Connect in Place: Emerging from Our Homes
Join facilitator LeeAnn O’Neill in this conversation that asks, How does the way you move through your community affect your sense of safety and vulnerability? What else affects your sense of safety and vulnerability? How might you change the way you interact with others as you move through your community to create a greater sense of safety for everyone?
Connect in Place: Art as Activism: Changing the World through Creative Expression
Art influences society by changing opinions, instilling values, and translating experiences across space and time. How can you use art to talk about what you feel is right or wrong? Join Pepe Moscoso for a conversation that invites participants to intimately explore their feelings, sentiments, and experiences and how to use art as a medium to turn thinking into doing.
Connect In Place: Should Schools Reopen? Risk, Reward, and Making Decisions in Community
Schools in Oregon are in the process of bringing students back into physical classrooms after a full year of virtual learning for many. Join Aimee Craig in a reflective conversation that asks, How do you weigh risks and benefits? How do we make decisions as a community when risk is involved?
Connect in Place: What Does Democracy Require?
Join David Gutterman for a conversation about what democracy requires of us and for us in this fraught moment.
Connect in Place: What are we learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, and how will we remember it?
How can we put our energy, intention, and creativity into nurturing deep individual and collective learning that will outlive the pandemic? How do we shape a better “new normal,” wherein even the concept of normal itself is liberated from various constraints? We can start by talking about it.
Connect in Place: The Meaning of Climate Change
We live in a time of tremendous transformation as the reality of climate change and its effects on our communities become more apparent with every passing year. What is the meaning of this extraordinary moment in human history? Portland State University instructor David Osborn leads a discussion exploring different meanings of climate change and how our understanding of meaning relates to action.
Connect in Place: Growing Old in a Time of Uncertainty
No matter our age, we all hear and tell stories about growing older that reflect our own ideals and fears and the ideals and fears of our communities. This conversation is for people interested in exploring experiences of and obstacles to aging well in this present time. What are the revisions in our stories as we live in this time of uncertainty? What new roles are we creating? What practical information can we share with one another? How does the power of these stories affect us and those around us? Join facilitator Melissa Madenski as we look at the power of story in a conversation that will ask you to share your own experiences and ideas and listen to the perspectives of others in your community.
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We live in a time of tremendous transformation as the reality of climate change and its effects on our communities become more apparent with every passing year. What is the meaning of this extraordinary moment in human history? Portland State University instructor David Osborn leads a discussion exploring different meanings of climate change and how our understanding of meaning relates to action.
Connect in Place: Are You Safer Outside?
Join facilitator Mareshah “MJ” Jackson to discuss what makes an outdoor space a “safe” space. How does one’s identity intersect with their security in a park, on a trail, or on a patio? In what ways have our perceptions of these spaces changed since the pandemic and recent protests, and how may they change in the years to come?
Connect in Place: Loneliness and Aging During COVID-19
What beliefs do we hold about loneliness and aging? If we have elderly neighbors and loved ones, what might they need at this time? This conversation with Pamela Slaughter is for people who live near elders or have elderly people in their lives to explore questions, experiences, and obstacles to showing up for elders and to generate ideas for connection during this time of heightened isolation.
Awakening White: White People Helping Each Other to Understand and Interrupt Racism
Join Emily Drew in a conversation that asks, How can we who are white show up as more effective and less damaging participants in struggles to interrupt racism in our community? How can white people engage in efforts to dismantle racism in ways that do not reproduce or place unfair burdens upon people of color to be our teachers?
Race and Adoption
In this conversation, facilitator Astrid Castro will ask participants to explore questions such as, What role do race and racism play in your family? What are the personal experiences that inform how you talk to adopted children in your life about where they are from? Where do you need to grow to be the best resource you can be for children who are adopted?
Inmigrantes y COVID-19: Nuestras historias, nuestro futuro
Los retos y desafíos que enfrentan las comunidades de inmigrantes en Oregon se han intensificado durante COVID-19, especialmente aquellos que son indocumentados o tienen familiares o amigos indocumentados. ¿Cuáles son nuestras historias en estos tiempos? ¿Dónde estamos encontrando apoyo? ¿Cual es nuestra visión personal para el futuro? Esta conversación será dirigida por y para los inmigrantes de habla hispana, y será facilitado en español.
Bias and Kids: How do our unconscious biases influence how we raise our children as caregivers and as a community?
In this conversation, participants will reflect on how our biases—conscious and unconscious—related to gender, race, class, culture, and other traits shape everything from our subtle interactions with the kids we care for to the ways we make political decisions that influence children in our society.
What Does It Mean to Be Good? Exploring Morality in the Midst of Structural Oppression
Most of us believe we are good people. But if we are all good people, with little room for fallibility, who are the people responsible for supporting structural oppression like racism, sexism, and heterosexism? If we hope to be “good,” what are our moral responsibilities in a society of privilege, power, and oppression?
Affinity Space Conversation: Honoring Multiracial Identity and Navigating Antiracism
For bi/multiracial people, whose identities are complex, navigating the world, relationships with others, and our relationships with ourselves is just nuanced and can be difficult to do alone. How do we honor ourselves and our cultural identities? How do we respond to society and individual assumptions about how we think, act, question, and live based on how we look or identify? How do antiracism, whiteness, and white supremacy affect us? This conversation is an opportunity to engage with an affinity group and discuss the bi/multiracial experience.
Music as a Tool for Justice
This conversation will dive into the role of music in shaping memories, communities, and justice. Join facilitator Donovan Smith to explore these through an interactive discussion that will include reflections/dissections of an oral history from Portland hip hop legend Cool Nutz.
Growing Old in a Time of Uncertainty
No matter our age, we all hear and tell stories about growing older that reflect our own ideals and fears and the ideals and fears of our communities. As we live in this time of uncertainty, what stories of aging are we revising? Are there new roles we are creating? How does the power of these stories affect us and communities during this time?
Housing and Belonging with Paul Susi
This Connect in Place conversation will explore common assumptions and perspectives about the experience of houselessness/homelessness and seek to answer the question, How do we decide who “belongs” in our community?
Conspiracy Theories: Truth, Facts, and Tin Foil Hats with Jennifer Roberts
Why do we gravitate toward conspiracy theories to make sense of the world? What human need do these stories fill? In this program, we’ll explore some conspiracy theories old and new, famous and obscure.
Connect in Place: This Place Now
These are uncertain and undetermined times which call for, as Rebecca Solnit has written, “an imagination adequate to the possibilities and the strangeness and dangers on this earth in this moment.” How has where you are affected your experience of the pandemic? How have you seen yourself and your community adapt? What can you imagine recovery might look like? This virtual community conversation will connect Oregonians to reflect on our resilience, to compare notes about our experiences during this pandemic, to share and learn about the places we live, and to imagine what healing is needed for the places we share. This week’s conversations are for people living in the Central Oregon, Southern Oregon, and the Willamette Valley.
Connect in Place: This Place Now
These are uncertain and undetermined times which call for, as Rebecca Solnit has written, “an imagination adequate to the possibilities and the strangeness and dangers on this earth in this moment.” How has where you are affected your experience of the pandemic? How have you seen yourself and your community adapt? What can you imagine recovery might look like? This virtual community conversation will connect Oregonians to reflect on our resilience, to compare notes about our experiences during this pandemic, to share and learn about the places we live, and to imagine what healing is needed for the places we share. This week’s conversations are for people living in the Columbia River Gorge, in Eastern Oregon, and on the Oregon Coast.
Sexual Violence and the Meaning of Justice with claire barrera
In this conversation we will explore the potential meanings of justice, specifically in instances of sexual violence. Who defines it, how is it achieved, and when do we know we’ve succeeded?
This Place Now
This virtual community conversation will connect people from all over Oregon to make sense of this moment together, to share what we envision for the future, and to start exploring how we might get there.
Work, Worthiness, and Sense of Self with Brittany Wake
How does the persistent belief that we must “earn” the right to live affect us? This conversation will explore the challenges of self-identity, worthiness, and value in relationship to productivity made apparent by COVID-19.
Loneliness and Aging During COVID-19: Making Space for Our Elders with Pamela Slaughter
If we have elderly neighbors and loved ones, what might they need at this time? This conversation is for people who live near elders or have elderly people in their lives to explore questions, experiences, and obstacles in showing up for the elderly people in their lives and to generate ideas for connection.
Why DIY? Self-sufficiency and Sheltering in Place with Jennifer Burns Bright
This conversation invites neighbors all over Oregon to reflect upon staying at home and social distancing, and how it might change our notion of what we can do, need to do, and can do without.