Tryon Life Community Farm

Strategic planning for urban transformation:

Tryon Life Community Farm as testbed and demonstration

What can sustainable urban density look like in Portland?

• How can we maximize the carrying capacity of dense human habitation and minimize unbalanced flows of resources, energy, and waste?

• How can we efficiently overlap and beautifully intermingle residences, agriculture, native habitat, education, arts, community-building, sustainable economies, and spiritual relation with the earth?

• How can we grow relations of respect, understanding, and collaboration, even across important differences of perspective and value?

TLC Farm is an opportunity for our communities to combine many innovative social, physical, and ecological processes for transforming lifeworlds into a holistic, accessible, and practical experience of a possible future.

TLC Farm's strategic planning process is intended to accomplish two main tasks. We:

• draw on our wealth of allies and partners -- organizations, experts, and stakeholders -- to develop a comprehensive plan outlining a physical, programmatic, and organizational strategy by which to accomplish shared vision; and

• build experience with and relationships for practical cooperation among Portland communities and movements as we move beyond single-issue silos and emerge into the living fabric of another (possible) world.

We want you to join us with your wisdom, your experience, and most of all your passion! Our staged planning process offers a variety of forms of engagement for those with differing amounts of time available: we'll work creatively to get you involved.

Our first strategic plan was developed in January, 2005. After the land we occupy was protected in January 2006, we initiated a broad-based six-month process to develop a more specific plan in collaboration with many stakeholders throughout the region's sustainability movements. Currently (2007), we are refining the documents developed through that process to apply for a full Conditional Use Master Plan with the city. Please see attached files below.

If not now, when? If not here, where?

Schedule for 2006 planning: Summer solstice (June 17, 2006) to winter solstice.

Process: Seven strongly-facilitated large monthly meetings will focus on generating creative ideas, collaboratively assessing them in the context of goals and values, and developing understanding and connection between different approaches and attitudes. Between large meetings, smaller working groups will transform the various ideas into substantive plans, for iterative review and improvement.