Mission
Portland Food Forest Initiative is a 501c3 non-profit committed to:
The transformation of private and public lawns into food forests that feed all community members, especially those experiencing food insecurity
Bringing awareness to, popularizing, and normalizing food forests as urban and suburban landscaping
Creation of diverse regenerative urban ecosystems creating habitat for all creatures
Facilitating access to land for marginalized community members for the purpose learning skills of regenerative urban agriculture and agroforestry
Public advocacy for productive urban greenspaces
Community engagement in areas of food security and sovereignty
Public education in ecosystem literacy, regenerative agriculture, and skills needed to restore urban degraded lands to abundance
What we do
We work with homeowners who have large grass lawns and, with their funding, convert their lawns into food forests which are stewarded for 5-year-minimum periods by volunteer stewards who are not land owners themselves. The homeowners and the volunteer stewards split whatever harvest they can eat and the excess is donated to mutual aid food distribution groups. Stewards gain valuable hands-on training and skills in regenerative urban agriculture and agroforestry.
We work with other non-profits and cities to design and establish food forests directly accessible to underserved communities, training community members in the care and stewardship of the food forests.
We teach food forest and urban regenerative agriculture classes with the intention of inspiring community members to take active step in converting their grass spaces into perennial abundant ecosystems, feeding their communities and creating habitat.
We give free educational tours of our demonstration sites.
We propagate fruit and nut-bearing trees and shrubs for planting in our food forests and elsewhere in Portland.