Yesterday, the 2009 class got to tour Portland by way of a jet boat on the Willamette and Columbia rivers. A city that I thought I knew so well, I got to see from a brand new angle.

The Port or Portland offered the tour, which included the port’s various terminals, a plethora of civilian and military water vessels, a gorgeous, up-close look at Portland’s many bridges, and exports and imports ranging from pot ash (a kind of salt used in fertilizer) to Toyotas.

We also got to see an eagle and its nest on Ross Island.

And, because we’re, seriously, not the most grown-up group of all time, the pilot talked us into three spinning maneuvers that included revving the jet boat up to about 50 knots, then taking a 90-degree turn and killing all forward momentum, leaving us shrieking, soaked, and bobbing in the middle of our own wake. Way cool.

It truly was one of the most fun and most informative tours of our year in Leadership Portland.

dana

Our six-person project team (which has absolutely mastered the ability to turn a happy hour into a committee meeting) picked Open Meadow for our project. Open Meadow is an alternative middle and high school program in Portland that has a 20-year track record for taking students who have dropped out, or who are about to, and getting them to graduate and get into college.

I was so moved by my tour of the Open Meadow schools that I asked if any of their alumni were at Portland Community College. That’s where I work, as the college’s public affairs manager.

Sure enough, they told me about Adrian Thompson, who is a student leader at our Cascade Campus in north Portland.

As luck would have it, my quarterly magazine, PCC Communities, was in need of a student feature for the summer issue. And the story of a guy who went from drop-out to student leader in college seemed as compelling as any I’d ever heard.

Adrian’s story appears in the summer issue of PCC Communities, which gets mailed out to 300,000 homes in the metro area next week.

Dana

Other times, the coolness is a bit more abstract.

I was having lunch with my girlfriend, Katy King, in Sellwood the other day. A woman at another table got up and crossed behind Katy.

It took my addled brain a couple of seconds to realize where I knew her. “Excuse me?”

She turned, smiled.

“Aren’t you a dancer? Oregon Ballet Theatre?”

Her eyes grew very big. She was, in fact, ballet dancer Daniela DeLoe and several of us from Leadership Portland got to watch her and other dancers practice for a performance titled “Lambarena,” a few months back. I recognized her because she’d rehearsed right in front of me.

For those of you who went, she’s also the woman who, in mid leap, had her feet slip out from beneath her and crashed to the hardwood floor, her ribs and hip taking the brunt of the impact. She then jumped up, laughed it off, and tried the move again. I would have been in traction.

In the restaurant, she laughed and said she’d never been recognized in public before. I told her I was a fan and wished her luck on the next performance, “Left Unsaid.”

See what I mean about the less obvious coolness of Leadership Portland?

dana

This is very exciting. The Capitol has an amazing energy to it, especially when the Legislature is in session, as it is now.

Especially this session: After all, the economy is doing it’s impression of the Hindenburg, Oregon managed to slough off $3 billion in revenue from December to February (when the ill-named March Revenue Forecast was released) and nobody believes the slide has stopped. We’re expecting, at a minimum, to have lost yet another $1 billion when the equally ill-named June Forecast is released May 15. If we lose as much as $2 billion, we will have shed one-third of the state’s revenue in five months.

Mazel tov!

So Leadership Portland is taking us into the heart of maelstrom, and it should be an exciting time for every single member of the class of 2009.

Except, of course, me.

Because I live at the Capitol these days.

I’ll be there around 7 a.m. this Monday, because the education subcommittee of Ways and Means is taking up the budget for Oregon’s 17 independent community colleges. I’m the public affairs manager for Portland Community College.

A public affairs manager is… OK, that’s never been explained to me. Save to say: I’m in the Capitol when our budget comes up.

I’ll be there until around 7 p.m. Monday. Then back at 7 a.m. Tuesday. And 7 a.m. Wednesday.

Then there on Thursday, around (yawn) 8 a.m. for Leadership PDX.

Seriously. Ground Hog Day much?

dana

I was stunned by those numbers.

Here are better ones: We asked, what would a donation to Impact Northwest (formerly known as Portland Impact) provide to needy Oregonians?

The answers:

$50 would pay for after-school music lessons for two children.

$150 buys a year’s worth of school supplies for three children.

$250 nets you a first book for 125 toddlers in the Early Childhood Education program.

$500 allows 10 homebound seniors to maintain their phone service for a month. Either that, or it helps a working mother pay for one month of child care.

The 95 staffers and 2,400 volunteers at Impact Northwest aren’t out to save the world. Just their small corner of it.

dana

In February, several of the 2009 LP cohort got an invitation to attend the final dress rehearsal of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s production of “Lambarena.” It was simply amazing.

First, it was a full dress, so the show we saw was the show paying customers would see. Except they stopped from time to time to make some minor adjustment (they literally practiced taking bows after the performances). There were, maybe, 50 people in the audience (Katy King, my girlfriend, and I decided to dress up), consisting of friends and family members of the troupe.

The show consisted of three very different dances: “Ash,” “The Right of Spring” and “Lambarena,” the last of which combined Bach and African drums. Simply amazing.

During the first intermission, the Leadership Portland group got a backstage tour of the Keller Auditorium. I’m an ex-theater geek, so as you can imagine, it was kid-in-a-candy-shop time for me.

Literally, this is the reason one joins Leadership Portland. To stand in places we otherwise would never, ever get to stand. Oh, the places we’ve gone…

Last week, about six of us sat in the office of Steve Gonzales, artistic director of the iconic Jefferson Dancers, in a dank sub-sub-basement of the enormous and eerily empty Jefferson High School. I’ve heard of the dance troupe since I moved to Oregon in the 1980s, but I’ve never seen them perform.

I predict that will change soon, now that I’ve met Gonzales. We also got to see a short video of his students performing hip-hop, jazz, ballet, modern and classical dance moves. It was stunning.

For a school plagued by administrative turnover, an at-risk neighborhood and a sordid reputation – quite possibly undeserved – Jefferson High has managed to create the most impressive artistic program I’ve ever seen. And as a journalist, I covered schools for 20 years.

One of our team members asked a student: Do you feel safe here? Her reply was: between dance, Mock Trial and student government, she’s at the school from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. most days. “I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t feel totally safe.”

So much for Jefferson’s undeserved reputation.

Open Meadow is a program for middle school and high school students who have dropped out or at risk of dropping out. It’s terribly impressive. It’s been around for decades and has a high success rate for get students to graduate and to provide them a platform for success after graduation.

I spent 12 years in the Portland area as a newspaper journalist, mostly covering education issues, and I never heard of Open Meadow until I joined Leadership Portland.

The tour included a look at the alternative program’s “high school,” a gorgeous, Queen Anne home overlooking the Columbia River, a stone’s throw from the University of Portland (one of our team mates graduated from U of P and lived briefly near the Open Meadow high school, and he, too, had never heard of it).

Beyond the basics of providing an education, Open Meadow offers a program called Step Up, which supports in-coming high school freshmen. Educators have said for years that you can tell the future trajectory of students by how well they do as freshmen. Step Up provides a safety net for those kids to get them through the tough times of being the “new kid on campus.”

Team Seamus McDuff has decided to make Open Meadow our project. We’re not 100 percent sure what we’re going to do for them, but there’s no question that this is a worthy program.

Stay tuned…

Rhythm, on the other hand? Not so much.

That was the lesson learned at the December program day for Leadership Portland 2008-09, when dance instructor Jason Olson took on the unenviable task of teaching salsa dancing to 30-some-odd people whose footwork could be charitably described as “asynchronous.”

Less charitably: “crummy.”

Not all of us, mind you. R.J. Cervantes could barely restrain himself from breaking out into some serious moves. (R.J. has just been named as an aide to County Commissioner-elect Deborah Kafoury. Hopefully, her staff dances better than our class.)

While the brief dance lesson was less than graceful, it was more than helpful in reminding us that, when it comes to arts and culture, half the battle is just getting folks involved. Whether it’s fundraising or volunteering, the battle is won by those who show up.

Even those with two left feet.