The Resilience Hub is seeking proposals for projects to build community-scale resilience:

•Are you part of a community group that could benefit from increased access to your own fruits and vegetables? From reduced water or electricity bills?

•Are you an organization doing community organizing or direct support work that has an idea for the way that small-scale energy or food/medicine production could support your work?

•Are you a tenant or a renter in an urban area wanting to increase your access to fruits and vegetables, decrease water or electric bills, and learn about and demonstrate urban gardening techniques?

•Are you a property owner in a rural, urban, or suburban area looking to build your household's resilience and also committed to building equity in your community by leveraging your property towards community benefit? (This could look like land sharing agreements, building a community gathering space, creating a neighborhood food distribution network with surplus, running a community research project on soil remediation, etc.)

The Portland Permablitz Network organizes work parties to build projects that increase resilience through backyard or neighborhood food production, energy generation, water catchment, and community-building. We take a permaculture approach - a way of designing that mimics nature's patterns. Together, we can accomplish in a day what it might take an individual or small group a whole season to complete. We will convene 5-6 permablitz work parties from June through November this year.

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Before you fill out this application, please read below for background information:

What we’re offering:
- To work with you or your group to make a design or plan to bring these goals to life.
- To coordinate team leaders who bring skills to install a phase of your project.
- To organize the work of 30+ volunteers to make the first phase of your project happen in a day.
- To share educational resources and support before and after.

What we ask for from the host:
- To fill out this questionnaire to explain more about your ideas
- To connect with a mentor who has been a host in the past
- To commit to a design process, either by hiring a professional permaculture designer or by working with a student. (There may be some funds available to support this as needed. )
- To gather or purchase all materials for the project with the support of the organizer. (There may be some funds available to support this as needed.)
- To show up to support at least two other permablitz work parties in 2020.

Some examples of projects we’ve completed in the past or would love to complete this season:
- Building a solar-powered generator (back-up system in case the power goes out)
- Converting lawns to garden space
- Installing an orchard or food forest
- Installing solar panels
- Weatherizing a home or building
- Building vertical growing or food production in urban areas
- Installing rain barrels or water catchment systems
- Cob ovens or benches
- Building medicinal herb gardens
- Building composting toilets
- Building greenhouses or cold frames to grow vegetables year round
- Building greywater systems
- Building ponds or wetlands.
- Building compost systems
- Building bike-powered machines

Every work party is a chance to:
- Provide free hands-on education to anyone who wants to learn.
- Weave connections in our community by getting to know our neighbors through working together.
- Increase community preparedness in food or medicine production, distribution, or small-scale energy generation.
- Strengthen resistance and our ability to fight the things we don’t want by building things we want to see and decreasing dependence on unjust systems.

The question of community resilience is necessarily a question of equity and must ask who is benefiting and how resources are being distributed. To that end, priority will be given to ideas and initiatives led by people of color and native people, LGBTQ* people, people with disabilities, working class and poor people, and young people, so that skills, funding, and work can be leveraged to support the visions, goals, and needs of these communities. To hear more about community resilience building and its relationship to resistance work, check out this inspiring podcast of Sherri Mitchell’s Love and Revolution radio, featuring Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/occupy-radio/e/48989210?autoplay=true .