Lewis & Clark to use $1.5M grant to kickstart education partnership with Albina Vision Trust

The concept is simple: people from North Portland’s Albina community investigating and learning more about the history of the area in tandem with local college students.

Albina is Portland’s historically Black neighborhood. People there faced decades of discriminatory practices under the guise of urban renewal, including the development of Interstate 5, the Memorial Coliseum and Emanuel Hospital. Those projects displaced thousands of people from their homes, according to the city.

Looking forward, Winta Johannes, the executive director of Albina Vision Trust, envisions a diverse classroom. She can see Albina residents of all ages taking part, grandparents learning with their grandchildren and neighbors being educated alongside university students.

“The real opportunity is that the history, the storytelling, and the culture of the Albina district will be used to make sense of where we are today and where we want to go together,” Johannes said.

Now that idea is a step closer to becoming a reality.

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A new $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation will help kickstart the educational arm of a partnership between the Portland nonprofit and Lewis & Clark College. The money will go toward a new series of humanities-based undergraduate courses that will be cooperatively developed by both institutions.

And if it’s carried out in just the right way, organizers behind the project believe it will not only be a learning opportunity, but also the beginning of a transformational moment for the Albina community, Lewis & Clark students and the city of Portland as a whole.

“One of the most courageous things that anyone can do is commit to learning with other people, because it requires building trust,” Johannes said about the fledgling initiative.

“It requires taking a step forward without knowing what you will actually learn on the other end of it.”

The partnership with Lewis & Clark, announced a year ago, is just one of the many paths Albina Vision Trust is taking to redevelop the neighborhood. Johannes said continuing education is a key part of the nonprofit’s plan to revitalize Albina’s Black community.

“One of the most consistent streams of feedback we heard was that people wanted Albina to be a place where learning spilled out beyond the bounds of classroom walls,” she said. “The spirit of that feedback led us to this partnership with Lewis & Clark.”

The groups are at the beginning stages of developing the curriculum. But they are certain the courses will be rooted in the community and based in the humanities. They anticipate exploring a range of topics, encompassing history, philosophy, literature or performing arts, among others.

Lewis & Clark professor Reiko Hillyer is planning to offer what she calls a “face-to-face” history class next spring, in which half the class will be made up of undergraduate students and the other half would be from the Albina community.

“We’re hoping that by bringing different forms of community knowledge together, we can enliven the humanities and demonstrate its relevance and applicability in solving real world problems,” said Hillyer. “We’re hoping to do that in a collaborative way, with folks in the community who have a lot to teach us.”

Related: Portland to pay $8.5M settlement to descendants of displaced Black families

The classes will be free to people in the Albina neighborhood and eligible for college credit.

Lewis & Clark also plans to use the grant money to seed a project called the York Summer Institute. That initiative, named after the enslaved Black explorer on the Lewis and Clark expedition, will delve into Portland’s Indigenous history and the impacts of colonialism in Oregon.

“It’s an effort to really situate ourselves in place to study — not only the history of the college and the land that it’s on — but the history of the expedition and the legacy of settler colonialism,” said Hillyer. “That can be tracked all the way to other forms of displacement, including urban renewal in Albina.”

A full launch of the new curriculum is still a few years out. Hillyer estimates that the summer institute may not be ready for students until 2028, for example.

But both institutions see this work as a starting point for a relationship that will help rebuild and support the Albina community for years to come.

“Everyone in the room is a teacher and everyone in the room is a student, that’s just the starting premise,” Hillyer said. “We’re going to make the road by walking.”