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