Sun, warm temperatures, a bit of spring rain, green shoots…time to grow, bold leaders!  We have the perfect place for you!  Show up at Urban Farmer on Wednesday 20 May at 5:30 ish to dig in the dirt (hmmmmm), plant seeds, pour some miracle grow libations, and grow some new relationships.  Come on, grow local.  Grab your favorite buddy and come toast a cold beverage with us on WEDNESDAY! 

Make it a BOLD day.

Coolest. Tour. Ever!

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

Have you missed the last few LPAA Happy Hours? Never been? Well, call a few people from your class and meet them on May 20, 5:30 p.m., at Urban Farmer in the swanky new Nines Hotel. You can’t beat the price: drinks and snacks are covered by the Leadership Portland Alumni Association.

The Class of 2008 is doing some smack talk about the fact that they show up at a 5:1 ratio, and normally take home the prize, (the class with the most attendees is put in a drawing) last month – a one night stay at the Portland Marriott.

Join us — in an economy like this — can you afford to pass up networking and, ahem, free drinks?

Just in case you missed it, make sure you register and stop by the Gerding Theater tonight for EMERGE Portland tonight, May 11 from 5-7 p.m.

The idea: Get all the leadership program participants and other emerging and established leaders in one room, and see what happens.

Don’t miss it, and for $10, it’s a deal. (And, donations to the Oregon Food Bank are appreciated.)

They said that being part of Leadership Portland would be beneficial to our day jobs. And it’s already proven true for me.

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