Mission
Food security and dignity, grown by neighbors
A community organization, not a charity. We do the work because we are the people the work serves.
How we started
In 2014 a vacant half-block at SE 35th and Division — a former Safeway parking lot — became available for a five-year community-use lease. Three neighbors (one a retired school teacher, one a line cook at a nearby restaurant, one a registered nurse who had worked on the food-bank side of homelessness for a decade) wrote the proposal. We laid out forty-eight raised beds and ran the first season as an unincorporated neighborhood project. Forty-two families signed up for plots. Twelve hundred pounds of produce came off the garden that first summer; about a third went to the pantry our partners at Saint James were running across the street.
We filed for 501(c)(3) status in 2015 when the pantry partner closed and the work consolidated under one roof. The five-year lease became a fifteen-year lease in 2018, with an option to buy at fair market value at term. The garden doubled to ninety-six beds in 2019 with help from a regional foundation grant. The pantry moved from twice-monthly to twice-weekly in 2020 for obvious reasons; we have not gone back.
Our theory of change
Food insecurity is downstream of three other things: an income gap that does not close, a transportation gap that prevents people from reaching the cheaper food across town, and a knowledge gap about cooking from raw ingredients that does not get filled in two-generation families that never learned. We cannot close the income gap; we can shrink the other two by putting fresh food and the people who know how to cook it on the same square block.
Dignity is the other half. A pantry that requires income verification, household-size counting, and a queue around the block tells the people it serves that they are need-statistics first and neighbors second. We do not do those things, and we will not. The pantry is open to anyone who walks up; there is no proof-of-need step, no asking what your story is. The work is to be a neighbor.
Who we serve
The southeast Portland neighborhoods on the Bear Creek watershed side of the river — Richmond, Sunnyside, Hosford-Abernethy, Brooklyn, and the eastern edge of Buckman. Roughly 32,000 residents within walking distance of the garden. About 18% of households in the service area are food-insecure on any given week, according to the most recent regional food-bank survey; that fraction has been climbing since 2022.
Staff & board
Esther Torres
Executive Director · Co-founder
One of the three original neighbors who wrote the 2014 proposal. Retired RN; spent the last decade of her clinical career on the food-bank side of homelessness for a regional health system. Lives four blocks from the garden, walks to work, and could tell you which plot is which from sixty feet away.
Board of directors (5): Esther Torres (chair, ex officio), Aliyah Whitfield (treasurer; community banking), Owen Park (secretary; line cook turned culinary instructor), Marisol Vela (legal; community-law clinic), and Daniel Akamine (former plot-holder; school principal). Three of five board members live within a half-mile of the garden.
Staff is Esther (1.0 FTE), one part-time program manager (0.6 FTE), and one part-time volunteer coordinator (0.4 FTE). Everyone else is a volunteer.