Not every nonprofit would petition to take responsibility for a buried landfill. But when the City of Portland handed over the development rights of a brownfield in northeast Portland's Cully neighborhood, Verde executive director Alan Hipólito considered it a landmark victory.
Transforming the onetime landfill into a park and neighborhood hub fulfills Verde’s mission of increasing environmental wealth in underserved communities. It also pulls together Metro’s nature and transportation grants, showing how they can support the same community – and nurture a growing nonprofit.
Verde began as a program within Hacienda CDC, providing job training and employment opportunities at the nonprofit’s affordable housing projects. Its first endeavors were small: developing plans for a nursery and restoring stream banks.
"We felt that the sustainability community, despite a foundational commitment to equity, wasn't really supporting low-income people and people of color," Hipólito said. "And at the same time, peer organizations working in those communities weren't really engaging sustainability as a strategy. So we built a bridge."
"Verde has an entrepreneurial aspect.
It's putting people to work and using the grant resources they receive to create jobs for people. That's still kind of a rare model in the nonprofit world."
- Dan Kaempf, Regional Travel Options
Now an independent nonprofit, Verde attracts national funding attention and takes on complex projects region wide.
Let Us Build Cully Park is a park and garden designed and implemented by the community that shares its name. From the start, community members worked alongside Verde and partner organizations, conducting initial outreach, soil testing, park design and construction.
Hipólito views Verde's impact as twofold. First, he said, it's important to build community members’ capacity to control their environmental future. Second, he hopes that Verde's work will spark interest in sustainability as a strategy to fight poverty.
Cully Park received $577,000 from Metro’s Nature in Neighborhoods capital grants, and a companion project to improve neighborhood transportation choices received $130,000 from Metro's Regional Travel Options program. This successful collaboration sets the framework for other antipoverty organizations to pursue the same resources, Hipólito said. "There's the potential for what we're building here to replicate and serve other like communities."