2021 Annual Report
Together, we’re making a difference.
This September, due to citizen advocacy, the City of Portland reversed course and did not issue a land use compatibility statement to Zenith Energy! (Photo from our August Pedalpalooza bike ride, in partnership with Community Cycling Center and Andando en Bicicletas y Caminando)
Dear Families for Climate Community,
2021 has been an important year of growth and connection for our organization and we’re so grateful you’ve been a part of that. We’ve strengthened our ability to help parents and children in the Portland Metro area raise our voices for climate justice on local and statewide issues. Members provided personal testimony during the legislative session, and we also submitted public comments on behalf of our organization on priority climate-related bills. We hosted both in-person events and virtual gatherings with guest speakers to deepen our understanding of important current climate issues. We joined coalitions that center climate justice, such as ensuring worker safety during wildfire smoke events and stopping dangerous oil trains moving through low-income neighborhoods. But most importantly, we keep growing our community network with caring people like you, who are willing to find the time here and there in your busy lives to build a better future for all children.
We hope you will enjoy looking back on this year’s highlights and we deeply appreciate the support and engagement of so many people that make these efforts possible. We could not do this work without you! Here’s to a brighter 2022!
Sincerely,
Nora, Leonard, Noelle, Amber, Maia, Caleb, Paula and Katy
Families for Climate Board of Directors
Parent Climate Action Network (PCAN) takes flight!
Every public comment period, town hall meeting, or hearing presents an opportunity to influence public processes and outcomes for the better, but it takes coordination and planning to 1) track when these opportunities are coming up 2) recruit and support people to give testimony and 3) help them craft impactful messages. At the start of 2021, we wanted to educate parents about opportunities to advocate for strong climate policies, and the Parents Climate Action Network was born!
Climate Solutions helped get us off the ground with a January webinar giving an overview of the key climate bills for the 2021 session of the Oregon Legislature.
During the session, our Policy team organized live and written testimony for seven priority bills. Of these, four passed, including the three Clean Energy Opportunity Campaign bills. We are already preparing for the short Legislative session in 2022 and beyond, to facilitate and provide parent testimony on the most important climate bills.
Following the legislative session, we decided to help educate legislators on the importance of decarbonizing our homes & buildings, and have held four “constituent coffee meetings” with Oregon state legislators, in coordination with Oregon Environmental Council, 350PDX, Climate Solutions, and others. These small group meetings focused on the dangers of methane gas, Northwest Natural’s greenwashing campaign, and the importance of building electrification. Through these meetings, we hope to simultaneously educate elected officials and build relationships among parent climate advocates. Additional constituent meetings are currently being scheduled.
Coalitions: We are stronger when we work together!
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In March 2020 Governor Kate Brown signed Executive Order 20-04, which directed all state agencies to take actions to reduce and regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Members of our policy team joined the statewide coalition tracking its implementation, via the Oregon Climate Action Plan (OCAP). To mark the one year anniversary of this critically important directive, Families For Climate produced a short video in partnership with Renew Oregon advocating for OCAP to be as strong as possible. In the fall, our policy team held a testimony writing webinar, also in partnership with Renew Oregon, to help train parents to testify to the Department of Environmental Quality for the strongest possible rules for its Climate Protection Program. Board members and parent volunteers provided both written and oral testimony to DEQ on this important program, which will regulate GHG emissions from stationary sources under the OCAP directive.
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This year, Families for Climate joined coalitions working on climate mitigation (reducing GHG emissions); fighting the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway expansion project; blocking the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure at the Zenith crude transloading terminal; opposing fracked gas power plants; raising awareness among families about the Decarbonization; and advocating for the State of Oregon to divest from fossil fuels. We co-authored the report Methane Gas: Health, Safety, and Decarbonization (endorsed by 68 organizations) to alert elected officials and the media about the multiple dangers of so-called “natural” gas, and the ongoing greenwashing campaign by the gas industry.
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Closer to home, we helped refine, gather input, and mobilize support for the Portland Public Schools Climate Emergency Response Policy. In May, we were one of the sponsors of the Climate Justice Q & A with State Treasurer Tobias Read that launched the Divest Oregon campaign. In early June we co-sponsored a press conference on the anniversary of the Mosier, Oregon oil train fire to raise awareness about Zenith. In July, we co-sponsored a timely bilingual webinar about how to keep our families and communities safe from wildfire smoke. And in September, we were invited to co-sponsor Senator Ron Wyden’s Youth Climate Town Hall.
Just Climate Adaptation
We think that all Portlanders should have shaded streets, no matter what neighborhood they live in. The necessity to actively adapt to our changing climate was brought into sharp focus by the June heat dome event. The tragic loss of 70+ lives in lower income areas of Multnomah County was predicted by PSU researchers using maps of hot spots lacking shade trees. Public officials were aware of this risk, yet there is no coordinated city or county-wide plan to address shade inequity. This fall we have been gathering information and reaching out to other organizations to begin envisioning a platform of solutions to minimize climate-related harm to the most vulnerable members of our community. Some of our fall activities:
Hosted an Oregon Walks September event with Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson in Lents, which was the hottest place in the city during the heat dome. You can find a heat island walking guide on our blog.
Created a shade equity resource page, including public comment on PBOT's Pedestrian Design Guide.
Hosted a webinar with Dr. Vivek Shandas about heat & tree equity with 76 registrants.
Continue to engage with a coalition proposing democratic reforms to our city government through the Charter Commission.
Supporting climate change adaptation in our rural forestlands is also important. With mountain snowpack and glaciers melting ever earlier, fish, wildlife and humans need a way to hold water on the mountains to keep streams and rivers flowing through the summer. Enter the mighty beaver! In October we partnered with Bark and Dr. Suzanne Fouty, who created a fascinating webinar about how beavers could be among our most hopeful climate adaptation partners -- if we can stop killing them.
"Tackling Climate Change with the Mighty Beaver" was created for children age 7-12 (but it is packed with information for grown-ups too!), and while this beaver hunting season has unfortunately already begun, maybe it will be the last. If you need a good kid-friendly art project over winter break, it’s not too late to write to Oregon Governor, Kate Brown and request a ban on beaver trapping on our public lands -- we really need our beaver friends to thrive once again here, in the Pacific Northwest!
Climate Communications for Families
Each month we produce an action-packed newsletter, keeping parents and families informed about easy, impactful opportunities to weigh in on local and state-level climate justice issues. Our audience, currently 580 subscribers, has grown by 65% in the past 12 months alone.
This fall, we created a blog to serve as a platform to write about current events and to share the many resources in our newsletters with a wider audience. Similarly, the Families for Climate YouTube channel shares our webinars created in partnership with guest speakers. (Thanks to The Other House for editing!)
During Earth Week, we launched an expanded online resources section with deep-dives on carbon sequestration, active transportation, and plastics and mindful consumption, including kids activities. These provide useful resources for teachers and parents year-round.
In June, special guest and musician, Jessa Campbell joined Climate Defender Kids for a program entitled, “Music, Activism and the wind.”
Youth Engagement
After more than a year of lockdown, we carefully held an exciting Earth Day event at the Rigler School Garden, with experiential stations for kids to learn about soil biology, carbon sequestration, and pollinators. The best part was a soil critter scavenger hunt in wheelbarrows of sifted compost!
While we are very excited about the Climate Defender Kids model we developed in 2020-2021 (holding programs every six weeks), we backed off to quarterly events as the two board members who lead the program with our amazing volunteers went on leave. We are hopeful that more frequent events will resume once funding and volunteer help are restored. Some of our recent kid-focused activities include summer slow-roll bike rides in partnership with Andando en Bicicletas y Caminando/Community Cycling Center, and the October webinar about beavers geared toward 7-10 year olds. Finally, we are big fans of Jessa Campbell & the Saplings, a fantastic children’s music group teaching children about ecology, and there might just be a song for Climate Defender Kids on their forthcoming bilingual album :)
Fundraising
The co-chairs of our fundraising team are plant fanatics. Putting their passions together, they grew over 1,200 plants in their home nurseries and held a spring plant sale offering PNW natives, flowers, and cool veggie crops plus lots of seeds. Along with a smaller native plant sale in the fall, we grossed over $7,000! These efforts also provided opportunities to share the work we are doing with like-minded folks in the community, and to connect with many home gardeners about the importance of planting natives for creating habitat and carbon sequestration.
As we hone our grant writing skills and let funders know that we exist, our sustaining donor base continues to be our most important source of income. We are deeply grateful for all the community members who have contributed to making this work possible! Not a sustaining donor yet? Give it a try :)
JEDI Team
In 2021 our Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion team designed and facilitated six monthly conversations for our board to deepen our critical racial/social equity analysis. We discussed and examined systemic racism, segregation and gentrification, redlining and its ongoing impacts on environmental health in BIPOC communities, environmental justice and climate justice. We discussed the ways in which each of these topics is interconnected, and how they directly relate to climate change work. We also took the time to reflect on our own social identities and location, and how our identities and lived experiences influence our relationship to this work. Following our conversation series, we've begun to integrate a JEDI analysis into all working groups.
Staffing Changes
Our newest board member, Maia Hixon, joined us in March of this year. Also in March, our Executive Director Katy Kolker left her position to become the ED of the Portland Farmers Market. Since then, board members have been leading the organization to build up reserves so we can hire staff in 2022.
Opportunities to Engage
Currently, one board position is open and we also enthusiastically welcome volunteers to join any of our teams: Policy & PCAN, Communications, Events, Fundraising, and JEDI. We could really use a technology coach; sometimes we have questions about the platforms we use regularly (Squarespace/Mail-chimp/Action Network). Is there someone out there who could be our tech phone-a-friend? Another easy way to help is to encourage friends to sign up for our monthly newsletter.
2020/2021 Sustaining Donors:
Margaret Allison, Chelsea Caffyn, Karen Callahan, Maria Casas, Laura Davison, Julia DeGagne, Amanda Kolker Dos Santos, Matthew Easterlin, Joy Eberhardt De Master, Sara Fullerton Kolker, Megan Glor, Ann Goldstein, Bethany Hansen, David Hurtado, Jim Labbe, Anne Lehmann, Claire Lehmann, Emily Lieb, Marta Lohrmann, Rebecca Neel, Barbara Neel, Gabriela Ordóñez, Jamie Painter, Melanie Plaut, Brianne Rosenstock, Carol Roth, Lara Roth, Wolfgang Roth, Matthew Scotten, Bethia Sheean-Wallace, Patty Smith, Celena Votel, Molly Wallace, Christina Wismer, Owen Wozniak.
2021 Business Donors: The Other House, Orange Splot LLC, Portland Nursery
2020 Business Donors: Deep Harvest Farm, One Green World, Skin Fancy, Genuine Movement, Clover Broan, Lyly, Critical Bath, Pound Disc Golf, MilkRun, Inc., Equal Exchange, Sweetheart St. John, Goodwolf, Eb & Bean, Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider, Clarklewis, The Hoxton, Sunblossom Farm, House Party, Jamie Painter Consulting, Your Taropist, Raya Jade Photography, Luzmaria Renjifo Spanish Classes, Tallulah’s Daddy, Red Yarn, Adaiha MacAdam-Somer, Blue Cranes, Johnny Terrific Murals, Maija Rebecca Hand Drawn, Eleanor Gordon LMT
Finances
Income: $17,691
One-time Donations $1851
Sustaining Donors $6700
Business Sponsorships: $1200
Webinar Donations: $137
Plant sales: $7803
Grants: $0
Expenses: $10,384
Q1 Staff: $6067
Other: $4317
Balance: $7307
2020-2021 One-Time Donors: Eleanor Gordon, Rebecca Darling-Budner, Jasmine Tanguay, Karen Wolfgang, Nancy Matthias, Neon Brooks, Keri Logan, Stephanie Hayes, Stephanie Haas, Bethany Hansen, Kara Chanasyk, Chris Price, Sunny Hunter, Juana Maria, Anna Gordon, Amy Johnson, Erin Leddy, Katharine Daughtery, Janice Snyder, Jane Keating, Ted Labbe, Howard Cutler & Pamela Echeverio, Amy Stork, Eleanor Gordon, Kristen Saxton, Abigail Marble, Celine Fitzmaurice, Holly Levow, Matt Bacon-Brennes.
We are based in Portland, Oregon and focus on local and state issues. We seek to restore balance to these lands in deep gratitude to the first peoples who cared for this place from time immemorial. "The Portland Metro area rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area" (Portland Indian Leaders Roundtable).