It is a critical time to donate to Rewild Portland and help us build the skills of resilience.

-Peter Michael Bauer

Our Two Goals

100 New Monthly Donors
5%

Monthly donations are the most effective way for us to predict our finances. You can donate any amount a month, and it will automatically be deducted from your credit or debit card.

$10,000
9%

We’re also raising $10,000 in individual donations by December 31st. Not everyone can or wants to become a monthly donor. You can still help us with a lump sum donation, that will give us a leg up on our expenses.



Why donate to Rewild Portland?

At Rewild Portland, Rewilding means remembering the human place is in the natural world. What do we, as human beings, need? To nourish our bodies? To calm our minds? How do we connect to each other and to the environment? How do we connect to ourselves? How do we give back to our ecologies to build more biodiversity and resilience?

Many of us feel isolated and cut off from the natural world and the human communities around us. This isolation is harming our mental and physical health. As a species we are facing a host of challenges – from pandemic, to climate change, to rampant injustice and economic uncertainties – we have seen the failure of our modern cultural systems.

Rewilding is rooted in social and environmental justice, and at its core it is about community building and community health and resilience, so that we may face these challenges and move toward something better. Rewild Portland’s mission is to foster cultural and environmental resilience through place-based arts, traditions, and technologies. This mission comes to life through three areas of focus: education, community, and restoration. 

We create unique and engaging spaces for knowledge and skills-  learning about our ecosystems and how to be in relation with nature – Observing. Foraging. Crafting.  Eating. Discussing. Connecting. Using a blend of anthropology and ecology, we weave a story of humanity that harmoniously connects people to each other and to our place. We provide spaces where people can take action to make this vision a reality, both as individuals and as members of the larger community.

All of our programs have the goal of building community with a shared vision and purpose. We teach skills like conflict resolution, transformative justice, mentoring, and how to care and provide for one another through mutual aid. To create resilience, we must also work to restore the damaged landscapes that feed and shelter us. This means getting our hands dirty doing restoration work: removing and finding alternative uses for invasive species, planting back native plants, and encouraging people to grow roots into their place.

These three elements—education, community, and restoration—form the core of our organization. We dwell at the intersection of environmental education and restoration, arts and crafts, and personal and community health. Access for all is foundational to our vision, and for the last 13 years we have been providing a variety of community programming at no cost. In order to keep this vision alive, we rely on individual donations. 

Each year we raise funds for our community based programs, and this year our goal is to raise $25,000 from individual donations. These funds allow us to pay a program coordinator, rent a community space and classroom, and purchase supplies for programs.

For the last fourteen years at our monthly Free Skills Series, we have taught such things as wild edible plants, ancestral technologies, and social technologies. Beyond just teaching skills, this program connects people with shared interests and creates a social network of shared values that can exist beyond the event. 

We offer a free monthly Spoon Club, where participants share their knowledge and skill of green woodworking. This involves learning safe techniques for knife and hatchet work, the qualities of different woods, and how to carve things like spoons, bowls, and more.

Our Philosopher’s Fire is a monthly community conversation focused on different rewilding-related topics. Each event centers around a question such as: How do we care for our elders? How do we forage ethically? How can we tend our human relationships?

Our Community Nursery offers the opportunity for volunteers to learn more about gardening with natives, perennials, medicinal, and fiber and dye plants and to take home plants of their own. We also host a Share the Harvest Festival each fall, as a way to celebrate and share the abundance of the season with the community.

The Social Forestry Club connects land owners in our community with people who do not have access to land, and provides the opportunity to connect with a place and each other through a combination of recreation, volunteer work, and community building. Where our Community Nursery teaches more small-scale gardening and individual plant uses, Social Forestry Club teaches larger-scale land tending. Participants get to forage for wild foods, learn forestry skills, and connect with green spaces outside urban zones. 

The Rewild Library is a collection of more than 500 books that range from simple regional field guides, to how-to books on topics like bushcraft, to rare academic texts on anthropology, archaeology, and indigenous studies. We hold “Read-Ins,” where community members are encouraged to come and read from the library, then discuss what they learned in the books they chose—another opportunity for dialogue and discussion around a vision of a regenerative future. 

Each month we host a Community Hike, where we lead a group hike in the wild places that surround Portland. These are community-building events and a chance for people to share their collective knowledge of nature.

These programs take a lot of time and energy to organize and maintain. While they are free to the community, there is a cost. The time and energy it takes to organize, teach, facilitate and administer the nonprofit requires a full time paid position, office rental, equipment and supplies, and more. The majority of funding for our community-based programs comes from many small donations from individuals–people who feel the value of the work we are doing want to help us make an impact. With our goals of 100 new monthly donors and $10,000 we will be able to enter 2025 with a solid foundation to keep our programs running.

Please donate to our campaign and help us to Rewild Portland.