On Tuesday of this week we held the public meeting about the conditional use permit for the pre-school campus on 26th St. Our goal is to transform the old Grace Lutheran church and 5 lots next to it into a state of the art day care/ preschool for our neighborhood. We plan to put an outdoor play space as well as outdoor garden and a paved parking lot with landscaping and fencing to create a park like setting for the preschool campus.
Back in the early days of open gym, we had over 175 kids a night coming to the Mackin building to hang out and play ball. It was loud, boisterous, sometimes contentious when games didn’t go their way, but there was always a lot of love in the building. One evening an acquaintance we had met who worked for Catholic Charities Refugee program showed up with a large family that had recently arrived from a Tanzania refugee camp. It was a mom and dad and their six children, 5 boys and one girl. They were from Congo originally and had been living in the refugee camp in Tanzania for the past 15 years.
We have mentioned a few times that one of our goals is to open a preschool campus at the corner of 26th and Bank St in the old Grace Lutheran church building. We purchased the church building in the fall of 2019 and started demo to convert the old Sunday school building attached to the church into a preschool that can house 100 kids aged 1 – 5 years old. When COVID hit all construction came to a halt, but we were able to purchase additional lots next to the church to put together plans for a whole preschool campus. These plans included outdoor play space, and parking for staff and families.
Over the years we have had many volunteers that have come through Love City. They have come from as far away as California and as close as next door. When we do orientation sessions for volunteers we always stress the importance of neighbors coming together to love each other and change our city. This past week we hosted teams of volunteers again for the first time since COVID. This is spring break season and even though our school is still in session for another week, other schools and colleges around the country are off this week and some decided to take a trip to volunteer rather than the traditional hitting the beach spring break trip.
I’m sure that if you’ve been around or involved in Love City in any way, you have most likely heard a little bit about how Love City started and even a little bit about how Shawn and I met. Even though Shawn and I were both living in Louisville we didn’t actually meet each other until we were in Rome Italy, studying abroad with Bellarmine University’s MBA program in May of 2013.
Shawn was in the class of 2013, and I was in the class of 2014. MBA classes at Bellarmine are done on the cohort model, so you take all your classes with the same group of 20-30 people.
One of the first people to show up at what would become Love City back in early 2015 was a young man that Shawn had met while volunteering at a men’s group on Thursday mornings. Matt had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree and was taking some time to pause and figure out what was next in his life. He was interning with the men’s group and became friends with Shawn through those Thursday mornings. Matt was one of the first people to come down and help demo what would become our house on Alford Ave. He would regularly come down to the neighborhood, hanging out and helping with various projects, as well as when we would just gather as a community to just pray or share a meal.
The main goal of Love City is to empower the neighborhood, I thought it would be important to tell this story, not from a negative perspective about an event that prompted us to get security at the school, but from the perspective of community coming together.
Every morning at school we follow the same schedule. The teachers and staff arrive at 8am for our morning meeting to talk about the day, what’s on the agenda, any special programs, etc. At 8:15 we open the doors to arriving students. All students enter through the front doors of the building, get their temperature taken and can either hang out in the gym or go get breakfast before school starts at 8:30am. This particular Wednesday morning everything
I can't remember where the idea for a screen printing company at Love City actually came from. A few years ago Shawn and I and some of our team members were trying to come up with ideas for some new t-shirts. We had shirts with the basic Love City logo printed a few months earlier and they were very popular with people coming to visit Love City. Some how through the conversation the idea came up that we should open our own screen printing shop, then we could just print whatever t-shirts we wanted when we wanted. The next couple of years the idea was always in the back of our minds but we didn't actively pursue it. One thing we have learned through Love City, is that timing is not always something we have control over. Things will fall into place, when things fall into place.
If you've been around Love City for any amount of time, you surely have heard about Porkland or eaten there. While we've told the story many times about how it started, not many people know the full impact that Porkland has had on our neighborhood, or even on us.
Following the general theme in our lives, we had no idea what we were doing when we started a small fish fry out of the back of the Mackin building when we moved here seven years ago. Amazingly though, over time, we've come to see how we had been unknowingly prepared by past experiences and life in general for just such an endeavor. Shawn and I met at business school at Bellarmine University, my background was government and his was culinary. When we moved to Portland neither of us had any experience with non-profits. We knew our calling was to love our neighbors, whatever that looked like. Necessity shoved us down the path that would eventually become Porkland.
While 2020 upended life for everyone 2021 brought opportunities to lean into not just a new normal but a deepening of direction for Love City. Masks became an everyday part of life as we opened a new school in January (Mighty Oak Academy), celebrated the return of summer camps, started the first full school year of Mighty Oak Academy in August and once again joined our friends throughout the West End to put together food boxes for the holidays that fed around 20,000 people.
We don't usually share these kinds of stories about our neighbors, but this story deserved to be told if nothing else for the encouragement that love brings.
Every place has a rhythm and Porkland's rhythm starts out with inventory pick up for the week every Monday. We have some supplies delivered and go pick up others. If we are smoking meat that week we purchase the full amount of meat to smoke on Mondays. When we closed down after lunch on Monday October 11, we had a full stock of food for the week, as well as two cases of rib tips we were set to smoke the next day.
Yesterday Mighty Oak Academy held its first annual Christmas Program, and it exceeded all our expectations. Our students showcased talents we never knew they had, and our families came together in a beautiful display of community it literally brought us to tears. When Shawn and I first moved here six years ago we filmed a video in the ballroom of the Mackin building. At the time we held open gym every afternoon and had fish frys out of the cafe in the back every Friday. The ballroom where we filmed was a long unused space with a rich history just waiting to embark on it's next life. We told the story of how we
Over the past semester Bellarmine's Athletic Training department has come to Mighty Oak Academy every Wednesday to run P.E. classes for all our students. In addition to the P.E. class they worked with our middle school class on projects related to health, fitness and nutrition. This Wednesday our middle school class took a field trip to Bellarmine to present their projects, take a tour of the camps and have lunch in the campus cafeteria. We're super thankful for our partnership with Bellarmine and for this opportunity to come visit!
We finished out our last full week before Thanksgiving break. Next week we'll only be in school for two days. Our Kindergarten class has developed a tradition of birthday parades, and this week was Kalen's birthday. The class goes on a tour of the whole school visiting each class on their birthday parade, so all the other students get to join in and celebrate!
This week we held our first all school family meeting. The Family Meeting pairs our older students with our younger students to foster relationship and bonding throughout the school. Our middle schoolers and 4th and 5th grade class were paired with our kindergartners, and 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders. This family meeting was just to have them get to know each other. We'll be having family meetings about twice a month and will encourage the students to get to know each other better and and we'll give them small projects to work on together to foster collaboration across grades. Bellarmine also continues to come once a week to teach physical fitness to our students, this week they worked on proper stretching techniques.
Last weekend was our Fall Festival! it was awesome to be able to hold this event again. In addition to our neighbors, all of our families from Mighty Oak Academy came to the festival and a special thank you to all our parents that volunteered to help make the festival a success! This week at Mighty Oak Academy, our middle schoolers presented their fashion business ideas to our "sharks"! We were impressed with their ideas and creativity !
This week our Kindergarten class took a trip to Hubers Educational Farm, they got to pick their own pumpkins, ride a tractor, and have lunch in the pavilion!
St C's Tees has some new styles now available at Porkland! We have T-shirts and sweatshirts with Portland and the Portland anchor. Stop by today, grab some fish for dinner and pick up a new sweatshirt!
