Building Community, One Mural at a Time

The Oregonian
Friday, May 18, 2007
Edition: Sunrise, Section: Local News, Page B03

(SUMMARY: Urban makeover | The Village Building Convergence gets neighbors together)

Today is the official start of the seventh annual Village Building Convergence.

Sing “Happy Birthday” if you want. Stand up and applaud if it makes you feel better. But know that thousands of volunteers are already knee-deep into 25 environmentally friendly community building projects in the Portland area.

Construction doesn’t officially start till Saturday. But for months, volunteers have planned and designed murals, intersection paintings, repair projects and, yes, a puppet theater in an old garage. They get to know one another through this process and then enjoy the fruits of their labor for years.

Take the huge, multicolored sunflower painted at Southeast 33rd Avenue and Yamhill Street in the Sunnyside neighborhood. Amber Ferris met neighbors there a few years ago at the annual painting party, ate with them the same day at the block party and then watched a movie with them last summer on a sheet hung in the middle of the street.

“I love it,” she said Thursday, two days before the intersection will be repainted. “It’s part of the reason we chose this neighborhood.”

This is the kind of stuff that Mark Lakeman envisioned 10 years ago when he helped create the City Repair Project, a nonprofit that sponsors the Village Building Convergence. The whole idea, he said, is to retrofit the city so it’s easier for people to get together and feel like part of their own communities.

It’s a Portland idea, no doubt about it. But it’s spread to about a dozen other cities, Lakeman said. And real progress has been made locally, from the cob pavilion at the Portland Hawthorne Hostel to the Village Green at the Tryon Life Community Farm.

The annual budget for the City Repair Project is nearly $200,000. But thousands turn out each year to build up their neighborhoods and then hang out at the temporary Village Building Convergence headquarters on East Burnside Street.

The volunteer vibe is part of what attracted Yveline Wilnau to the City Repair Project.

She remembers one night last year at the giant warehouse on East Burnside. She saw a group of volunteers building the main stage at the little village that serves as the cafeteria and concert hall during the event each year.

“I was just, like, totally in awe,” Wilnau said. “They’d probably all been working during the day, and then they came here at night. And people just kept coming.”

This year, the Village Building Convergence will stretch into Clackamas County, with the addition of a landscaped gathering area, a mural and a cob structure at a drug and alcohol treatment facility in West Linn.

The Runaway Circus Puppet Theatre will be built in a rehabbed garage at Southeast 37th Avenue and Washington Street.

Lakeman is happy to see these projects blossom here and elsewhere. He’s also happy with the progress he’s seen the past 10 years. Sort of.

“I was hoping we would have saved the world five years ago,” he said.

He was joking. We think.