A Portland center for Black culture closes its doors – oregonlive.com:
The Soul Restoration Center, a colorful cultural and community hub for Black Portland, is closing this month after losing its lease in the historic Albina Arts building in Northeast Portland, founder S. Renee Mitchell said.
You just know this will be an article filled with excuses and politically progressive babble words.
She and her staff, including seasoned community organizer Sunshine Dixon, are vacating the space because of money. Mitchell said they had been unable to pay the rent since July after a series of financial tribulations and are moving out in lieu of paying the $15,000 that they owed the landlord.
Glad I’m not the landlord.
In the 1960s, the building was purchased by the Albina Women’s League Foundation and became a hub for the city’s young Black community members and their artistic expressions of all kinds. Mitchell said her understanding was that the Jefferson Dancers helped lay the wooden floor to use as a practice space.
And they did such a good job with it that…
…by the mid-2010s, it had fallen into disrepair and was taken over by the Oregon Department of Justice, which sought a nonprofit to oversee the building. It eventually landed on the Oregon Community Foundation, one of the state’s largest grant-making organizations.
Organizers with Don’t Shoot PDX, a nonprofit that advocates for social and racial justice in the city, launched an effort to buy the building in 2022, alleging that OCF had fallen behind on upkeep. After that, the Oregon Community Foundation sought to transfer oversight of the building to a Black-led organization.
So the Oregon Community Foundation did a bad enough job that another progressive group complained. That’s saying something.
They chose the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center, also known as POIC, a nonprofit that provides education, training and job placement services to underserved youth and adults.
Meanwhile, jazz pianist and composer Darrell Grant, who teaches at Portland State University, had begun a pop-up at the space, intending to spotlight how the arts can seed community revitalization. It was Grant who called the space the “Soul Restoration Center,” a title Mitchell kept when she took it over.
Restoring your soul is good and all, but I’m not sure it’s a viable business model.
Mitchell was also looking for a home base for an organization she founded called I Am M.O.R.E., an acronym for “Making Ourselves Resilient Everyday.” Through the organization, she runs trauma-informed workshops, mindfulness classes and listening circles for Black youth.
I’m not sure there’s a viable business model in that either.
The Soul Restoration Center was the perfect space, she said, particularly after the Portland City Council in 2022 set aside $800,000 in grant funding from the Black Youth Leadership Fund, an initiative championed by former city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty that redirected nearly $1 million from the Portland Police Bureau’s budget.
And I was right: There is no viable business model. And all Portland taxpayers had to do was defund the police to the tune $1 million so this nonsense could do whatever it is that they’re pretending to do.
But Mitchell ran into time-consuming problems with the organization chosen to administer the grant, the Black United Fund of Oregon, which she says took months to reimburse her for money she’d spent on programming and a youth entrepreneurial training program. Eventually, Mitchell said, she hired an attorney to help her recoup some of the funds she was owed.
Progressive Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) suing each other over taxpayers’ dollars is the best.
“In the course of our role as fiscal sponsor of the city funding for the Youth Leadership program, we did experience some delays in processing payments due to the need for additional information at times,” said Mike Alexander, who chairs the organization’s board of directors. “We worked directly with Dr. Mitchell in resolving and reimbursing her for a significant number of the items that were in question. Any remaining unresolved items were incorporated into the final report to the city of Portland for their determination.”
In other words: “We were slow to pay because we didn’t know what we were doing despite it being our job and the reason we were chosen to administer the grant money. Frankly, some of the money being requested sounded like a complete sham even to us so we didn’t pay those things and told the City to figure it out.”
Data released by the city in response to a request from The Oregonian/OregonLive shows that the Black United Fund of Oregon spent roughly $560,000 of its initial $755,000 in grant funding and returned the balance to the city.
That money went towards “designing evidence-based curricula, offering hands-on training in areas such as business, finance, advocacy and policy, and providing stipends to encourage youth participation,” said Alison Perkins, a budget and finance spokesperson for the city of Portland.
In other words: “We have no idea what happened the money.”
A second round of funding for the Soul Center came from a $180,000 contract with the Urban League of Portland, which tapped Mitchell to help connect Black community members with services like rental assistance and bill repayment. But there, too, there were conflicts, Mitchell said, including what she described as trouble getting reimbursed for work she said she’d performed.
If two progressive groups can’t figure out what you’re doing, some of the problem might not be the groups providing the funding.
Mitchell acknowledged being unable to meet the contract’s reporting requirements after losing access to key documents while embroiled in a dispute with her sister, whom she’d hired as her personal assistant to help with I Am M.O.R.E.
That is awesome. Best sentence in an article filled with great sentences. “I failed to meet the reporting requirements because I got into an argument with my sister who I hired as a ‘personal assistant.’” Chef’s kiss right here.
Her sister and at least one other employee believed they were entitled to funding from the Urban League grant in addition to their agreed-upon salaries, she said.
Where could they have gotten such a grift-filled idea?
A spokesperson for the Urban League of Portland said the organization does not comment on contracts or employment, as a rule, to protect “our partners’ privacy.”
In other words: “We don’t want to say that the group we agreed to fund was a complete sham.”
Mitchell’s dispute with her sister escalated until it wound up on the Judge Judy-created syndicated reality TV show “Hot Bench,” in which a three-judge panel considers a case and delivers binding arbitration. The judges ruled in Mitchell’s favor, but not before chiding her for sloppy business practices.
OMG. That’s awesome as well.
All of it took a toll, Mitchell said, and paying rent on the space took a backseat.
“Paying rent…took a backseat.” LOL.
Officials at POIC, the nonprofit, tried to help her cover expenses while she sought reimbursements from other organizations, she said. When she was summoned to a meeting with POIC leaders — who did not return a call seeking comment — she said she was told that short of paying in full, she had no option but to vacate the premises.
The only thing missing here is a cry of “racism.”
It is absolutely no wonder that taxpayers are fleeing Oregon in general and Portland, down 5.7% since 2020, specifically.