Programs Built
with the Community,
for the Community
Every THTF program starts with the same question: what does this neighborhood actually need? From active resource navigation to community engagement, mutual aid, and cultural celebration — our programs are built on lived experience, dignity, and the belief that there is always room inside.
Active Programs
These programs are open, running, and welcoming participants right now. All THTF programs are free — no application, no income verification, no barriers. No one is ever turned away.
The PDX Resource Compass is a free, searchable community resource directory covering 1,031+ services across Portland — but it is far more than a static directory. Through The Navigator Series, trained Peer Navigators bring the Compass directly into shelters, food pantries, libraries, and underserved neighborhoods, walking side-by-side with residents through the process of securing housing, healthcare, legal aid, and emergency support.
We reject the idea that a passive information tool is an adequate safety net. Active navigation — human-to-human, peer-led, and dignity-first — is the difference between knowing help exists and actually reaching it.
The Sidewalk Gallery Brigade is a community encouragement and mental-health visibility program — not a formal art exhibition. Volunteers create temporary sidewalk chalk affirmations and maintain small Encouragement Card Exchange stations in everyday public places where neighbors already pass by.
The goal is simple and practical: place brief messages of hope, belonging, and support where people can encounter them for free, without signing up, explaining themselves, or entering a program. During Portland's rainy months, the focus shifts toward weather-protected cards, resource QR codes, and refillable containers that invite neighbors to take encouragement, leave encouragement, or pass it on.
Every family in Portland carries recipes that have never been written down — dishes that traveled across oceans, survived displacement, and live only in the memory of the people who make them. The Portland Cultural Cookbook Contest invites community members to submit their most meaningful recipes, along with the story behind them.
Winning entries are published in the annual THTF Community Cookbook, translated into English and the contributor's home language, and distributed free to Portland Public Libraries, community centers, and local schools. These recipes are not just food — they are cultural documentation.
The PDX Community Compass is a free, relationship-first community app that connects Portland residents through grassroots mutual aid, local events, and shared neighborhood resilience. Every time you help a neighbor, RSVP to a community event, or vote on a Town Square poll, you earn Engagement Stars — which automatically enter you into a monthly prize drawing.
No ads. No corporate spam. Just neighbors helping neighbors, with real local prizes for those who show up for their community. The Compass includes a community feed, neighborhood event calendar, Town Square civic forum, and direct integration with the PDX Resource Compass directory.
In Development
These programs are in final development and will open to the public in 2026. Want early access or to help shape them? Reach out — we build with community, not just for it.
Monthly communal dinners that bring together immigrants, refugees, and longtime Portlanders to share meals, stories, and the food traditions that define who we are. Each gathering centers a different cultural community — their cuisine, their rituals, their history — in a warm space where everyone is the guest and everyone is the host.
Learn More →Free tool kits and multilingual repair guides distributed to households in Outer East Portland — helping neighbors fix what they have rather than go without. Each kit includes instruction sheets in multiple languages and a Repair Café referral card for in-person help with skilled volunteers. Tool donations accepted.
Learn More →A community storytelling and workforce development program that trains residents from immigrant, refugee, and underrepresented communities to become neighborhood journalists, oral historians, and cultural documentarians. Participants receive free training in storytelling, photography, audio recording, and community interviewing — and are paid stipends for published work. Neighborhood Voices is free to participate and open to all. No experience required — only a story worth telling and a community worth preserving.
Express Interest →A pilot program connecting Portland-area employers with structured, meaningful community service opportunities in immigrant and refugee neighborhoods — co-designed with those communities, not imposed on them. Employee teams participate in skill-sharing sessions, neighborhood beautification, cultural exchange events, and hands-on projects identified as genuine priorities by community members. This is not PR. It is relationship. Participating employers receive an impact report and ongoing partnership with THTF community liaisons to ensure the work actually serves the people it claims to.
Employer Inquiry →A hyperlocal skill exchange connecting people within the same neighborhood to teach and learn from each other — cooking, language, computer basics, sewing, tax prep, childcare, carpentry, bike mechanics, and more. Every person is both student and teacher. No money changes hands; no credentials are required. Skills are matched through a simple platform maintained by THTF volunteers, with in-person sessions hosted in homes, libraries, and community centers. This program is built on a foundational belief: every person is a traveler carrying something the world needs.
Join the Waitlist →World Cultural Tour —
Portland 2027
A three-day public celebration of Portland's living cultural landscape — centered in Cathedral Park under the St. Johns Bridge, in the heart of a neighborhood that has always been home to the communities THTF serves. Free to attend. Open to all. Built by the community, for the community.
World Cultural Tour is not an ethnic festival — it is a gathering of neighbors. Every booth, performance, and table is hosted by a community that has made Portland home. Every dish, dance, and story belongs to a real family, a real history, a real place.
What Program Should
We Build Next?
"We don't decide what this community needs. We ask. Then we listen. Then we build together."
Every program THTF has ever built came from a conversation. Someone in a neighborhood said we need this — and we found a way to make it real. That process doesn't stop. It's how we work.
We're actively collecting community input on what the next THTF program should be. Should we focus on youth? Elder care? Digital access? Legal navigation? Language classes? A community garden network? A tool library? We want to know.
Submit your idea below — we read every one. Ideas that gather strong community interest become our development shortlist. You are not just a participant in this work. You are a decision-maker in it.
We respond to all ideas within two weeks. Submitting does not commit you to anything — it starts a conversation.
Idea received.
Thank you for helping shape what we build next. We read every submission and will be in touch if your idea moves forward. — The THTF Team