Welcome to a little slice of history!

Thanks for dropping in on this blog. 

The artists, dreamers, doers, thinkers, growers, makers, and teasers at Project Grow collaboratively spun this world that you are seeing the documentations of. 

This beautiful experiment existed in an unexpected setting, growing within a sheltered workshop as an alternative to a sheltered workshop. As one might expect, this contradiction of environments posed many challenges but with humor and resilience the team met them all. 

What started as a tiny urban growing experiment and a small art studio grew into a phenomenon. We hosted lectures, built and curated an art gallery, traveled to residencies, hosted residencies, joined movements, instigated movements, we held creative workshops, we gleefully planted seeds in more and more empty lots, we played, we pushed back against discrimination with humor...in short, we created a stunning universe of radical possibilities. 

 If you'd like to peek inside the studio, we have many videos on youtube, you'll find some of them linked on this site: Week in Project Grow. 

In 2012, our parent organization was acquired by a much larger non-profit (the largest in the State of Oregon) whose primary role is in providing residential support to people intellectual disabilities (this term is reluctantly used as it is unjust, inaccurate, and has caused unthinkable pain for many years, yet it is the one most prominently used to refer to the artists we had the joy to work with). With this shift in priorities, Project Grow could no longer remain the same radical experiment. The team that was present for the years 2008-2012 was replaced shortly before and after the transition. 

This blog now serves as a documentation of those years when this place of dreams was formed collaboratively among people who lived with and without unjust labels. We hope that this is not just a place for memories, but that these experiences help instigate a celebration of ambiguity, possibilities, and justice.