Portland Enrichment is a group of volunteers whose mission is to create thriving and sustainable communities in the area of Lents. The Portland Enrichment program is currently conducting a listening project and community challenge to gain feedback from residents in the Lents area. With the feedback they receive, Portland Enrichment is able to assess what changes and actions need to be taken in the neighborhood. If residents in the area are looking to take action and help out their community, Portland Enrichment will connect them with the particular organization to get them started.

Portland Enrichment works with a variety of organizations that specialize in food security, energy efficiency, community engagement and other sustainable community solutions. The group of volunteers canvass in the Mt Scott Arleta and Lents neighborhoods in SE Portland and table at the Lents Farmers Market.

This summer is the second go around for Portland Enrichment and the group hopes to build off of last year. Portland Enrichments goals are to knock on 1200 doors and receive as much feedback as possible.

Portland enrichment is broken down in to teams to handle certain aspects of the program. The data management team, led by Leo Qin, recently released the programs mid program report. The analysis gives background about the program and describes the methodology that was used. The survey questions were designed so Portland Enrichment could see how people felt about their neighborhood, what they liked, along with what complaints they had.

So far the volunteers have knocked on 500 doors, collected 100 surveys and 66 people have decided to participate in community challenge actions. After taking the community survey, 2/3 of the people agreed to also take the community challenge. Twenty one percent of people chose to partake in Food Security actions. Portland Enrichment plans to table at community events and hold two mega canvass days to reach this summer’s goals.

Leo was able to analyze the survey questions that the group asked the Lents residents by using graphs and word clouds. The first survey question was “What is your favorite thing about your neighborhood.” As Leo outlines in his word cloud, the words: “community,” diversity,” “parks,” “farmers market” and “neighbors” were many peoples favorite things.

Data shows that on average the residents of Lents rate their neighborhood a “4” on ne a 1 to 5 scale (1 being low and 5 being high). This numbers describes how people generally feel about the community.

Those surveyed also expressed their thoughts on barriers to living in an ideal community, what their ideal community would look like, and their concerns for development. There are three more weeks until the end of the program and the Portland Enrichment team will come out with a final program analysis after its completion. Portland Enrichment’s survey can be taken online at pdxenrichment.com.