Love City is now in it's 7th year and it's amazing what the community has accomplished during that time. Around New Years I was reflecting on the past seven years and all of the changes we have seen, all the people that we have and how the core identity of the community has deepened over time. I remembered a story from not long after Shawn and I moved to Portland that gave us a glimpse into the true heart of the community.
This past year at Love City we were focused on expanding and deepening our initiatives to develop community. We finished the 2021 - 2022 school year in May at Mighty Oak Academy and took all that we had learned to expand our staff to be able to meet the needs of not only our students but also our educators. Over the summer in the midst of summer camps and parties on the porch, we hired additional teachers, along with an instructional coach, a behavior interventionist, a chef nutritionist, and Nicole Essex, a long time member of the Love City Family left her job of 28 years with Norton Health Care and come on full time as our Head of School.
Merry Christmas!
Over the past seven years, we have witnessed many Christmas' at Love City, from our very first Christmas party in 2015 to our 2nd annual Mighty Oak Academy Christmas program a couple of weekends ago, we have seen community come together year over year in deeper and more meaningful ways.
As we look back at Christmas celebrations of the past we are thankful for all of our neighbors both near and far and how we have all come together over the years. We started with a large Christmas party for neighborhood kids in the gym at the Mackin building, giving out presents and bikes.
Ad we get ready for the Christmas break at our morning meeting at the school today we took some time to reflect on the last semester. Often when you see kids every day, you don't notice when they grow both physically and social emotionally. This past week Shawn and I got the opportunity to witness some exponential growth in one of our students and I was able to share that with the teachers this morning.
On Tuesday this week Shawn stopped by the school to encourage everyone and he ended up having a conversation with one of our now 2nd graders. Kris lives around the corner from the school on Alford about a half a block down.
One of the things that we said from the beginning when we moved to Portland and ended up starting Love City was our goal was always to build community. While it can seem like that is a very complicated undertaking, in the end it’s actually pretty simple. If you give people opportunity, resources and love and are genuine in your desire to see them live the life of abundance, community will thrive. Yesterday we had the opportunity to see community in action. Mighty Oak Academy had its 2nd annual Christmas program and lunch. This year we had 5 classes performing to a packed house full of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors, and friends.
We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and is ready to enjoy a holiday season full of Love and Joy! Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday, and while we are thankful for our neighbors near and far and how they partner with Love City throughout the year we wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you and ask you to help spread the word about Love City.
While there are many things that Love City does as a thriving community this Giving Tuesday we are highlighting our school, Mighty Oak Academy. Our Goal is to get 25 new monthly donors of any amount to become regular partners with Love City in support of the school.
Over the past seven years Love City has had lots of events; spring carnivals, parties on the porch, Christmas parties and Thanksgiving dinners for the community. The events had multiple goals; first to build trust in the community, second to provide an opportunity to listen to our neighbors and third, for neighbors to come together and build their own community. At the beginning of Love City, we would plan the event, and volunteers would come from all over town to help run the event for the community.
Not long after we started the fish fry out of the back of the Mackin building an older couple named Tom and Pat started coming to buy fish every Friday. That was back when I worked the window taking orders and Shawn worked the fryers in the back making the fish and fries. Tom was always friendly, making small talk, asking about what we were doing with the Mackin, saying how great it was to have it back open for the neighborhood. They used to buy two fish plates and one fish sandwich. The two fish plates they wanted in one bag and the fish sandwich by itself in the another.
Way back in 2015 when we first moved to the Portland neighborhood we had no idea what the next seven years would hold for us and for the community. We moved here with pure hearts to just love our neighbors. What started out as a simple move from one side of town to the other turned into a broader community movement of love. When I opened the mail that fall of 2015 and saw the letter from the IRS officially declaring Love City Inc. a 501c3 with an effective date of November 3, 2015 stamped at the top it was the start of one of the greatest and hardest journeys of my life.
What a year it has been. Today is my birthday and I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate than celebrating Love City and the community! There has been so much that has happened over the last year, from growth at the school to the return of the fish fry, to multiple trips overseas, it has been a wonderful adventure. For my birthday this year my goal is to raise more awareness for Love City. This also happens to be the time of year that we plan for next year and I'm excited for what the future brings at Love City! If you would be interested in donating to help support the goals of Love City you can click the link below! Thank you in advance! We love you!
About a month ago Shawn and I had the opportunity to go to Kenya to visit some friends. We felt prompted to go and visit but weren’t sure the full extent of the reason for our trip. We had been to Kenya multiple times before and made arrangements with various friends in and around Nairobi to come visit. This time instead of staying downtown Nairobi we stayed at a small hotel in the Karen neighborhood. The neighborhood is more residential and used to be the ranching estate of Karen Blixen in the early 1900s. It has quiet tree lined streets far from the hustle of the downtown Nairobi high-rises and slums.
When Shawn and I sold our house and moved to the Portland neighborhood we did not have any grand master plan to start Love City or honestly do any of the things that we ended up doing over the last seven years. We were just following the spirit, one step at a time. I remember we used to tell people the story of how we moved, and how Love City started, and they would always be so amazed that we had done what we did. For us, though the amazing thing wasn’t us, it was how we got to watch God work every day, bringing together countless details we didn’t even know about so that at the right time, in the right place love happened.
The beginning of 2018 was an extremely busy time at Love City. We opened Porkland, we finished a total renovation of the gym, and opened the renovated front room of the Mackin building as the Social Impact Incubator. The goal of the incubator was to hold entrepreneur training classes based on a curriculum that we had received from some nonprofits in Chattanooga, TN. We had worked on the renovating the room for weeks. We had a hard deadline of May 9, the room had to be finished.
Often you will hear Shawn and I talk about how the focus of everything at Love City is building community. Even with Mighty Oak Academy, we say we’re not building a school, we’re building a community and a school just happens to be a part of it. One tangible way that we have intentionally focused on building community with the school, is to require our parents to volunteer a certain number of hours a month. When we first put that expectation in place, we weren’t sure how our parents would feel and how willing they would be to volunteer, but they have taken to it with gusto.
Five years ago, when Shawn had the dream of a forest on fire and the fire break keeping the field of saplings safe, we knew that for long term change for the kids in our community we would have to start with the saplings. That’s why we started the preschool in 2018. The pandemic taught us however that, while it is better to start young, we couldn’t all together ignore the older kids or large trees that were already on fire. When we opened Mighty Oak Academy in January of 2021,…
One of the very first neighbors that started coming to the fish fry back when it was at the Mackin was our neighbor Danny. Danny lives on St Cecilia St right across the street from the church. He and his wife bought the house decades ago because his wife liked to sit on the front porch and see the stained-glass windows of the church across the street. His wife passed away many years ago leaving Danny on his own. He kept himself busy volunteering at the Portland Museum, the Portland Festival, being active…
When Shawn and I opened up the gym 6 years ago our immediate goal was to give kids in the neighborhood a safe place to hang out and come play ball. As we got to know the kids that routinely would come, those goals deepened. Not only did we want to give them a safe place to hang out, we also wanted to help them learn, grow and ultimately transform their own neighborhood. We knew that it was a long-term goal. When we first opened the gym, the largest age group that came were 10 an 11-year-old boys. Then the girls followed the boys shortly after that, sitting on the bleachers…
If this summer was a whirlwind, the last week was a tornado. We kicked off the week with our community back to school bash and ended with the first week of school for 2022 – 2023 school year in the books. On Monday and Tuesday our teachers and staff made final preparations for school to start on Wednesday. We had the staff taste test our new school menu for breakfast and lunch at the beginning of the week. Our teachers put the final touches on their classrooms, and the support staff finished last minute projects in the building, everything from cleaning to putting in a new ceiling in the hallway and breakfast café. It was long hours and a lot of work, but it all was worth it on Wednesday…
This summer has been a whirlwind. Shawn and I were just talking yesterday commenting about how it was only April when we sat down with our Nicole, our long time Love City family member and new school administrator and Dr Kathy our Academic Dean to reflect on the past school year and strategize how we were going to leap forward with our educators and put in place additional resources we learned we needed. We came up with an organizational chart, and wrote job descriptions posting them on Indeed, looking for an elevation of skills…
When the world shut down in March of 2020, within a week of all the mandated closures, we had already secured a semi-truck load of fresh vegetables to distribute throughout the neighborhood. We had been granted the use of an old meat packing plant on the corner of 19th and Market Street. Shawn had contacted neighbors throughout the area to each come get a portion of the food out of the meat plant’s walk in coolers. It wasn’t just organizations that Shawn contacted but regular neighbors, one such neighbor was BJ. BJ owns BJ’s Kustom Auto mechanics shop on Bank St and 33rd. BJ’s girlfriend is Sandy, who we had worked with on numerous real estate deals in the neighborhood.
