WHO WE ARE

Leaven is a community of communities. We are a wide and diverse web of people who gather to imagine our future and build it together. Rooted in Leaven’s core values of justice, story, diversity, and action, we ignite the power of our relationships to act collectively with our neighbors for more equitable, diverse, and thriving neighborhoods.

Our Vision

Leaven Community envisions more equitable, diverse and thriving communities rooted in the sacred interconnection of all and the creative and liberative power within these relationships. Recognizing our complicity in racist and other systems that oppress, harm and steal life, we commit to transforming ourselves and taking actions that resist, disrupt, and heal these broken systems.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNITY CENTER

The Leaven Community Center is the space where all of this takes root. At the corner of NE Killingsworth and NE 20th in Portland, Oregon, we create space for everyday people to learn and unlearn; dream and plan; to offer care and accompaniment; and to build power in community. Here’s how:

• Leaven regularly offers low- and no-cost events to bring people together: weekly meals, community organizing training, creative workshops, and spiritual gatherings.

• The Leaven Common House is a collective of nonprofit organizations, community groups and small businesses based at Leaven Community Center. Each with their own mission and body of work, the Common House builds community and collective power with each other through orienting to this place as our shared home. The Common House seeds a hub of organizing activity whose sum is greater than its parts. 

• Emerging from Leaven’s neighborhood organizing for affordable housing, Leaven Land & Housing organizes faith-owned land statewide for affordable housing, mobilizing land, people, and money toward reparations, countering narratives of ‘othering’ in our communities, and growing a diverse base of community leaders.

• At a time when low-cost and free community spaces are dwindling, Leaven offers space rentals at below-market rates and makes the Sunroom available as a free weekday coworking space with access to wifi, coffee and tea, and gender-inclusive restrooms. 

Leaven Community is a place where life happens. Connections are forged, relationships are built, mistakes are made, repair is offered, resources are shared, support networks flourish, and our common humanity is seen, felt, and honored.

will you join us in stewarding this placE?

What We Do

We organize Leaven members and our neighbors to share our stories, make meaning of our collective stories, and respond out of our spiritual wisdoms and shared stores to take social action for the common good.

We interact with varying spiritual paths and experiences, making meaning together through story, discernment and ritual.

We provide organizing education around the arts and practices of relationship-based community organizing.

As a secular 501(c) nonprofit, Leaven also provides a home for the ELCA congregation, Salt & Light Lutheran Church, and supports them in living out their values and faith in public life through organizing for the common good.

OUR HISTORY

In 2010, the members of Redeemer Lutheran Church, a historically multicultural and multiethnic congregation with roots in relationship-based community organizing and anchored in the Vernon and Alberta neighborhoods, initiated a process of deep listening with their neighbors. Due to the effects of gentrification, racialized harm, substance abuse, and other impacts on the neighborhood, the congregation focused on relational community organizing in the broader community to address the root causes of inequity and oppression.

That process led to the birth in 2013 of Leaven Community. As part of this re-emergence, Leaven opened its building and grounds for community use, and now shares headquarters with partners such as the Portland Fruit Tree project, NE Portland Tool Library, and Center for Diversity in the Environment.

Leaven Community has a rich tradition of organizing for the common good, and has been an institutional member of Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) affiliates in the Portland area since the 1990s.  In order to live out the passion this community feels for social, economic and ecological justice, in 2019 we incubated the interfaith Leaven Community Land & Housing Coalition to organize around housing pressures felt by its members to enact change that will positively affect Oregon residents.

Leaven Community Staff