Verde Outreach

Outreach/Advocacy

Verde Outreach addresses a divide that exists between sustainability and low-income communities, a Green Divide:

Increasingly, Portland’s communities are defined bythe presence or absence of environmental benefits, by whether a community has meaningful environmental assets: parks, greenspaces, habitat, transit, investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency, stormwater management facilities, environmental education opportunities, green jobs and green businesses. Portland’s growing sustainability movement makes purposeful investments in certain places and people, in certain businesses and institutions, creating vibrant, healthy and environmentally beneficial communities.

But, historically, this movement does not prioritize equity, does not build environmental wealth in low-income people and people of color, in their neighborhoods or in their businesses and institutions. Portland’s low-income people and people of color spend their daily lives in places that suffer disproportionate environmental impacts, in environmentally-deficient places like NE Portland’s Cully Neighborhood. They are environmentally marginalized, excluded from the routine opportunities that build environmental wealth for other people.

Verde’s Outreach-Advocacy activities bridge this Green Divide, fostering collaboration within the environmental community and building connections with other sectors of society.

Grassroots
Peer Groups
Environmental Groups
Policymakers

Grassroots Outreach

Verde Signage Example ~ Click to Enlarge

Verde enterprises support a grassroots outreach strategy based on green job and business creation. Through bilingual conversations, flyers, presentations and signage, our grassroots outreach activities share information about the connection between protecting the environment and making a good living.

Crew members from Verde's social enterprises are part of this outreach, talking with their own communities about their job at Verde and the work they do to protect the environment.

Peer Group Outreach

Verde strengthens the connection between environmental protection and economic opportunity - and brings more communities into environmental decisionmaking - by sharing our social enterprise experiences with other community groups and by working together to create new green jobs and businesses in new communities,.

Many groups have a mission-driven commitment to economic opportunity. They operate programs to deliver jobs, training and/or entrepreneurial opportunities to people of color, to low-income people, to certain neighborhoods, or to other target communities.

Click To Enlarge

When environmental groups spend money, they produce more than environmental benefits - they produce economic benefits. The question is: economic benefits for whom? Verde Outreach works with environmental groups to change their spending practices so they can support green jobs and job training for disadvantaged communities.

Consider Verde's partnership with Friends of Trees:

Environmental Policymakers

Environmental policies create more than environmental benefits or environmental winners and losers.

Environmental policies also create economic benefits, and economic winners and losers. With the rise of sustainability, environmental policymakers pay more and more attention to creating these economic benefits. Verde wants them to pay more attention to the economic winners and losers.

Advocacy groups and individuals have worked for generations to ensure that disadvantaged communities get a meaningful share of publicly-funded or publicly-subsidized projects.

Grassroots Outreach

Peer Group Outreach

Environmental Groups

Environmental Policymakers