Funding Rural | Episode #3 | Season 4: JT Flowers “Coming Home to Build Community”
Rhodes Scholar, lifelong Portlander, and community visionary JT Flowers draws the parallels between urban and rural communities. Born and raised in NE Portland’s historic Black neighborhood, the Albina District, Flowers recently served as Senior Advisor and Director of Government Affairs at Albina Vision Trust, the largest community-led redevelopment effort in America. The Trust was created to buy back land, rebuild community, and reestablish a prosperous Black neighborhood in the heart of Portland’s central city.
“We have so many things we could allow to divide us, but we know both intuitively and intellectually that there’s no faster way for us to build that brighter future than by building it together.” —JT Flowers
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About JT Flowers
JT Flowers is the founder and Executive Director of Article V, an organization geared towards helping working communities across Oregon secure an economic and political future built by our hands and to our benefit.
Prior to Article V, JT served as Senior Advisor and Director of Government Affairs at Albina Vision Trust, the largest community-led development in America, where he helped his community secure over $850 million in direct investment and notch landmark policy wins at every level of government.
JT is a lifelong Portlander born and bred in the heart of inner-NE Portland’s historic Albina district. Raised by a single mother and grandmother, neither of whom graduated from college, he went on to earn his BA in Political Science with distinction from Yale University.
A Truman Scholar, Flowers also made history by becoming the first Black Rhodes Scholar in Oregon’s history and holds master’s degrees in U.S. History and Music Performance from the University of Oxford.
He represents District 5 on TriMet’s Board of Directors, which encompasses large portions of North and Northeast Portland, is on the board of the Big Yard Foundation, and serves as Board Vice Chair of the Williams & Russell CDC.
“…If you spend any time elsewhere, you know we’re facing the exact same issues in rural communities and even really isolated suburban communities. Sometimes the issues are just wearing different clothes.” —JT Flowers
Discussion Questions
- Make a list of 10 ways in which urban and rural support needs are similar. Share the most potent items on your list with your teams and other funders.
- JT talks about the power of local work. What local work can you support in rural that could run parallel to work you’re already doing in urban settings?
Resources
- JT Flowers Is Planting the Seeds of Northeast Portland’s Future
- Article Five
- Our Team — Albina Vision Trust
- Albina Vision Trust seeks to reclaim historically Black neighborhood – Merkley
“Even in this moment of extreme cynicism about how polarized our country is, about how far we’ve grown from one another, about the ways that the digital landscape has accelerated that expansion in opposite directions, there is still tremendous confidence in the power of local work.”—JT Flowers
Transcript: Episode #3 | Season 4: JT Flowers “Coming Home to Build Community”
Erin Borla 00:10
I’m Erin Borla, and you’re listening to Funding Rural. I get asked often about the urban-rural divide. I think we need to start talking about the urban-rural connection and what draws us together, instead of continuing to highlight what divides us, there are so many lessons that can be learned from communities with historic disinvestment and be shared, whether that’s an inner-city community of color or a former logging town. Oregon has not always been a welcoming or hospitable place for Black folks. African Americans who came to Oregon after the Civil War were persecuted and forcibly segregated. The city of Portland had redline districts, areas where Black Oregonians were forced to live. In fact, a large portion of the city near downtown was once an entirely Black neighborhood. It’s called Albina. J.T. Flowers grew up in Albina. In recent years, his neighborhood has faced rapid gentrification. JT left for a while, studied on the East Coast and then in the UK, and lived in other parts of Oregon. But eventually, he knew he needed to come home and get to work for his community. Now he’s a senior advisor at the Albina Vision Trust. It’s the largest community-led development effort in the U.S. based on a 94-acre area called Lower Albina in Portland.
JT Flowers 01:22
We talk a lot in Albina about the gentrification of this historically black neighborhood from the late ’90s to early 2020s. This is widely recognized as one of, if not the fastest gentrifying neighborhood in the entire United States of America. But this specific stretch of real estate wasn’t gentrified; it was all out destroyed. There are only three legacy structures that have not been torn down or paved over from 1948 to the present day. So, very long way of saying what we do at Albina Vision Trust is we buy back land, buy buildings, and develop at scale with the goal of rerooting people who were pushed out of the neighborhood back into the neighborhood, and with the goal of generationally centering working class Black and historically displaced folks in the heart of our central city.
Erin Borla 02:14
So I know the first question folks are going to ask is: This is the show about rural. Talk about the interconnections between Albina and what you are hearing from rural places, even here in Oregon.
JT Flowers 02:30
Yeah, I mean it’s so interesting as we start to zoom out from our own 94 acre project area. I’ve lived in other parts of the state, have family in other parts of the state, and if you spend any time elsewhere, you know we’re facing the exact same issues in rural communities and even really isolated suburban communities. Sometimes the issues are just wearing different clothes. So one of the things that’s become most apparent to me over the course of the past few years, really, is the need for us as working class communities to get out of our own silos and start to pool our capital so that we can get further, faster together.
Erin Borla 03:15
That’s what we’ve been saying all along, right? Is we we close our eyes and be like, is this an inner city community, or is this a rural, you know, timber community that is trying to transition? Let’s go back a minute and talk about the history of the Albina neighborhood. What did that look like in the ’40s and the ’30s?
JT Flowers 03:34
Yeah, well, you had, in so many senses, what we recognize as a world class neighborhood. You had jazz venues that were internationally renowned. Everybody from the likes of Thelonious Monk to Louis Armstrong would travel to Portland specifically to play venues in Albina. Then there were things like tree planting initiatives that were started as blight ordinance resistance measures and were so successful in the beautification of the city that they were scaled citywide. You had education models pioneered specifically for Black children that were so resonant that they were piloted in cities all across America. So you had a vibrant, interconnected neighborhood where you could walk out your front door and recognize every single face you saw on the street. It was a true neighborhood in every sense of the word. A community where people knew one another, respected one another, but most importantly looked out for one another. And I think if there’s anything that we lost through the decimation of this district, it wasn’t actually our spiritual connection to one another. I feel like oddly we’ve been able to hold on to that sense of interconnectedness. It was the physical neighborhood that allowed that interconnectedness to manifest and build space. So. Today, the Black community in Portland looks very, very different. We’ve been scattered all over the city. We live in neighborhoods that feel disembodied in the truest of senses, and we’ve been entirely severed from participating in all of the accumulation of wealth that’s happened on the backs of the beautification, renovation, and reimagination of our neighborhoods. Right, other folks with money have came in, bought everything up, and pushed us to the fringes of the city. So, though the neighborhood we once called home looks very, very different than it used to look in ways that I’m sure many people would describe as positive. All of our issues, all of our challenges, have just been picked up from one place and moved to another, which means that we’re still drawing the short end of the stick when we really zoom out and look at things objectively.
Erin Borla 05:58
There’s folks that are listening from all over the country, talk about Oregon’s racial past and how you’re reckoning with that, because I think sometimes folks don’t want to acknowledge it, aren’t thinking about it, and it’s heavy.
JT Flowers 06:14
It is, you know, this was the only state in the union that was founded with a racial exclusion law explicitly written into its founding constitution. Of course, that law excluded black folks from staying in the state of Oregon. Right, you could be lashed and beaten if you were black and decided that you wanted to settle down here for more than an explicitly defined period of time. So, what we’ve had to work our way out of as a state is a really unique dynamic, right? Black folks didn’t really come here in droves until the Second World War, and you had the largest or one of the largest shipbuilding operations in the entire United States of America anchored on the Columbia River, separating the state of Washington from the state of Oregon, those workers who came from Louisiana, from Texas, like my family, from Arkansas, from Mississippi, from Missouri, and everywhere else in the South and Midwest, were expected to be here on a temporary basis, and then the town that they inhabited, right? It was called Vanport. It was a temporary town of about 30,000 folks, all of whom were working on the shipyards, flooded. And when that town flooded, our city and state had to grapple with a more fundamental question: Can we make room for these people who we see as disposable, who we see as not belonging here, within the broader pre-established fabric of this community that we very explicitly built to exclude them. Of course, in that instance, the answer had to be yes because they were responding to a national, excuse me, a natural disaster. But the way they chose to respond was very particular, right? They forced us into one neighborhood. That neighborhood happened to be the district we call Albina, which constitutes much of the modern-day footprint of North and Northeast Portland. So about a fifth of the total footprint of the city. It’s the only place you could live if you were black. At that point, 80% of Black Portlanders lived in a singular neighborhood. That ripple effect of the way that we’ve treated folks certainly extends into the present day in so many ways. Black Portlanders and Black Oregonians are oftentimes towards the bottom of the list when it comes to everything from life expectancy to reading outcomes, long-term socioeconomic mobility, all the core things that make a life worth living. So, though we’ve, in many senses, modernized our laws, we still are operating in a context that has failed to correct for the ways we’ve systematically disadvantaged certain people in this state, and while that’s felt really acutely in Portland’s Black community, I think if there’s one thing that we’ve also noticed in this work, and this goes back to an earlier question you asked Aaron, it’s that similar dynamics, though they might not be exactly the same, are very palpable in other communities that have been pushed to the fringes or the periphery of our state. Whether they’re rural communities that we’re told they should expect a transition in the nature of their economy, and that transition to a brighter tomorrow never came, or whether we’re talking about communities that have really been forced to fend for themselves for decades, if not centuries, while they produce things that are critical to the rest of us having food on our table at the end of the day, having. Energy to turn our lights on, having clean water to run through our faucets. At the end of the day, so as I think about the work in a modern context, it’s impossible to decouple it from the history of the state. But it’s also impossible to think about the path forward without thinking about it through the lens of a coalition.
Erin Borla 10:21
How do we bring people together around? I mean, we’re talking about two relatively disparate communities, right? We’re talking about urban or Black Portlanders, and we’re talking about rural timber communities or other economically disadvantaged communities. When we draw the curtain back, we can see that they have these similarities, but how do we begin that conversation? Because I get asked all the time, “Tell me about the urban-rural divide. Stop asking me about that question. The reality is, let’s talk about the urban-rural connections, right?
JT Flowers 10:52
Yeah.
Erin Borla 10:53
How do we start those conversations?
JT Flowers 10:56
Yeah, I think the first connection is that even in this moment of extreme cynicism about how polarized our country is, about how far we’ve grown from one another, about the ways that the digital landscape has accelerated that expansion in opposite directions, there is still tremendous confidence in the power of local work. You know, somebody said it to me best when I first moved out to the town of Oak Ridge, which is, you know, a former timber community that was absolutely destroyed by our transition away from a natural resource economy. We take care of our own, and I think that thread of communities having to be self-sufficient enough-not just to make it on their own, but to build together-is enough of a starting point for a conversation. Even if we’re not yet at the point where we can talk about how our state moves forward in one fell swoop. I do think our communities are at the point where they can start to take a step back and say, “Hey, what those folks are doing in Albina is edifying, right? We have an opportunity to learn from and draw from the way that particular community has been building power for themselves, or what those folks are doing out there in Harney County is powerful. Why don’t we adopt some of the collaborative approaches that High Desert Partnership and other organizations have been pioneering down there, or what that group is doing out in the Rogue Valley is really powerful. Maybe we need to think more broadly about the ways that educational institutions can become regional drivers of economic opportunity. I think there is a real opportunity for us to start the conversation in a context that feels localized, but that also allows us to draw from other work going on across the state, and I think that gives us a foundation to step into common space together, even if we’re not exactly working on the exact same things at the exact same time.
Erin Borla 13:09
And you left for a bit. Tell me a little bit about what, like where you went. You went to Oxford. Tell me about that and those experiences. And then what happened when you came home?
JT Flowers 13:19
Yeah, absolutely. So I wasn’t the best high school student. I had a 2.8 GPA at the end of my junior year in high school, but I was a really good basketball player. And luckily, I had the opportunity to go to school to play basketball. But because of my grades, had to actually do a fifth year of high school in order to allow that opportunity to materialize. So, when I was 18 years old, I shipped off to the East Coast on a scholarship to complete a fifth year of high school, and then was lucky enough to be admitted to Yale University to play basketball. And the nice thing about that opportunity, especially as a kid who grew up in a household where the two figures who raised me, right, my mother and my grandmother, neither of them graduated from college. I was on full need-based financial aid, so I say the Ivy League is the one place it really does pay to be broke. Didn’t have to pay a penny for my education, and that was all just tethered to our income as a family, and that really opened an entirely new world for me. If there’s anything that I’ll say about that space, which comes with its own set of very real and palpable challenges, with tons of judgment for folks who look like us, talk like us, act like us, you can get the same education at Portland Community College as you can at Yale University on an academic level. The difference is that institution really tries to convince the people who pass through it that they are supposed to make a difference in the world, and that because they have stepped into that space, they are exactly where they need to be to become, you know, a Supreme Court justice, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, something big and and I say this in air quotes important. I remember having a conversation with one of my closest friends, actually a white boy who grew up in a trailer park outside of Phoenix, Arizona, I was driving him to the airport. This is at our towards the end of our senior year, and he looked a little down. This is like 5o’clock in the morning. We’re both tired, and I asked him what was on his mind, and he said, “You know, sometimes I wish that I never had passed through this place. And I said, “Why? You know, it’s it’s transformed both of our lives, and he said, “Growing up where I did, in a trailer park, all I really ever needed to be happy was a roof over my head, food on the table, and my family and friends somewhere near me. And now I feel like I have to, again in air quotes, be something in order to live a life of meaning, and even though I know that that’s backwards, I still feel it very palpably. I say all this to say that experience was great. It opened up so many opportunities for me, but in many senses, it also pulled me very, very far away from the environment that I grew up in. So it was not even a question on my end. As soon as I had the opportunity to come back here, once I graduated, I did. I came back. I worked for Congressman Earl Blumenauer for about a year, and then I won a scholarship to go to grad school in the UK, and that was even more extreme. You know, I got to Oxford. I know this is a podcast; and it’s not— there’s no visual element, but I’m, six five. I’m covered in tattoos. I dress a particular way, and when I got to campus, they wouldn’t even let me into the college because they didn’t believe I was a student. So I think that that experience for me was really just the icing on the cake.
JT Flowers 16:59
These institutions we’ve been taught to think of as very prestigious and opportune can sometimes be some of the most stifling places in the entire world, and oftentimes these people who are going around the world winning academic prizes for the research they’re putting out and the work they’re doing in this intellectual space are so wildly divorced from the way that the issues they say they’re studying actually manifest on the ground, and it became apparent to me that I didn’t need to spend any more time in spaces like those. I needed to get back to the community that I called home, the community that raised me, and get into the work in a more material way. So, in so many senses, that academic experience actually very much soured me on academics. Not to say that learning doesn’t have value, but I think there’s more learning that happens when we’re in community and in the work together on the ground than when we’re sitting around in a classroom, sticking our noses up in the air and pontificating about philosophical developments that actually oftentimes are very, very far removed from our realities.
Erin Borla 18:07
Yeah, it’s a couple of things you mention when you talk about how academic institutions can change you, or how you feel maybe feel like you don’t belong, or what you, the way that you were raised, we hear that a lot, particularly from parents right now in rural places, where there is this fear of if their student goes off to college, that they will come back different, or not come back at all. And so again, we’re finding these connections and the ways that we see communities come together. One thing that drives me absolutely batty is the research institution, the lack of preparation for implementation. Right there’s the research without the folks on the ground, or and I love that phrase of being divorced from the reality. I think that’s that’s very true these days.
JT Flowers 19:04
Yeah, yeah, it really is. And nowhere is it more palpable than in poor working class communities like the ones that we grew up in and still work in, right? Yeah, oftentimes you’ll have researchers who fly into our communities and then want to airdrop some lab concocted solution into our local context without an understanding of the nuances that make that context tick, and that’s not only detrimental to our communities; it’s counterproductive in the most tangible of senses because those are the folks who have access to large-scale funding for the ideas that they create. Those are the folks who have, you know, statewide, national, even international visibility and can actually start to mobilize large-scale coalitions around the concepts that they pilot and all. Oftentimes, they see communities like ours as almost like petri dishes, where they can experiment and try out different things, and then document whether the thing succeeds or fails. But rarely is there a long-term commitment to doing the work with us, or actually supporting us in doing the work in our own way, and I think that’s a fundamental difference between the way we work, say, in a neighborhood like Albina versus the way I’ve seen and experienced that academic world interact with communities like ours more broadly. I
Erin Borla 20:37
I think that’s a really excellent example of that of being a petri dish and like, oh, let’s figure it out and let’s what what’s what’s actually going on there. And I just sat through a presentation a couple weeks ago, and there were academic institutions in the room, and there were implementers in the room. Both these very separate presentations, and watching the academic institutions share hard data, but not understanding what caused that data, what the causation was, and recognizing, “Wow, there is this anomaly here in this one region. Why is that an anomaly? Well, we don’t have that information. Oh, but the implementers do. Why are we not sharing that? I think it’s fascinating. Anyway,
JT Flowers 21:21
yeah, and then on the back end of a process like that, who’s being elevated? Right, it’s oftentimes the researchers rather than you know the community leader who’s on the front lines of the work, the person who could have told you that there was a causal link between X problem and Y long-standing issue without having to spend 10s, if not hundreds of 1000s of dollars conducting an experiment. So again, it’s it’s a question of who we elevate and whose knowledge we deem to be legitimate. And oftentimes, in communities like ours, the challenge when we’re, excuse me, interacting with these more buttoned-up academic spaces, and I would even say sometimes in in the funding landscape as well, is can we convince these folks that have never spent any real time here that our experience and our knowledge of our own home carries weight in and of itself.
Erin Borla 22:23
Yeah, we had a very similar conversation a couple of seasons ago with the folks from Western Landowners Alliance, where we were talking about the exact same topic, where we have researchers working on conservation, but not working with the landowners and the folks working the land, and trying to get that either the accurate information from the research to those landowners, but also understanding those implementation challenges, and we’re seeing that across every platform, which I think is really fascinating.
JT Flowers 22:53
Yeah, it is, and I think if we’ve gotten one thing right here in Lower Albina at Albina Vision Trust. It is we’ve been very very intentional about making sure that whatever we do, if it’s collaborative, and the collaboration is occurring with an outside partner who is not native to this neighborhood or this area of the city, we make sure that community is consistently in the driver’s seat of dictating their own future, and that means that if there’s a planning process taking place, we should be running and administering the planning process. If there’s a development process underway, we should be not only leading the engagement around that development process, but we believe we should be actually learning the ins and outs of being developers as well. If there’s a construction project taking place, we believe our community should be in the driver’s seat of being positioned to really competitively secure contracts to do that type of work. We have opportunities to not just work through issues in real time, but to expand capacity and build expertise by working through our problems in a local way, but we can’t do that if we accept a world where we are not the ones doing the work, leading the work, and assembling the coalition. Right? If we delegate that responsibility to someone who flies into our communities without that nuanced understanding of what makes our communities tick.
Erin Borla 24:29
Talk about some of the things that AVT is doing right now. Right, we’ve talked a lot about sort of where you’ve come from and what the community looked like and where it’s going. But what are or what has been done and what are you doing right now?
JT Flowers 24:44
Yeah, so I mentioned that we’re the largest community-led development in the United States of America, and that’s by a few metrics. So at 94 acres, that makes our project area the largest contiguous central city development that community-led in the entire country. It’s by funding we’ve secured over 850 million dollars in direct investment to our district in the past four or five years alone, which is nationally unprecedented. Of course, we’ve had our own experience and challenges with rescissions given the the shift in federal climate, but we’ve still attracted well over a half billion dollars to the work, even with those taken into account. And then we’re the furthest along in terms of policy, so we’ve secured landmark policy wins at every level of government-federal, state, local, hyper-local, county, regional-and what we’re starting to build is a reimagined model for 21st-century urban development. When I talk about you know these hundreds of millions of dollars that have poured into our community thanks to the work we’ve been leading, they’re not just flowing into one bucket, right? The simplest way to imagine our work is we are building a city within a city. I mentioned the fact that there are only three remaining legacy structures that still exist in our neighborhood from 1948 to the present day, that means that we are having to rebuild everything from housing, right, affordable market rate home ownership opportunities, to energy infrastructure, to our transportation infrastructure, to our access to the Willamette waterfront. We’re having to reimagine what it looks like to anchor educational institutions in our neighborhood, to anchor healthcare providers in our neighborhood, for folks in our neighborhood to have access to a grocery store that is within walking distance of their doorstep, and for folks to be able to live in a neighborhood that has greenery, right? Parks, green spaces, the things that make a neighborhood a neighborhood. So we are building all of those things. We buy land at scale, like I said, we are really at the forefront of developing this area. So we just opened up our first housing development, a 94-unit family-oriented affordable housing development called Albina One, on September 4 of 2025. That building is fully leased out, and 94 families now call that building home, which is amazing. We bought the building next to it. I mentioned that there were 66 units of existing housing in the neighborhood as of a few years back. We now own and operate that building as well. We were able to legally concretize the affordability of that building, and then reduce rents for people in the building, which is amazing. We opened up our headquarter space in the neighborhood. We are about a month and a half, two months away at the time of this recording from acquiring, or excuse me, getting to a purchase and sale agreement on that 10 and a half acre Portland Public Schools parcel, which will soon be torn down. We’ll be building an entirely new neighborhood on top of that parcel. Right, well over 1500 homes will be built on that parcel. We’ll have to reimagine the energy infrastructure, repave streets and sidewalks because you had nine city blocks that were melded into one mega structure to form that building. And then we are working with the Oregon Department of Transportation and our federal government to build a highway cover that would cap Interstate Five. So that would be effectively an eight-acre cover that would be seismically graded to support vertical development up to three stories in height. On top of it, we got institutional partnerships with the Portland Trailblazers, with Lewis and Clark College, we’re building an education and economic opportunity hub in partnership with Lewis and Clark College on that redeveloped Portland Public School site that will serve as a hub for lifelong learning and economic mobility for people from cradle to grave in this neighborhood. We’re building partnerships to try to weave both of those things-education and opportunity-and to not just the built fabric of the neighborhood, but the social fabric as well. So, Lewis and Clark College will be providing all the resources that they bring to bear as a college for residents in this neighborhood. That means if you live in Lower Albina, you’ll have access to their mental health and counseling services, their small business clinic, their legal clinic, their tax clinic-we’re really building a zip code from scratch.
JT Flowers 29:06
And I think the city of Portland has quite literally said: by the time this development is fully built out, they might have to create a new zip code to accommodate all the new families moving back into the area. So we’re talking about 2500 to 3000 people over the course of the next seven to 10 years who will be moving back into Lower Albina just through the redevelopment of that Portland public school site I mentioned, and then long term we’re talking 5500 to 6000 people who will be re-anchored in this neighborhood, and with that we have an opportunity to build a neighborhood that’s not just a working class neighborhood again, but a world-class neighborhood, and we see both of those things as being critically important to the delivery of the promise of our work.
Erin Borla 29:48
It’s all-it’s so remarkable. I remember walking around with you and seeing the space and hearing your vision or the vision of AVT, and it’s really, it’s really exciting just to hear your passion and excitement. And what’s come to fruition over bringing community together and dreaming together. Talk about the funding model that’s making that work.
JT Flowers 30:09
Yeah, well, we pull capital from anywhere we can. So when we talk about you know $850 million in direct investment to the district, the overwhelming majority of that is public capital, federal, state, local, county, regional, and then there has also been significant philanthropic investment. We got the largest award in the history of Meyer Memorial Trust a few months ago-a $15 million grant for our land banking effort. We’ve been working in partnership with our sister organization, the 1803 Fund, which was actually stood up by one of our founding board members in recognition of some of the other gaps that existed in this broader landscape. They have given us a massive operational grant to help us stabilize and expand our staff. They’re also co-investors on a number of projects that we are actively developing. And then there’s, of course, private capital that comes to the table-the traditional loans and debt that are typically used as financing tools in large-scale development. So, those are also very present parts of that capital stack.
Erin Borla 31:21
Yeah, what are the positives of working within philanthropy, and what are some of those challenges? Maybe some words of wisdom for our our funders out there.
JT Flowers 31:33
Yeah, well, I would say that oddly, the words of wisdom are the same regardless of whether or not we’re talking to philanthropic funders or the public sector, oftentimes what we try to do is piecemeal our way to transformative work. Right? We say, “Hey, there’s this really important project going on in Albina, but there’s also several other important projects all over the city, all over the state. Instead of investing in a catalytic way in one place or in two places this year, and then transition into another couple places next year, why don’t we give everybody a little bit? Right. Say we got $20 million to dole out. Why don’t we give 2 million to Albina? Why don’t we give 2 million to sisters? Why don’t we give 2 million to Wallowa County? And what we create is a world where everybody has gotten enough to need to come back the next year and have to ask for a little bit more. And that actually doesn’t allow us to work our way out of the challenges that we’re facing as communities, right? We need to be able to address our issues in comprehensive ways, in 360-degree ways, which means that we need to be able to ask for everything necessary in order to get beyond the triage work of trying to stop the bleeding and actually cutting to the root of the reasons that we’re experiencing the challenges we do in working communities across the state. So, my push to funders would be focus in on work you truly believe in, in a few places, make sure that work gets over the line, and then shift to taking that model other places rather than trying to piecemeal everybody into this never-ending cycle of having a little bit but not having enough to actually get the big work done.
Erin Borla 33:31
Yeah, that’s helpful. What are you doing now? Like, you have big, big plans that are, I don’t know how it could be bigger than the work you’re doing now, but it is bigger. It feels like.
JT Flowers 33:43
Well, you know, I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this a lot myself. I don’t know if it’s if it’s bigger, if it’s smaller. I think it’s going to be hard to replicate the beauty of being able to wake up every day and help rebuild the neighborhood that you grew up in. That’s the experience I’ve been blessed to have here at Albina Vision Trust. I came on as our second full-time employee, so this work is very near and dear to my heart. But to your question, my last day at Albina Vision Trust is september 1 of this year. So I’m going to be leaving to start an organization called Article Five. That’s of course a reference to Article Five of the American Constitution, which gives us as everyday folks the right to amend or change government when government no longer serves our needs. But also Article Five of the NATO Charter, which says an attack on one is an attack on all, and it really gets to this core idea that I think we’ve been circling around throughout this conversation, which is the notion that so many of our communities across this state and across this country are dealing with exactly the same issues, even if they manifest in really idiosyncratic ways that are particular to our hyperlocal contexts. The crux of the issues are very, very similar. At the end of the day, we want similar things for ourselves and for our children, right? A roof over our heads, a path to stable economic prosperity that can be sustained across generations. We want an education model that feels worth sending our children off for 18 years worth of hard work, sitting in a classroom trying to soak up the core skills necessary to be a good human being, and we want to feel like we live in communities that function as communities rather than in these isolated homes that, in no way, shape, or form, embody the collective spirit that this country was founded on. So, what Article Five will do is we’re going to be working to advance statewide economic development by providing free government affairs, strategic communications, and organizing support to poor and working class communities all over Oregon. So, effectively trying to learn from some of the core lessons that I think we’ve been able to absorb here in the context of our work in Albina, and help communities who might not have had the chance to do some of the stuff we’ve been able to do figure out some of their stickiest problems together. And I mean together in the broadest senses, right? We want folks in Harney County showing up for folks here in Albina. We want folks in Albina showing up for folks in Oak Ridge. We want folks in Oak Ridge showing up for people in the Rogue Valley. So there’s going to be a broad coalition-based approach to this work that is not only necessary, but I think is going to be really transformative for the future of our state because it’ll span geographic divides, right? Urban, rural, suburban, and it’ll also span political battle lines. It doesn’t matter if you’re staunchly conservative or wildly progressive. Again, the issues that we’re facing are the same. We got to be able to work with one another if we hope to fix those issues long term.
Erin Borla 37:02
Well, I normally ask, where do you, if you closed your eyes and said, in 20 years, I want this to look like this. What your hopes are? But I’m not going to ask you that because you’re a new dad, right? I want to know what your hope is for your kiddo. Like, can you close your eyes and think forward, what does that look like for your son?
JT Flowers 37:26
Yeah, it’s a really beautiful question. You know, I grew up thinking of myself as a kid from Northeast Portland. If you ask me where I came from, that was always my answer. I come from Northeast Portland, from this neighborhood called Albina, and if it didn’t matter if I was halfway across the country or halfway across the world, that was how I conceived of my identity. And upon having the opportunity to return to our state, live in other parts of our state, being community with different people from different walks of life all across this state. When people ask me where I’m from now, the first thing that intuitively comes out of my mouth is I’m from Oregon. I want my son to grow up with a deep sense of pride in being able to claim all of this state as his own. I want him to grow up in a world where he sees every pocket of Oregon as pockets of community that he has a responsibility to support, to uplift, to be in the work with, and I want him to be able to look out across the landscape of brilliant people committed to advancing this better tomorrow together. So my hope, I guess, is that we will be able to turn the corner, see past our differences, and really build on the common shared ground that has always defined that magical Goldilocks zone in this country. Right? We have so many things we could allow to divide us, but we know both intuitively and intellectually that there’s no faster way for us to build that brighter future than by building it together. My hope is that he doesn’t have to dream about a world where that’s possible, but rather he’s able to step into, inhabit, and live in a world where that is the defining feature of the way people relate to one another.
Erin Borla 39:44
Yeah, yeah. It has been such a gift to get to know you and learn about not only the work you’re doing in Portland, but your vision for what you hope to do and plan to bring together for the rest of the state. Thank you for being here and spending time.
JT Flowers 40:02
Oh, thank you so much, Erin, for having me. I’m so inspired by your work. Always thank you for not only the brilliant mind that you are, but for your unwavering commitment to the belief and the notion that tomorrow can be better than today, and for the way that you so deliberately highlight the people carrying out the work on the front lines all over the place. We’re all extremely indebted to you and your leadership. So thank you.
Erin Borla 40:45
I’ve always defined myself as an Oregonian. I’ve always thought that Oregon was the best state in the lower 48, is what I used to tell my friends. And to hear JT originally talk about himself being from one part of this state to now being, really feeling like an Oregonian, and seeing those connections, I think just shows how much we are trying to come together, and that there are so many things that we can come together on between urban and rural communities. I really want to identify that philanthropy in this work doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Here, we’ve got folks on the ground doing the work and building community, and they have these strong leaders that are in those spaces. And I think if we get down and closer to the ground and hear about what’s happening and uplift those stories in the best way possible, that’s how we can make change happen. Head to fundingrural.com for more on the Albina Vision Trust, JT’s new project Article Five, for show notes, and everything else you might need.
