Monday Mailing - March 29, 2021

RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 28 29 March 2021 1.

Quote of the Week: 2.

“Problem solving, and I don't mean algebra, seems to be my life's work. Maybe it's everyone's life's work.”

- Beverly Cleary

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Oregon Fast Fact Famous children’s book author, Beverly Cleary, grew up in Yamhill County and Portland, Oregon. Portland is the site of many significant settings in her books.

Learn more.

Oregon’s Native American Tribes, Often Hard-Hit by COVID-19, Make Concerted Vaccination Push (Katie McFall) Cities Turn to Resilience Corps as Pandemic Recovery Tactic Oregon Speeds Up COVID-19 Vaccine Timeline – Again (Katie McFall) The Future of Libraries is in the Community (Eva Kahn) Has Eugene, Oregon, Found a ‘Superpower’ for Climate Action?

Volunteer Appreciation – More Important Than Ever!

Around Oregon: Website Connects Consumers to Fresh Oregon-Grown Food An Oregon Utility’s Unique Model for Supporting Clean Energy Goals RESOURCE: Community-Rooted Economic Inclusion: A Strategic Action Playbook PODCAST: Myths and Realities of America’s Rural Economy

Oregon’s Native American Tribes, Often Hard-Hit by COVID-19, Make Concerted Vaccination Push

Oregon Public Broadcasting When Donna Woods of Keizer died before Thanksgiving last year, it was from a brain aneurysm, not COVID-19. The pandemic cast its omnipresent shadow over the funeral all the same.

“The Catholic Church in Keizer at that time was [allowing] 50 people inside the church, 50 in a different part of the church,” recalled Woods’ surviving sister, Dee Pigsley. “Our family, when we have a service, it’s usually around a couple hundred people.”

As chairwoman for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Pigsley has seen the pandemic shutter everything but the tribal health clinic in the past year. This has affected people’s ability to gather, whether for pow-wows or funerals.

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“We’ve had to tell people they can’t come, because that’s the way it is.”

But Pigsley is pleased that her tribe is pushing back against the pandemic — through vaccinations. As of early March, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians had inoculated one fourth of enrolled members and the Chinook Wind Casino had reopened, firing up one of the tribe’s biggest economic engines.

Read the full story.

2. Cities Turn to Resilience Corps as Pandemic Recovery Tactic

Smart Cities Dive More cities are looking to jobs programs focused on resilience to help their economies recover from the coronavirus pandemic and provide their hardest-hit residents with employment and new job skills.

San Jose, CA is the latest major city to pursue this path. Mayor Sam Liccardo announced the city’s proposed Resilience Corps earlier this month to create over 500 jobs primarily for young adults focused on pandemic response, environmental resilience, learning loss for struggling students, economic recovery and disaster preparedness. City officials said those are five crucial areas to build community resilience.

Liccardo proposed creating the Resilience Corps as part of his budget blueprint for FY 2021-2022, noting the enormous economic impacts of the pandemic, especially on disadvantaged communities.

"The financial effects of this pandemic — compounded by racial and widening economic disparities — have wrought a host of maladies among young adults, including homelessness, increased addiction, rising suicide rates, increasing child abuse by young parents, and rising violent crime," Liccardo wrote in a message to the San Jose City Council accompanying his budget proposal. "Our young adults' futures — and our collective futures — deserve a response beyond handouts: they need a paycheck."

Read the full story.

3. Oregon Speeds Up COVID-19 Vaccine Timeline – Again Oregon Public Broadcasting Another week and another big promise from the Biden administration has Oregon speeding up its coronavirus vaccine timeline once again.

Gov. Kate Brown’s office announced Friday morning that frontline workers, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and all adults 16 and older with underlying health conditions will be eligible for vaccine appointments starting April 5. That’s a full two weeks earlier than the previous timeline, which was announced just last Friday. All Oregon adults will be eligible for vaccines by May 1.

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All Oregon adults will be eligible for vaccines by May 1, but counties can apply to start vaccinating the general public sooner. Approved counties can start vaccinating all Oregonians 16 and older as soon as April 26.

Read the full story.

4. The Future of Libraries is in the Community Bloomberg CityLab During the pandemic, American public libraries found ways to continue providing services to their communities — particularly one that was sorely needed: internet access. They gave people access to WiFi from their parking lots, turned vans into mobile hotspots and gave out portable devices for home use. Their efforts offer a glimpse into the more expansive physical presence many libraries will likely take on after the pandemic, particularly to serve their most vulnerable patrons.

“Libraries are going to recognize that their role is not just within the walls of their buildings, but it is across the landscape of their community and in people’s homes,” says Lisa Guernsey, director of teaching, learning and tech at New America. “The days of having a computer lab are going to be receding. Instead people need to be able to get online from home.”

Read the full story.

5. Has Eugene, Oregon, Found a ‘Superpower’ for Climate Action?

High Country News Tyee Williams has been on the frontlines of climate change as a wildland firefighter. He helped battle the Pine Gulch Fire, one of three record-setting fires in Colorado last summer and fall — all scorching examples of how the climate crisis is intensifying wildfires in the Western U.S. Back home in Eugene, Oregon, Williams is on another vanguard of the climate fight: a push for the city to cut fossil fuel consumption. That work includes pressing the Eugene City Council to revamp its operating agreement with the local gas utility, Northwest Natural, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Read the full story.

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6. Volunteer Appreciation – More Important Than Ever!

Oregon Heritage Exchange We know that volunteers have a huge impact on our heritage organizations (no really, we do know because we did a study of it last year. Check out the results here). Due to social distancing, state guidelines, and risk of infection, engaging volunteers has been incredibly hard for many heritage organizations this year. With 2021 National Volunteer Week approaching April 18-24 we have got you covered on ways to appreciate your awesome volunteers!

Read the full story.

7. Around Oregon: Website Connects Consumers to Fresh Oregon-Grown Food Malheur Enterprise Finding locally grown fresh food Oregon just became easier.

Oregon Taste, a public service project of nonprofit James Beard Public Market, announced the launch of OregonTaste.com, a searchable online directory of the state’s locally grown fresh food.

The website allows area consumers to connect to Oregon’s local fresh foods and food businesses, providing a reliable source for information on Oregon food, food products, food systems programs and food events.

The directory initially is focusing on Oregon’s local producers that sell fresh foods directly to consumers. Listings include sellers of fresh, local and direct-to-consumer food, as well as information on farmers, fishers, ranchers, roadside stands, u-pick fields, farmers markets and orchards.

Read the full story.

8. An Oregon Utility’s Unique Model for Supporting Clean Energy Goals GreenBiz Portland General Electric (PGE) in Oregon manages a two-year-old program it hopes will accelerate the speed of renewable deployment in the state. It also may be a model for how other utilities can help customers choose clean energy.

The Green Future Impact (GFI) program provides an avenue for large companies and cities to choose renewable energy. The deals themselves look familiar to corporate energy buyers: power purchase agreements (PPAs) and load aggregation. The difference is how the utility acts as a partner in the deal, working with regulators to streamline the process for the customers.

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"If we're able to bring the utility together with our customers and bring new clean resources online, we can accelerate the impact and the move to a clean energy future in Oregon," John McFarland, vice president and chief customer officer of PGE, said in a phone interview.

So far the program, approved by the Oregon Public Utilities Commission in 2019, has inked deals for 300 megawatts (MW) of new capacity, with hopes to expand soon. The program acts as a platform, so far supporting two procurement models: aggregate PPAs and corporate PPAs. Read the full story.

9. RESOURCE – Community-Rooted Economic Inclusion: A Strategic Action Playbook Brookings Institute The United States is characterized by a persistent geography of racial and economic injustice, in which people of color and low-income people are concentrated in underinvested neighborhoods and systematically isolated from the resources, amenities, and opportunities needed to thrive. COVID-19 has magnified the harms of this enduring intersection between race, poverty, and place—literally killing people in real time for living in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods—but it only shined new light on systems that have long been broken.

Facing an inflection point of inequity, there has never been a greater urgency for community, city, and regional leaders to advance bold solutions that foster long-overdue investment and opportunity within disinvested communities—and to do so in a way that benefits existing residents and small businesses within these communities.

This playbook provides local leaders with an actionable set of tools to create more just landscapes of neighborhood opportunity through community-rooted economic inclusion— a new, multidisciplinary and systems-level approach to building community wealth within underinvested places, while driving city and regional economic growth and development that centers equity at its core.

Access the full playbook.

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10. PODCAST – Myths and Realities of America’s Rural Economy The Indicator from Planet Money Economist Gbenga Ajilore has been studying the economy of rural America for a long time, and when he speaks with people who are not from rural America, he finds that they often have the wrong impression. He commonly sees three assumptions that people make: 1) Rural America is all white 2) Rural America is all about farming, and 3) Rural America is dying.

Gbenga's research on rural America has been focused on correcting these assumptions.

And he now works as a senior advisor at the Department of Agriculture to hopefully prevent those false assumptions from misguiding policymakers. On The Indicator: in case policymakers or anyone else wants a shortcut and just get everything they need to know in a ten-minute podcast, we are having a chat with Gbenga about the myths and realities of America's rural economy.

Listen to the full story.

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