Recent national parks awards obscure years of budget cuts to Portland Parks & Recreation. In fact, nearly half the locals we recently polled didn’t know that our park system is underfunded and at risk. It’s time to set the record straight: gold medals don’t mean gold-plated. 

Had things gone differently, NW Thurman Street would have climbed into Portland's Forest Park not as Leif Erickson Trail, but as the spine of a 1930s subdivision. But where are the Forest Parks of the future?

More than just exercise, I credit my Sunday group runs in Forest Park with expanding my “cultural tribe,” built on a shared love of the outdoors. Likewise, we hope that this new blog fosters startling ideas, empathy, and new paths for The Intertwine Alliance.

Love bird song with your morning coffee? With a few simple steps, I transformed my backyard into an avian haven, and connected to wider wildlife corridors within The Intertwine. Here's how you can, too.

When I moved to Portland in 1998, I found it baffling that a city billed as the “greenest city in the U.S.” had a polluted river running through the center of town. Could the success of The Big Pipe project transform our urban river culture?

In 1970, when I started my first job out of college at the State of California Department of Parks and Recreation, I was asked to investigate why communities of color, youth and the poor didn’t seem to be interested in “wild spaces.”  Four decades later, we’re still asking the same question.

From Collective Impact models to Social Network Analysis, the word “partnership” has taken the main stage in promoting collaboration to solve the world's increasingly complex challenges. But the solutions we need require more than memorandums of understanding.