Orton Family Foundation – Community Heart & Soul Community Heart & Soul reconnects people with what they love most about their town and translates those personal and emotional connections into a blueprint that serves as the foundation for future community decisions. It's a barn-raising approach to community planning and development designed to increase participation in local decision-making and empower residents to shape the future of their communities in a way that upholds the unique character of each place.

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The Orton Family Foundation believes that the strength of a community lies in the hands and the hearts of the people who live there, and that the community’s heart and soul is the common cause that they will rally around. Communities that acknowledge and value their heart and soul are able to take action to strengthen it.

We believe that there’s something special about every town—the old downtown, the pastures or woodlands, a get-it-done spirit, or an everyone-is-welcome ethic.

Whether they are places, traditions, or attitudes, these community characteristics are the things that really matter to people. They draw people to a place and make them care about where they live. Such characteristics are a community’s heart and soul.

For more information about the Heart & Soul Community Engagement Model, click here.

4. Four Characteristics of Active, Healthy Neighborhoods Scientists are learning more and more about how where we live affects the amount of exercise we get, and thus how fit and healthy we are likely to be. In general, city dwellers are particularly well placed to get regular exercise if they can take care of some or all of their daily errands without getting into a car: walking is good for us, and so is taking public transportation, because almost every transit trip begins and ends with a walking trip.

The subject fascinates me, and I have written about it often, most recently with respect to the demand for walkable neighborhoods and some of the city planning tools that can help provide them.

(See also this article from 2014.) A massive Utah study from 2008 reported on WebMD found that “people in the study who lived in the most walkable neighborhoods weighed an average of 8 pounds less than people who lived in the least walkable areas.” (The full study is here.)

To access the full story, click here.

5. 2016 Northwest Nonprofit Capacity Report Portland, OR - A consortium of five northwest state nonprofit associations has released a comprehensive study on the capacity, strengths, and challenges of the region's nonprofit sector.

The 2016 Northwest Nonprofit Capacity Report: Our Strengths - Our Challenges - Our Resilience was developed using survey data from over 1,000 nonprofits in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.

The report highlights the progress nonprofits are making in creating a resilient sector.

The study specifically focuses on four core areas for building capacity: mission effectiveness, collaboration, public policy, and use of data and evaluation. The data points to some progress that nonprofits have made, but says that progress is limited. According to the report, all stakeholders including nonprofit organizations, funders, and government - share the responsibility to support and enhance the performance of the sector.

The report recommends that nonprofits pay greater attention to strengthening their ability to use data and planning tools effectively and to engage in collaboration and advocacy to bring about more systemic change within communities. It calls on funders to provide more unrestricted financial support to strengthen the critical infrastructure of nonprofits which allows them to better fulfill their mission and diversify revenue sources. Finally, the report asks government to seek more participation by nonprofits in setting public policy. It finds that too often an adversarial undercurrent exists between government and nonprofits, likely caused by budget cuts brought on by the recession.

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The organizations that developed the report include The Foraker Group from Alaska, the Idaho Nonprofit Center, the Montana Nonprofit Association, the Nonprofit Association of Oregon, and Washington Nonprofits. Luma Consulting in Seattle assisted with reviewing the data and summarizing its findings. Financial support for the survey came from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust in Vancouver, WA; Philanthropy Northwest in Seattle, WA; and GiveGab in Ithaca, NY. To access the report, click here.

6. Urban Sanity: Understanding Urban Mental Health Impacts and How to Create Saner, Happier Cities Does urban living threaten our sanity and happiness? Popular culture is rife with stories which suggest that living in a city increases loneliness and unhappiness, and some scientific studies indicate that urbanization increases mental illness and depression. Are these claims credible? How can communities maintain mental health and happiness?

These are important and timely questions. The human experience is increasingly urban; transitioning from rural to more urban areas. Decision-makers and individuals need practical guidance on how to maximize sanity and happiness when planning cities and choosing where to live.

My newest report, "Urban Sanity: Understanding Urban Mental Health Impacts and How to Create Saner, Happier Cities" examines these question. It indicates that city living has mixed overall mental health impacts. Credible research suggests that urban residency can increase psychosis and mood disorder risks, addiction to some drugs, and some people's unhappiness, but tends to reduce dementia, some types of substance abuse and suicide rates, and increases happiness for many groups, particularly very poor and alienated people. Urban living also tends to increase mental health by increasing economic opportunities, fitness and health, and access to mental health and addiction treatment services. The table below summarizes these effects.

To access the full story, click here.

7. 8 Takeaways From 'Draining Oregon': The Big Water Giveaway Something seemed amiss in Harney County last summer, long before it became the scene of January's armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

After years of liberally granting access to underground water across the high desert of southeastern Oregon, the state abruptly told irrigators it would accept no new applications to pump wells.

Regulators launched a 5-year study, saying they feared newly dug wells were sucking up unsustainable quantities of water. Cattle ranching and alfalfa, once bright spots in the struggling rural economy, were thrown into limbo.

How could Oregon so freely approve pumping permits for so long, then suddenly announce concerns so serious that they required immediate action?

To access the full story, click here.

8. Reedsport Boatbuilders Get Big State Grant A company that builds commercial fishing boats in Reedsport netted a $3.4 million grant from the state this month, positioning itself to expand its workforce by 50 percent in the coming years.

Fred Wahl Marine Construction, currently the biggest private employer in the coastal city, won the grant through the Oregon Department of Transportation and its ConnectOregon program. Its award

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was the second highest monetary award after an $8.3 million grant given to Union Pacific for railroad improvements.

The award allows the company to begin work on a nine-story facility on Bolon Island, between Reedsport and Gardiner. The new building will be designed to be large enough to take on a bigger workload. The new facility would also take shipbuilding and repair work out of the rain when necessary. The company recently bought a six-story, 200-ton lift to haul boats out of the water and carry them into the proposed building. Once it’s completed, the company expects its roster of 91 employees to grow to about 130. (ONDA), says he isn't discouraged with the current congressional inaction on wilderness.

To access the full story, click here.

9. The Morbid and Mortal Toll of Sprawl A federal report this week revealed that traffic deaths have risen 9 percent over the last year and have totaled 19,100 in the first six months of 2016. More than 2.2 million people have been seriously injured in that time. The economic cost of those accidents is estimated annually at $410 billion, or 2.3 percent of gross domestic product.

The human cost is harder to calculate. Although motor vehicle accidents rank around 10th in causes of death in the US, they are the most frequent reason for fatality of children 5 and up and young adults. In terms of life years lost, motor vehicle crashes rank near the top—in this study, third behind coronary attacks and strokes.

Much of the blame has been placed, predictably, on distracted and drunk driving and rising vehicle miles traveled. The “elephant in the living room,” the factor that nobody wants to talk about, is sprawl and the infrastructure of sprawl.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Destination Huntington Huntington is bustling with activity. Life in the small town had slowed over the years. It was bypassed by the freeway and the trains that still go through town but rarely stop, and the population eventually declined.

But that has changed with laws that now allow use of medical and recreational marijuana.

Huntington’s sole dispensary has become a destination, even from metro areas that have a lot of dispensaries, such as Portland.

Because of action by the Huntington City Council Feb. 9, giving the green light for the little town in the canyon to allow dispensaries, it is again bustling with activity.

Oregon voters in 2014 approved the use of recreational marijuana. In 2015, the state Legislature gave counties where voters did not support legalizing pot the ability to opt out of allowing dispensaries.

Baker County does not allow pot sales, but that doesn’t apply to any decision made by the Huntington City Council, as it is an incorporated city within the county with its own governing body.

To access the full story, click here.

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11. Community-Based Water Resiliency Tool The Community-Based Water Resiliency (CBWR) Tool (version 2.0) is an easy way to find out how prepared your community is to handle emergencies that impact your water systems and learn about tools and resources that can be used to build resilience.

The self-assessment in the tool is for:        

drinking water and wastewater utilities state primacy agencies, hospitals public health agencies fire police emergency managers elected officials concerned citizens

A summary report is provided after the self-assessment with suggestions and recommended resources for increasing resilience. Users can then navigate to the CBWR toolbox, where they can find the best tool for their needs from over 400 tools and resources.

Version 2.0 includes the Water Resiliency Action Plan (WRAP) Kit. The WRAP Kit walks users through a step-by-step process for planning and hosting a community meeting or workshop on water emergencies. It includes everything you need, from sample agendas and invitations to suggested planning committee members and participants.

To access the Community-Based Water Resiliency Tool, click here.

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