Our Mission
City Repair Project collaborates with communities to cultivate and facilitate community-led artistic, equitable and ecologically-oriented placemaking. We work towards create a world where urban communities thrive with diverse ecologically and culturally regenerative shared participation. City Repair actively supports groups to create thriving community through the creative reclamation of public space.
City Repair Project collaborates with local businesses, community agencies, and communities to cultivate and facilitate community-led artistic, equitable and ecologically-oriented placemaking, workshops, and community building events.
Our immediate service area is the Portland Metro Area. We have worked with communities in Portland, Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Oregon City, Tigard and Vancouver. Additionally, we consult with and support communities and organizations across North America and internationally.
Placemaking means different things to different people. To us, it is a grassroots action that builds community, fosters relationships and creates communal neighborhood stewardship and lived connections. To most people, it is an unfamiliar term that is slowly seeping into our mainstream consciousness.
The City Repair Project values the transformative power of the places we make and the living stories we share for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable world. We also believe that a more just world requires us to recognize the needs, wisdom, and leadership of systemically-excluded communities including Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (QTBIPOC) and people with lived experience with houselessness.
City Repair is made up of people from varying backgrounds and walks of life including mothers, youth, educators, volunteers, leaders, visionaries, artists, builders, herbalists and neighbors. This community is made of thousands of individuals from hundreds of neighborhoods across Portland and neighboring cities, as well as independent City Repair organizations that have emerged by virtue of our 20-plus-year efforts in Portland.
Within this vast constellation of contributors, a group of core organizers converge each cycle to tend the organizational, inspirational and motivational forces that keep our cultural ecology in equilibrium. These groups are the City Repair Staff, Board of Directors and the Village Building Convergence Core Volunteers.