Neighborhood Partnerships works to create an equitable economy across Oregon that meets everyone’s basic needs. Rather than provide direct services, we bring together diverse coalitions and cross-sector partnerships to develop policy solutions to inequity statewide.
This involves bringing together impacted communities, advocates, policymakers, businesses, community groups, and other stakeholders to build consensus around an agenda for change. Our role is to provide backbone support to shape a shared platform, conduct research, and drive strategies.
We work with communities across Oregon to develop human-centered and emergent solutions to immediate harms; and to power liberatory and transformative change through organizing, policy advocacy, and narrative change. We center those most impacted by racial, housing, and economic injustice, directing our energy and resources toward building community power, knowledge, and capacity.
We envision a culture and economy of abundance where everyone thrives. This universal thriving is made possible when all have enough and are nourished by a sense of belonging, interdependence, and love among people, communities, and the land.
Well-being and Abundance
We act from the understanding that there is economic and material abundance sufficient to support the core and priority physical needs for health and well-being: clean air and water, healthy food, housing, and safety.
Belonging
Places and communities where we experience belonging are foundational to thriving. Belonging requires connection, support, trust, and the felt sense that we can be seen, heard, and understood. It also requires that we be resourced to provide the same space for others. Such spaces allow people the full range of expression of love, joy, and the grief of inevitable losses.
Transformation and Liberation
We work toward a just, antiracist, and liberatory culture and economy in service to all humans—Black, brown, and white, across ability, age, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality—and to the health of the planet we are all dependent upon. Well-being and belonging are currently scarce due to inequitable, unjust, and overtly racist and harmful systems and structures.
The timescale of change extends across generations. In the immediate term, we invest in addressing the needs and harms people experience daily. For our futures, we insist that universal abundance and liberation requires visionary, emergent, and collective transformation—starting now. We commit to the generative conflict necessary to speed the pace and quality of change, and take courage, inspiration, and leadership on this long journey from Black and Indigenous communities, and other communities of color who have shown the way historically and today.
Healing and Reparation
We commit to openness and honesty with ourselves and each other to keep learning, growing, and working to end white supremacy culture and the harm and injustice it perpetuates. We acknowledge the deep and primal harms that began with the colonization of these lands, and the addition soon after of enslavement into building the capitalist economy in the United States. These have translated into systemic racism, with anti-Blackness and imperialism at its core, impacting all communities of color differently but with deep and persisting harms over time. While these harms cannot be undone for the generations who have passed, we can and must make meaningful and material investments toward healing and reparation today to achieve true justice, shared abundance, and universal liberation. We commit to supporting this work with love, resources, and energy.
Racial Justice and Intersectionality
We know that racial injustice is and was built into our economic and housing systems and structures starting before the founding of the United States. Therefore, we center equity across race and ethnicity, and center the impacts of intersectional identities—ability, age, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality—to maintain focus on dismantling the structures of white supremacy.
Centering Those Most Impacted
Our work centers communities and individuals most harmed by housing and economic injustice. We believe these community members’ lived experiences position them to identify the solutions best for them, and to develop and build the strongest strategies for change.
Narrative Change
We believe stories—narratives—shape people’s understandings of how things work, help us make meaning, and drive change. We strive to discern which dominant stories reinforce power imbalance and injustice, and which work to disrupt them. We work to make space for and listen to stories marginalized and silenced by white supremacy culture, and to follow their light toward a culture of abundance and liberation.
Change Starts at Home
Nonprofit organizations are a part of the institutional structures that maintain inequity. They also hold positional power and knowledge to help make change. They are staffed by human beings who often were or continue to be highly impacted by racial, economic, and housing injustice. Therefore, integrating equity into work structures and processes, and centering the well-being of the people who do the work, are vital in moving toward liberation.
We believe doing the inner, or personal, work is a necessary part of moving toward liberation. This requires learning and sharing experience, hard conversations, and constructive conflict, and working together to unpack white supremacist norms we have been socialized to accept as truths.
We believe that this work must be sustained and collective. We care deeply about people and believe that our practices, policies, and things we design should reflect that care. To bring love and support on the long road, we slow down, and we grow and tend our connections and relationships with one another.
Power and Accountability
We know that people’s ability to get what they need to thrive is restricted by unjust systems and policy. We believe that sharing and shifting power is necessary to redistribute access and resources to rectify past and ongoing harm.
We believe that accountability to measure outcomes and impacts must be built into our practices to understand which strategies work, and whether change is happening.