At long last, this is your site. We’ve tweaked, and worked, and worked to get this site up and running. So bookmark it now. Comeback often. Participate. Comment. Blog. Enjoy.

A couple of housekeeping items:

• You’ll be getting occasional emails from us updating you on what’s going on with Leadership Portland, this blog, and other important updates. Please make sure we don’t end up in your spam filter, and pretty please, don’t opt out!
• Join us March 18 at 5:30 p.m. at Roots Brewing for our monthly event – remember, we buy the first round of snacks and cocktails.
• Have a story idea? Let us know at info@leadershipportland.com

We think we’ll have some interesting content for you, and this is what you’ve asked for – a place that’s your own, where you can get your updates out and find your classmates.

A special thank you goes to the good folks over at eROI who have worked with us to launch this site and provide our email updates. Thank you, eROI, you do terrific work.

Welcome our first site authors who have taken the plunge to provide our first content. Interested in contributing? Let us know, we’d love to hear from you.

Did I mention that you should bookmark the site now? And keep coming back? Good. Now enjoy.

Dr. Seuss’ book, “Oh The Places You’ll Go!” could be should be the official playbook of Leadership Portland.

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…

The members of Team Seamus McDuff (OK, how cool is that name; the origin is for a later column) recently got the opportunity to tour Portland’s best-kept secret: Open Meadow.

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…