While it seems that the whole world is stretched thin right now with more bad news on the way, our small grassroots team at Regenerate Northern Willamette Valley inspires us to keep going and brings us purpose even in these difficult moments.
With regular meetings around creating an ecoregional listening tour for the Willamette Valley, establishing a more structured relationship with Regenerate Cascadia, and continuing to steward the land down at Stephens Creek, we have kept our spirits up. All it takes to remind us to be grateful for the magic that is life is watering the baby white oak trees we recently planted and sang to together.
Stephens Creek Project
Getting an adopt-a-landscape permit from the Oregon Department of Transportation to do restoration work down at Stephens Creek has proven to be a fantastic way to begin bioregional education on a grassroots community level. We have had two land-tending events since receiving the permit in March, and both of them have been well-attended, with more than 20 participants at each event, even including a couple people from the How to Organize Your Bioregion Learning Journey!
We plan to continue doing this event monthly, and the South Burlingame Neighborhood Association has been so kind as to spotlight the event, so we may soon have even more community members involved! In the near future, we would like to establish a community governance practice around stewarding the space to create participatory decision-making.
At the most recent event, we taught volunteers about native and “hyper-abundant” plants, used ODOT-cut alders to do some natural terracing of a steep slope, removed blackberries from the creek, pulled out English ivy, and picked up more than eight landscape bags of trash.
Willamette Valley Listening Tour Progress
Our collaborations with the team in Southern Willamette Valley continue to be fruitful, and our teams are holding a weekly event planning meeting to get this design immersion and listening tour off the ground. We have been hard at work getting a budget together to pitch at the BioFi Conference. If you would like to support this effort, please view the pitch deck here.
At present, it’s looking like the tour will take place from September 4th-17th, 2025, and we will be following the Willamette River from the headwaters to the confluence with the Columbia River, visiting regenerative projects along the way.
In our area, we will be visiting sites including the ITECK Center, Tryon Life Community Farm, and p:ear mentor.
We’ll be meeting with the Southern Willamette Valley organizing team at Lost Valley Education Center to do some visioning on ways our groups can continue to collaborate.
Website Directory for Northern Willamette Valley
While the website has taken us longer to get up and running than we had hoped, we recently pulled in a new person to join our team who believes they can help us fix some calendar errors we have been having. In the meantime, we’ve been adding pages to our content, talking more about the projects we are working on, and adding organizations to our growing directory of projects.
We are creating a “how-to” guide for new people who make accounts so they can add their organization and wisdom to our pages.
To take a look at what we have so far, click here.
Join the Bioregional Efforts!
If you are interested in joining up with our organizing team in the Lower Willamette and Tualatin watersheds, please email regen.willamette@protonmail.com. Or, if you feel inspired to start creating your own landscape team to do this kind of weaving work where you are, email learningjourney@regeneratecascadia.org.
Let’s all become more resilient, restorative, and refreshed in the process of creating a bioregional community.