As part of The VANPORT MOSAIC FESTIVAL 2018 - May 23-28, we invite you to participate to 

INVISIBLE WALLS: a public crowdsourcing effort to document Restrictive Covenants & Residential Segregation in Portland

In the early to mid-20thcentury restrictive covenants (rules) prevented people of color, particularly African Americans, from buying and owning property in certain Portland neighborhoods.   This racist history is hidden in tens of thousands of title deeds. We need your help unearthing them.

Become a history detective and join a collective effort to uncover Portland's history of housing segregation!

What can you do? Meet Portland State University students at the festival so you can:

• Learn about this history and the long-term effects of housing discrimination.
• Receive guidance to discover if your title deeds have a restrictive covenant
• Bring your title deeds with restrictive covenant so we can digitize them, and add them to the growing database
• Add your own discoveries, questions, and stories to help us amplify this silenced history.

For info: Greta Smith, greta@vanportmosaic.org

This mapping effort is a collaboration between The City of Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, the Portland Housing Bureau, Portland State University, and the Vanport Mosaic.

The Vanport Mosaic Festival 2017 is around the corner!
We are so grateful for the excitement and heartwarming interest the event is receiving! Many of you are asking the following question: 

That is a heck of an event! How are you going to make it happen? And how can you offer 4 days of screenings, oral history recordings, theater, exhibit, an educational workshop, a reunion for former Vanport residents, narrated bus tours, self-guided walking tours with a map and an app, a bike tour with theater performances for free or low-cost to the public?

Here is our "secret": Abundance. Abundance of volunteers, abundance of funders, abundance of sponsors, abundance of partners. First and foremost, abundance of passion and idealism. And if this sounds terribly naive… well, it is, but it works! Last year our Inaugural Vanport Mosaic Festival, grounded on this unconventional “business” model, is a testament to the power of grassroot organizing and community engagement.

Watch this short documentary to get a glimpse of it:

On Memorial Day weekend, over 2500 Portlanders of all racial and gender identity, age, and socio-economic backgrounds gathered to explore the history of Vanport, the catalyst of the racial mosaic that now exists in Portland and the region. Sixty-eight years after the flood that destroyed what at its peak was Oregon's second largest city, we showed its former residents, now in their 80s and 90s, that their experience matters to us, and that we are not going to forget it.

This abundance-powered effort received a Spirit of Portland Award, a Columbia Slough Watershed Council Leadership Award, and an Oregon Heritage Excellence Award.

We will be honest. This year it’s been harder… Allowing yourself to be so idealistic and keep your hopes up in these difficult times where everything around us screams fear and scarcity has been a challenge. But now more than ever, we want to believe we can do it again. We can keep using the power of personal stories, arts, and dialogue to envisioning and building the community we wish to become.

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Will you help us do it again? Will you join the growing network of funders, sponsors, donors and partners who are making this year’s festival possible, and help fill the gap we have left? Your tax-deductible contribution will prove, once again, that stories build communities. 

DONATE TO THE VANPORT MOSAIC FESTIVAL 2017

On April 26th a small Vanport Mosaic representation traveled to Newberg to receive an Oregon Heritage Excellence Award for

The Vanport Mosaic Festival 2016, a groundbreaking, grassroots effort that utilized a multi-disciplinary approach through creative partnerships to bring Oregonians together to learn and talk about Vanport’s history.

We are so honored and humbled to see our collective effort acknowledged with such a prestigious and meaningful recognition! And it was truly inspiring to learn about the work that individuals, community groups, and local institutions are doing throughout Oregon to preserve local history.

Truly, this award is to the former Vanport residents and their families, the community groups, churches, teachers, historians, activists, artists, who have been silently preserving small and large pieces of this important history, so that at last, almost 70 years from the flood, we could assemble this rich and complex mosaic.

With gratitude,
The Vanport Mosaic Team

On Tuesday, December 13, 2016, Portland’s City Council will recognize and celebrate the winners of the 32nd Annual Spirit of Portland Awards. Vanport Mosaic is so honored to be included among so many committed individuals and groups “who make outstanding contributions to our community.”

The Vanport Mosaic is a collective of artists, historians, educators, storytellers, activists, and media makers. We joined forces and contributed our individual projects and efforts to re-discover and properly honor an essential and often-forgotten chapter of Oregon’s past. It is one of the many that never made it into textbooks and official records, relegated to the margins of our collective memories. It is yet another causality of the dangerous tides of historical amnesia.

This award means so much to us, and we are grateful to Portland’s City Council, and particularly to Commissioner Nick Fish who chose this project. It is, first and foremost, an official validation that this history does matter.

For our community-driven, artists-led organization fueled by creativity and idealism, this prestigious award is an invitation to keep doing what we are doing. Together with a generous grant from the City Special Appropriation Fund and the support from more partners and funders that I can list here, it makes possible to dream bigger. It galvanizes our commitment to surface the silenced histories that make this place we call home what it is today. We will keep using the power of personal stories, arts, and dialogue, as an invitation to all of you to join us in envisioning and building the community we wish to become. The Vanport Mosaic Festival 2016 was a glimpse of that possibility. Over the course of the four days over 2000 Portlanders of any racial and gender identity, age, and socio-economic background gathered to explore the history of Vanport, the catalyst of the racial mosaic that now exists in Portland and the region.

This short doc produced by Natalie Smith/Blue Chalk captures the spirit of the Festival.

On May 27-30, 2016 we honored the experience of the diverse community that was formed in Vanport, and we shared the personal stories and different perspectives through oral histories screenings, theater and poetry performances, an exhibit, and tours of the historic sites. We invited historians as well as community experts who lived there to help us understand the legacy of what used to be Oregon’s second largest city, and how the past continues to influences city dynamics today.  We captured more memories with those generous enough to share them with us. We hosted a reunion for former Vanport residents, and had the privilege to witness their long-standing connections. Their friendships and ties born in a time of hardship and common hopes are unvaluable lessons in building a strong and resilient community. 

Former Vanport residents reunion at Vancouver Ave First Baptist Church. (Photos by Julie Keefe)

On May 30th, the 68th anniversary of the flood that wiped out their city, in a moving ceremony at City Hall, Portland’s Mayor Charles Hales read our Proclamation and officially declared a Vanport Day of Remembrance.

Representatives of the Vanport Mosaic with Mayor Charles Hales and Portland City Council declaring May 30th a Vanport Day of Remembrance.

The driving force behind this truly grassroots on-going effort is our collective desire to honor our silenced local histories, celebrate resilience, and create opportunities to become the inclusive, diverse, and compassionate community we aspire to be.

In gratitude,
Story Midwife Laura Lo Forti, and the Vanport Mosaic Team

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 Save the date for Vanport Mosaic Festival 2017, May 26-29, 2017!