Event Rentals
TLC Farm is a place to connect. As a forum for community sustainability, opportunities are endless!
A meeting, retreat, celebration, private class, spiritual event or other gathering at TLC Farm is something special. Here, the life of nature is woven into human experience: this place merges indoor and outdoor, living and artificial, wild and domestic. This program supports our work in bringing various communities and organizations into deeper relation with this beautiful place of the earth, and through it, each other
You are welcome to hold your own event at TLC Farm; by bringing your own group here you contribute to the fabric of the farm—sustainability to us is linking the many networks and threads of our social, ecological, political, economic and cultural ecology. Each group brings its own story, sometimes transforming a piece of TLC Farm, sometimes leaving information, sometimes getting others involved.
We are particularly interested in hosting multiple groups at the same time that can informally interact with each other, or gatherings that are focused on bringing different constituencies into closer and more meaningful interconnection. Let us know your ideas and needs
Contact the Events Working Group at events@tryonfarm.org to book your reservation.
Click here for testimonials from folks who have hosted events.
Money
We are committed to welcoming groups to this land. This is especially true of those aligned with our mission to support ecological & social justice movements, and structurally marginalized communities.
Space
Village Green: On the north end of the land is our lovely Village Green. This sloped, grassy area is surrounded by the sauna, fire circle, composting toilets, Yurt, T-Whale, Outdoor Kitchen and stage. It's a great spot for picnics and game
Yurt: A 30' diameter year-round insulated event space, with electricity and radiant heat, a mandala-floor, and earthy energy
Cob Cave: A beautiful, handmade earthen cave room, this lovely space fits 15-25 people in a cozy space without lots of light, great for healing practices or meditation gatherings. It naturally stays wonderfully cool in the summer and warm in the winter
Outdoor Kitchen: Facilities include a wood-fired, super-efficient "rocket stove"; a four-burner propane stove; running hot water and sink; various counters; and electricity. There is also a heated earthen bench and picnic tables. We have a stack of washable plates and cups available. Wood must be provided by event host, or otherwise arranged.
T-Whale: This whimsical teahouse was originally built for the Earth Day Celebration at Sunnyside Elementary School, and was soon thereafter adopted by TLC Farm. Made into the shape of a whale, the body provides an organic space for 10 people to sit and the tail is a fun spiral tower, great for kids! Between the body and tail is a small tea serving area.
Stage: Our 144 sq. ft. carpeted and covered stage is the perfect place for bands, theater, or just a nice flat spot to sit!
Perch: The back porch of the yurt is a multi-level wooden deck shaped in a spiral with a heart at the center. It overlooks the garden and is a lovely private-feeling spot.
Maple Grove: Eight big leaf maple trees in a circle form this sacred space, and a wonderful spot for intentional conversations, meetings or ceremony. Bring special items for the two alter areas.
Lower garden areas/edge of forest: The eastern edge of the land is the wild boundary between farm and forest, and contains many niches for gathering.
Forest: TLC Farm is surrounded by Tryon Creek State Park, with 700-acres of secondary forest and miles of trails. TLC Farm's trails connected directly into the Park.
The residences and other structures on the land are not available for use (they are part of Cedar Moon, the intentional community at TLC Farm). Composting toilets are available in the Village Green
Services
Services are offered by our talented community members based on availability, and therefore may not be available at all times. We pay our service providers a living wage stipend of $15/hour, and ask that you cover this cost.
Catered Food: We have a variety of on-call cooks who can create fabulous menus for your group. We specialize in vegetarian, vegan, raw, or local/in season meals. And/or, we can arrange to have your event catered by local restaurants in our community.
Childcare: We have a group of on-call childcare hosts and lots of fun places for children of all ages to play! We even have a pack of small children (under ten years old) living at the Farm who are often welcoming hosts for other kids.
Meeting facilitation: Our facilitators specialize in consensus-based processes and can facilitate groups of all sizes.
Publicity: If appropriate, you are welcome to post your event on our Facebook page or emai. (free)
Farm Tour: Guided tours are a great way to learn about TLC Farm's sustainability demonstrations, inspiring history, and ongoing community success stories. Tours can be from a half hour to two hours in length; recommended time is one hour. (free).
Workparty facilitation: If your group wants to get down and dirty, we can facilitate workparties in the garden, native habitat restoration or a building project.
Educational Programs: TLC Farm offers a variety of educational opportunities -- please see our website for details.
Farm Host and CoCreated Agreement
Your link to TLC Farm is the Farm Host, and is coordinated through the Forum Working Group. You and the Farm Host will work out all necessary details for your gathering. If your event is ongoing, than your host might only need to be there just the first few times, or until you “learn the ropes”. Alternatively, we can train you to be your own Farm Host.
The CoCreated Agreement is a written document that outlines the details of the event, our agreed upon exchange, and TLC Farm’s guidelines. We will ask you to sign this (we will too)
Parking and Transportation
Parking provides us with our biggest opportunity for creative fossil fuel independence. We encourage people to get to TLC Farm via bikes, public transit, hikes through the park or carpooling. As an incentive, we will reduce the per hour rate of using the farm by $5/hour if you use zero or one parking spot! Directions for bus, biking, hiking and driving are on our website.
Bike: Definitely the most fun way to get to TLC Farm, biking takes about 45-55 minutes from downtown and only 30-40 minutes back!
Hike: During the day, you can park at Tryon Creek State Park Visitor’s Center on Terwilliger Blvd. and hike 15-minutes across to TLC Farm. Beautiful!
Bus: The #38 bus has a stop at our doorstep, but only runs M-F during rush hours. The #12 bus runs up Barbur Blvd, within two miles of TLC Farm. And the #39 runs from the #12 to Lewis and Clark College, a 25-minute hike through the woods from the farm.
Cars: We have four parking spots for visitors, and if your gathering will require more parking areas then we suggest carpooling or shuttling. Want to know our secrets for these successful car dances? Read on:
Carpools: Arrange to have your group meet at someone’s house or the Barbur Transit Center (two miles away) or New Seasons (3/4 mile away) and then share cars. It’s fun to carpool!
No parking in our neighborhood or in the State Park parking lot. We are very respectful of our impact in the surrounding area and ask that you be as well. As an event host, we will expect you to ensure that your event participants respect this request.
Guidelines
Animals: Friendly dogs are allowed but must be kept on leash at all times (we often have children, chickens or goats browsing the land).
Cleanup: All cleanup from should be done immediately following the event. The Outdoor Kitchen sink may be used to wash dishes. Recycling and compost containers will be provided by TLC Farm; please plan to carry out your trash.
Noise: Part of TLC Farm’s work is to be a good neighbor, and as such, we do not allow extended drumming or amplified music without prior consent of our closest neighbors. Quiet hours begin at 10pm
Smoking: There are two places to smoke cigarettes at TLC Farm: at the top of the driveway and at the bottom of the driveway, in the parking lots.
Alcohol: If kept to a central area, alcohol can be consumed in a respectful manner (and of course, for over 21 only). Alcohol cannot be sold without an OLCC permit.
Land Projects
At TLC Farm, Portland's sustainability movements are creating one example of how urban density human habitat can coexist with thriving food systems and native ecologies. Our demonstration projects, all of which are workshopped and volunteer-run, illustrate how specific technologies and practices work, and how they can interconnect.
You're welcome to come and walk through the land, learning from the signs along the self-guided tour. But the best way to get involved and learn about what it's like to build a new world, is to help create it alongside the rest of us!
The areas we're focused on are:
- Gardening
- Primarily focused on food production using standard organic and permaculture techniques: sheet mulching for weed control, interplanting, insectivories, etc. Primarily annuals and small perennials. Coordinated through the Garden working group, which has regular meetings.
- Food Forests
- Planning and implementing multi-story food forests both within existing native forest and orchard areas, and from scratch. In the medium-term we intend to establish a Food Forest Research Center in collaboration with local permaculturists, educational institutions, and urban policy planners. The purpose will be to develop experimental trials of various micro-habitat configurations and assess human food productivity, native habitat suitability, and human habitat usability. The goal will be to identify combinations that can be used on both public and private land to create corridors of stacked habitat and function.
- Building
- Working with volunteer professional architects, designers, and builders, TLC Farm pushes the envelope for regenerative design in Portland: built environments that are fully integrated into energy, water, food ("waste"), and habitat cycles with the rest of the local ecology. This includes a wide variety of demonstration natural building techniques (strawbale infill, cob, light straw/clay, earthen plaster, earthen paint, poured earth, earthbag, etc.). Saturday work parties frequently include a building element.
The easiest way to get connected is to come out to a workparty.
Or contact us: farm@tryonfarm.org
Together, we're building a better world!
Workshops and Workparties
TLC Farm is an amazing place to learn ideas and practices for growing sustainable culture.
Check out this page for the current schedule of events.
Past workshop topics have included:
- Earthen plasters
- Wild fermented foods
- Medicinal plant identification
- Basic Gardening
- Permaculture Design
- Carpentry for women
- Primitive Skills
- Cheesemaking
- Chickens!
- Needle Felting
- Bird language and tracking
- Earth Activist Training (a permaculture design course)
- Plant wisdom and earth songs
- Food forest design
- Indigenous lifeways
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and many more!
Most workshops ask for a donation on a sliding scale or offer work-trade, to assist in paying for the presenter, facilities, and materials. Want to present a workshop? email work...@tryonfarm.org or call our office at 503-245-3847.
Class trips
Details about how and why and what our amazing class trips for kids K to college are all about!
Our Niche
TLC Farm facilitates a diversity of movements, communitiues and individuals in the metropolitan Portland region to: educate ourselves and each other regarding skills, values, and paradigms for holistic human integration into our ecosystems; experience a sustainable urban ecology as possible, practical, and desirable; and emerge as empowered co-creators of a well-functioning network of cultures, economies, and polities of deep change. Program Goals: Within 15 years, we will accomplish these purposes by coordinating programs and projects in the following areas: Education: Provide learning opportunities for replicable skills in permaculture, natural building, community collaboration, earth arts, sustainability life skills, wilderness awareness, etc. 4500 participant-hours/mo, grossing $9300/mo, with 5-10 intimate partnerships, and coordinating 60 consistent volunteers Forum: Host events, meetings, retreats, and performances so that aligned organizations can gather in a restorative space supporting transformative values. 1920 visit-hours/month, grossing $2680/mo, 10 intimate partnerships and 40 volunteers. Demonstration & ecological design: Visitors of all ages experience a set of functioning systems that illustrate integration between human and non-human habitats, including food production, dense residential communities, water management, energy cycles, construction, native habitat, transportation, etc. 50 full-time residents, 50% food production for 50, no personal vehicular use, energy independence, infrastructure visited by all other users, grossing $10,000/mo, 5 intimate partnerships, 40 volunteers. Healing & Spirituality: Create healing resources integrating various modalities, accessible regardless of income, by which body and soul can relax into a wiser appreciation of the many relations that make the world. These include ecotherapy, body and energy work, food celebrations, spiritual practice, cottage agroindustries, etc. 600 person-hours/mo, gross $9000/mo, 15 intimate partnerships, 30 volunteers. Social Ecology: Support the network of relationships within and between working groups, intentional community, partner organizations, neighborhoods, etc. Provide an experimental testbed for empowering transformations of personal, social, economic, legal, and other interactions. 200 person-hours/mo of support, gross $2000/mo, 5 intimate partnerships, 20 volunteers. Research and Assessment: systematic protocols for data gathering, analysis, documentation, and dissemination regarding progress towards sustainability goals regarding all projects above, as well as skills acquisition, value shift, psychosocial wellbeing, etc. 5 peer-reviewed articles per year, 5 informational pamphlets per year, acquired by 200 people per month, $1000 per month gross, 5 intimate partnerships, 20 volunteers.
Urban Ecology
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.
Mission
TLC Farm brings people together to root into relationships with each other and the land, by sharing tools for community-based sustainability and social change, and tending resilient ecosystems.
TLC Farm is a unique community-created venue for public and private events -- great for workshops, retreats, weddings, birthdays, meetings, parties and more.
We also teach workshops and lead educational field trips, and host regular workparties and community events.
Our Willow Creek Forest School is an outdoor, place-based farm and forest kindergarten for children ages 3-5, from September to June.
TLC Farm programs and land tending is completely community created and run by volunteers and donations. Thank you for your participation!
Economy
TLC Farm as a non-profit organization has accomplished a great deal with very little operating income. At the same time, we have raised a very large amount of money in order to protect the land we occupy from development (see our history). An important part of our "open source" approach to this project is making the accounting for our operations as accessible as possible.
See below for IRS 990 returns for 2006 - 2022.
History
Once upon a time, the land of TLC Farm was slated to become a housing development. The journey to protect the land and transform it into a public resource has inspired many, and we invite you to read about the campaign to "Save the Farm" is this Farm Story written in 2007 by our writing intern, Emily Aronowitz, from Green Mountain College in Vermont.
If you want to get more into the nitty-gritty of how we accomplished the task of saving the land, here is a technical overview of the land acquisition. Enjoy!
Do you want to see how the land has changed and been used over the past many years, please view the 10 years of photos.
Click the photo to go to our Flickr page for the TLC Farm Story photo album!
Partners
An overview of some partners with our organization, and how we work with them.
- Cedar Moon
- An ntentional community that co-manages the land with TLC Farm. Currently has about 12 adult and 4 children members.
- Sacred Lands Alliance
- A residential collective that co-manages the land with TLC Farm. Currently has about 5 adult and 1 teen members.
- OSALT
- The land trust that leases the land under a 99-year ground lease that requires the land to be used sustainably and educationally.
Feedback and participation welcome! Please send bug reports to web@tryonfarm.org
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