Tryon Life Community Farm

TLC Farm exists because of the commitment and energy of Portland's broad network of organizations, movements, and citizens committed to a transformation of our urban ecology. It is already living proof of the potential we hold when we work together. Now, we have an opportunity to actualize that potential, to use this place and project as a catalyst for the emergence of deeper and more collaborative relations among varied communities with a common goal for sustainable urban density to become more than a slogan: a living ecosystem of change.

In our six-month strategic planning process – of which we near the mid-point – we have repeatedly used the symbol of a forest. Forests are chaotic, decentralized, unplanned – and yet also deeply peaceful, efficient, and resilient; the complex interweaving of mutually interdependant relations makes them beautiful. Unlike monoculture crops, forests require little or no energetic inputs other than the sun's light, and produce no waste products other than air and water. And especially during the mid-successional phase characterizing moments of change, they are among the most bio-productive ecosystems on the planet.

Portland once was a forest, and in more ways than one, it can be so again.

On the one hand, this means developing experience laying the groundwork for urban ecosystems that support habitat for all our relations: native species, food and fiber sources, ourselves. It means learning how to invite the wild back into our neighborhoods, our daily lives, our self-identity. It means inhabiting a living forest of trees and shrubs and roots, of birds and voles and salamanders – at urban densities.

But it also describes a network of social relationships, a way of understanding the economy of our movement as complex and interwoven, yet evolving agilely and coherently. This is the grassroots momentum that saved this land when it seemed impossible. And it is this work that we are continuing with our strategic planning process: non-linear, iterative, and as broadly-based as possible, designed to invite and support cooperation in imagining and accomplishing the [im]possible.