Almost fifteen years ago, SERA and GreenWorks were lucky enough to be asked by the Portland Development Commission (now Prosper Portland) to work with City staff and community members on a redesign of N Denver Avenue – the core of Downtown Kenton – as part of a larger revitalization effort for this North Portland neighborhood.

For the City of Salem, it posed a challenge from the very beginning to the Cultural Landscape Management Plan in progress for Bush’s Pasture Park and Deepwood Gardens. With the kind of large, in-person meetings needed to effectively listen to the community out of the question, the team had to come up with something different.

GreenWorks was selected to assist the City with MIG to, among other things, equip the City to engage the public. The new reality presented the team with an opportunity to do something they usually wouldn’t have done: We put much of the information that would have been shared at the in-person meeting into a video.