Category Archives: Events

By Riley O’Boyle – CNA Media Team

Erinne Goodell and Kirk Paulsen enjoy a variety of bike rides during every June’s Pedalpalooza. This year they’ll lead one of northeast Portland’s alleys, including some in Concordia. Photo by Chris Baker

Riding bare as you dare in a sea of other naked bike riders happens once every June during Pedalpalooza. The World Naked Bike Ride highlights the importance and vulnerability of people on bikes in the U.S. oil-centric culture.

The June 24 event – which begins this year at Fernhill Park –is also the biggest event of more than 230 free organized bike rides held during Portland’s month-long Pedalpalooza, an annual family-friendly celebration of bicycle delight.

In fact, the Concordia neighborhood is featured in a June 18 ride led by neighborhood residents Kirk Paulsen and Erinne Goodell, exploring the back alleys of northeast Portland.

“Something important to know going into Pedalpalooza, is that you’ll likely rest as much as you ride.” Kirk explained. “Many rides operate on ‘bike time,’ where the rides don’t usually start until 15 minutes or more after the scheduled time of departure.”

“Of course there are rides led by local bike shops and organizations that operate strictly on schedule,” Erinne added. “But generally, there’s as much socializing as bicycling to be found.”

Like the rides planned by Erinne and Kirk, all of Pedalpalooza’s themed rides are organized by individuals throughout the Portland and Vancouver metro areas. Find the schedule on Pedalpalooza.org.

There are fast rides and slow rides, costumed rides, and rides that involve plenty of noise and bright lights. Some show off specialized bikes, like folding or cargo bikes, and others dare people to get lost in the city at midnight.

Some teach how to maintain bikes, or to advocate for safer streets. BikeLoudPDX, a local grassroots advocacy group, leads advocacy and protest rides, like demonstrating against widening I-5 near the Rose Quarter.

Pedalpalooza started in 2003 as an offshoot of Bike Summer, during which Portland adopted its own version of the World Naked Bike Ride. Both were organized, international events similar to Critical Mass, in which people on bikes rode together through city streets to bring attention to the need for safe bicycle lanes and parking, and to celebrate the joy of biking.

Pedalpalooza is now facilitated by shift, a grassroots, volunteer-led, bikefun community formed during Bike Summer. Members strive to demonstrate the value of bicycling through activities that are fun, free, inclusive and, in this case, great for kicking off summer.

Riley, certified EIT, works in land development and site engineering, and can be reached at RSOboyle13@gmail.com

HIV Day Care Center volunteer George (left) and social work intern Tate review orders while preparing breakfast for clients. The center is one of two agencies in the Portland area – and one of 60 on the continent – to receive funding from Dining Out for Life on Thursday, April 27. Photo by Marcus Murray

Dining Out for Life (in Concordia)

Thursday, April 27

Dine out at one of seven Concordia restaurants Thursday, April 27, and you can make a difference in the lives of people with HIV and AIDS.

The businesses are among 35 restaurants in Portland and 3,000 across North America donating a portion of their April 27 proceeds to Dining Out for Life. That nonprofit organization distributes the funds to 60 outstanding HIV/AIDS service organizations, including two in Portland.

One is Concordia’s own HIV Day Center and the other is Partnership Project.

The seven closest restaurants are:

• Bison Coffeehouse
• Extracto Coffeehouse
• Extracto Roastery & Coffeehouse
• McMenamins Kennedy School Courtyard Restaurant
• P & Q’s Market
• Peter’s Bar & Grill
• Red Sauce Pizza

Portland is in its ninth year participating in nonprofit Dining Out for Life which, across North America, raises about $4 million each year.

By Nancy Varekamp, CNews Editor

According to Donna Maxey (left), RACE TALKS draws people of diverse perspectives, races and ages, even her mother, Mrs. Johnnie Maxey

Let’s start at the beginning. “My parents were always involved in community service,” said Donna Maxey, RACE TALKS founder. “I was an activist in utero.” “My father belonged to the NAACP as a college student which was considered an underground activity at the time for which he could have been kicked out of school.

After migrating to Oregon from Texas, her parents became active in the Republican Party – the party of Oregonians Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield and Clay Myers – and her father became president of the Young Republicans. “There were always people coming and going from the house, and things going on,” Donna recalled.

“My first solo protest march without my parents was when George Wallace came to the Hilton Hotel in the early 1960’s “I’ve always been independent and pulled for the underdog, which is probably why I ended up being a teacher,” she said

In that role, and others, Donna has found herself blazing trails. “I’ve been the first and only Black person in too many situations, so much that I don’t have to be the first or only anything ever again.”

Growing up in Portland she was always around white people, but attending Pacific University was a culture shock for her. “I was surrounded by white people.” But that didn’t discourage her activism or her belief in building relationships – what she calls “the R word.”

The feeling of being surrounded intensified during her first teaching job in Oroville, California. “It was John Birch country and I was the first and only Black school teacher in the small, rural town.” Intensifying her dissimilarity to the rest of the community was her husband at the time–a white Jew who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War era.

While teaching in Portland Public Schools, she was introduced to “Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools,” by Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Lenton.

“The activities helped us to look at social interactions from perspectives other than our own. When one particularly ‘difficult’ person ‘got’ it, I thought, ‘This is powerful.’

“The only problem was that it was associated with people’s paychecks. If you expect people to make change and it’s connected to their paychecks, it doesn’t necessarily change their minds. It needs to be separate from people’s paychecks.”

In 2010, Donna was one of the several speakers at a McMenamins History Pub program, “Urban Renewal, Urban Removal,” and was upfront about the racism that accompanied the physical and economic displacement her family experienced during the early 1960s.

She was perplexed at how to explain the magnitude of that loss. “How can I share this so people understand what kind of home and community I lived in and what it did to us?” So, instead, I described the fauna and flora in our yard. People were just struck by this. Hey! A boxwood shrubbery is a boxwood shrubbery, regardless of what color the people in the house are.”

The first speaker talked about the unfair laws passed allowing the city and the Portland Development Commission to summarily move the Black community “It was all very technical,” Donna noted. The next speaker was a pictorial historian with photos of the Albina community dating from the 1800s to the early 1960s when the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and Lloyd Center were built. The third speaker was a Black real estate agent who discussed the home purchasing policies of the time.

Then it was Donna’s turn. “The Black community was decimated. My family lost our home, our neighborhood, our church, Daddy lost his barbershop.”

That led to the 2011 partnership between Donna, Uniting to Understand Racism and McMenamins to start RACE TALKS, which they bill as, “filling the spaces between race with compassion and education.”

For more information, visit the RACE TALKS website.