Trustees make PORTLAND EVEN MORE awesome

What’s a trustee? We’re glad you asked! Becoming a trustee is a low time-commitment, non-bureaucratic, easy way to make a big difference. You get to decide where 100% of your funds go. Your contribution directly supports grass-roots projects that otherwise have trouble finding funds.

Contribution: Commit $100 every other month in the interest of awesome.

Participation: Help us review applications and decide who gets our $1,000 and attend a total of three meetings every other month. These are the basics—but if you want to do a little more, you can volunteer to help with the small amount of administrative and program growth work that we do. Due to COVID concerns, we’ve been meeting virtually since March 2020, you don’t even have to take off your pajamas.

WHAT’S THE TIME COMMITMENT

While we’d love to see you and prefer you attend every meeting, we do not require that trustees participate in all 6 funding cycles in a year. If you want to talk about how you would be comfortable participating, we definitely want to hear from you! Help us pick finalists, hear their presentations, and vote on the winner.

Each cycle we have three meetings:

  1. In a non-grant month, we hold a general business meeting.

  2. In a grant month, we hold a meeting to decide which applicants will be the 5 finalists who present their ideas.

  3. That same month, we hold a meeting where the finalists give their 3-minute presentations and answer our questions. We then go into a separate space and deliberate. The project with the most votes is the winner!

WHO GETS OUR GRANTS?

We prefer to fund projects that will make a difference, that demonstrate a clear ability to deliver, and where our $1,000 make a big difference. We prefer applicants who are not able to acquire funds through more traditional funding streams because they are individuals or groups without non-profit status, completely new ideas that do not necessarily fit within other grant opportunities, and that are based on equity and inclusion.

YOU WANT TO DO IT? GREAT! WHAT’S NEXT

Sound like fun? Tell us a little about yourself...

A trustee will email or call you to give you background on our group. This includes how and why we exist, what projects we’re excited about, our goal of bringing back live grant parties, and a more detailed view of our process. We’d love to answer your questions, too!