This issue’s theme is FAITH and features stories about faith-based organizations retooling themselves to become more responsive to community needs. In it we interviewed leaders from the Ainsworth United Church of Christ, Leaven Community and Berean Baptist Church. We also profiled Rena Williams of Another Level Sex Trafficking Recovery Support Group and State Representative Tawna Sanchez.
Video Tour of Right 2 Dream Too
Right 2 Dream Too is a rest area in the Rose Quarter that is self-managed and governed by its residents who are experiencing houselessness.
We worked with them to develop this video to help shed light on how they operate and they people who live there.
We Love Northeast!
We have our hands in a lot of pots around town so it can be hard to answer the question “what does NECN do?” without launching into an hour-long diatribe. So we thought it would be useful to make this little video primer to cover the basics of our organization. Enjoy!
Priced Out Screening at Leaven Community
We’re excited to be a co-sponsor of this great event. Priced Out is an award-winning documentary about gentrification in Northeast. The director, Cornelius Swart will be there for a Q&A. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out!
NECN Wants to Overthrow The Government
We’ve been talking loudly (okay, screaming pointlessly) for awhile about the need to overhaul Portland unique and inequitable system of government that leaves Portlanders without direct representation in their city council.
We were happy to have our Communcations Manager, Mischa Webley, invited onto KGW’s Straight Talk public affairs program to shout - um, discuss - the issue alongside former Commissioner Steve Novick, among others. You can watch part 1 below.
NECN's 2019 Community Grants Awardees
The Affordable Housing Rabbit Hole
In the Winter issue of our newspaper Hey Neighbor, we continued on our quest to break down our city’s most complicated and pressing issues and tackled Affordable Housing. Needless to say it’s… complicated. So naturally we made a cartoon to help make sense of it.
Portland, Unhoused
This is the video companion to the feature story in our Fall ‘18 issue of Hey Neighbor, a deep dive into the homelessness situation in Portland through the perspectives of those people who live and work in and around it.
In the video, we put forth a number of facts and statistics about homelessness in Portland that are often overlooked in the heated debates that surround the issue.
Two Teachers Change the Cannabis Game
You might not know by looking at it from the outside, but inside the old Northeast Portland Craftsman home that houses Green Hop, a new cannabis dispensary, a quiet revolution is taking place.
Led by co-founders Karanja Crews and Nicole Kennedy, two public school teachers who both grew up in Northeast, Green Hop touts itself as the nation’s first hip-hop dispensary and one of the few black-owned dispensaries in the city.
The legal marijuana industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the country, yet only one percent of dispensaries are black-owned. At the same time, the vast majority of those who have served time in prison for marijuana charges are black, and their numbers nationwide reach into the hundreds of thousands.
It’s this disconnect that Crews and Kennedy have their sights set on fixing and, as you might expect from a pair of teachers, they are tackling it the only they know how: through advancing education and promoting opportunity.
To that end, the pair formed the Green Hop Academy as an offshoot of the dispensary with the goal of building an apprenticeship program that will train the next generation of African-American youth in the industry. In partnership with other cannabis businesses, they will identify and place promising young people into various corners of the industry, and give them the tools they need to succeed in an increasingly competitive industry.
“Being that gateway for people to ask questions and for it to be okay to learn and to not know everything [about cannabis] is a huge piece for bringing more people of color in,” Kennedy says.
Their efforts are paying off: they were recently awarded a grant from the city of Portland to administer their program and on June 16th, Tupac Shakur’s birthday, Green Hop held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate their grand opening. At press time, their attendance sheet was impressive and listed City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Congressman Earl Blumenauer as attendees.
Clearly, Crews and Kennedy are filling a need, and getting noticed: “Green Hop’s mission to promote community health and wellness, and increase economic opportunities for people of color is something the City of Portland wholeheartedly supports,” said Mayor Wheeler in a press release.
As they gear up for the grand opening, Crews and Kennedy are focusing on the day-to-day struggles of running a business, especially one with so many twists and turns. With annual licensing costs for a cannabis business exceeding $10,000, the hustle to stay afloat is neverending. But it’s all worth the struggle to build a business in the community that they grew up in and to create opportunities for others. That is, after all, what teaching is all about.
Green Hop is located at 5515 NE 16th Avenue and is open 7 days a week.
— story by Mischa S. Webley, NECN Staff Writer
This article originally appeared in the Summer, 2018 issue of Hey Neighbor, NECN’s quarterly newspaper.
Catsplaining Portland's Form of Government
We created this video to answer one perplexing question: how the heck does Portland's government work?
Our answer: Ask a cat.