Sunday, the Portland Enrichment team went to the Lents Farmer’s Market. Across the street, the Ramona Street Fair was also going on. Some of our partner organizations were on display on Ramona and numerous people were visiting the different tables on the corner of 92^nd and Foster.

At our meeting on Thursday, our group had discussed our approach and strategy for getting people to listen who we are and what we are trying to accomplish in the community. Our group’s idea for the farmers market was to play a quick and simple trivia game with the people that came by our table. We called it “Foster Trivia” (Foster is one of the major streets that runs though Lents.)

Examples of questions we asked people were: How many people live in Lents? Who was Lents named after? How many grocery stores are in Lents, and what year was Lents founded? Some of these questions are hard to get exactly right, but a surprising amount of people knew the answers to our questions spot on. Weather people knew the answers to the questions or not, they were happy to take a free lollipop off of our table… everyone likes lollipops.

Nearly everyone at the Market lives right in the Lents area, and most people that talked with us wanted to take our survey after learning a new fact about the town they lived in. I was able to learn a lot of facts about Lents on Sunday and heard some exciting stories as well.

Leo Qin, and the data management team, presented the mid-season report on the feedback Portland Enrichment has accumulated thus far. His report first describes our program and what we do and then he described our team’s methodology for collecting our neighborhood feedback. The three methods we collected data through were in person canvassing, tabling at the Lents International Farmers Market, and through online submission.

The data management team analyzed what people said in the community survey questions. Questions we asked were broken down into eight categories: favorite things, overall experience, relative importance of livability, highest visions, areas for growth, concerns about development, and barriers to health. For each category, a word cloud was created which showed the most commonly used words from people for that particular question. For the “favorite things” category some most commonly said words were: community, diversity, affordable, proximity, parks, Farmers Market and quiet.

There are also graphs to show what community actions people chose to take so far. All of the community actions were well represented and fairly popular. The eight community action categories were: Local Community Energy, Food Security, Resource Sharing, Watershed and Habitat, Community Engagement, Community Investments, Community Spaces, and Diversity and Healthcare. The Food Security action was the most popular action chosen by residents, accumulating for 21 percent. To view our mid season report visit pdxenrichment.org.