Living Cully

Increasingly, a Portland neighborhood is defined by its environmental assets: parks, habitat, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, carbon action, stormwater management, environmental education, green jobs and businesses. Portland’s acclaimed sustainability movement makes purposeful investments in certain places and people, in certain businesses and institutions, creating health, vibrant and environmentally beneficial communities.

But this movement does not prioritize equity, does not build environmental wealth in low-income and people of color, in their neighborhoods, or in their businesses and institutions.

Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East (Habitat), Hacienda Community Development Corporation (Hacienda), the Native American Youth & Family Center (NAYA), and Verde believe that sustainability can be reinterpreted as an anti-poverty strategy, as a holistic, integrated means to address multiple disparities in health, income, education, community engagement and natural resources by concentrating environmental investments at the neighborhood scale and braiding those investments with traditional community development resources. These 4 high-performing nonprofits believe that early sustainability frameworks have been narrowly focused, lacking the essential balance for place-based development and aligned human development strategies. In response, we established Living Cully: A Cully Ecodistrict.

Living Cully has collaborative, programmatic and signature project components. Signature projects are a growing series of leveraged investments in Cully that combine economic, social and environmental justice goals, including new parkland, green affordable housing, culturally based habitat restoration, alternative energy facilities, and critical home repairs.