| Dear Friends,
Over the last month, your staff at The Intertwine Alliance has spent a bit more office time than usual gazing out the window. But can you blame us? Between concerts in the park, river floats
and forests in full leaf, it's not the mosquito bites talking when we
say we're itching to get outdoors. August is for adventure!
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| Alliance Updates Cue the waterworks. Two years ago, we forecast 57 partners would join The Intertwine Alliance by 2013. Yet July 10th saw us offer an emotional welcome to partner #100, the Clean Water Institute. Call of the coalition. Even while celebrating our 100-partner milestone, new partners reached out. Please join us in welcoming Green Girl Land Development Solutions, Trillium Consulting, Wind and Oar Boat School, Clackamas County Water Environmental Services and Common Ground OR-WA. Our cup overflows! Save the date! Between the Intertwine animals, the greenspace geezers, and our princely partners, we felt the magic at our Spring 2013 Summit. Now, our party, um, event planners are dreaming up new delights for our Fall Summit, slated for the afternoon of October 9th. Intertwine News A more equitable Intertwine. On July 17th and 18th, North Carolina State University Professor (and former National Park Service Deputy Director) Mickey Fearn lent his 40 years of parks and equity experience to Intertwine forums like the first-ever Our Common Ground Dialogue on Race and the Environment, a parks directors meeting, and a community gathering on bikes and race. Look soon for updates on this initiative -- with many thanks to July's sponsors: Metro, Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation District, Cambia Health Solutions and REI. That Outside Voice. We miss Mickey already, but luckily we can revisit his thoughts on conservation and equity via our blog -- along with the considered musings of July guest writers including Will Levenson of the Human Access Project, Metro naturalist Lori Hennings, and urban planner Ken Pirie. Counting counts and so can you. We're beating a path to our annual Intertwine trail-user counts from Sept. 10th to 15th, when volunteers tally the what, where, when and how of human traffic on our footpaths. This data helps keep our trails funded, so contact Shawn Bacon at Metro today to count yourself in. Partner Updates  When trail plans intertwine... Two Alliance partners released active transportation plans in recent weeks. The Bicycle Transportation Alliance's Blueprint for World-Class Bicycling identifies key routes for fix-its, greenways, and more, while Metro's Regional Active Transportation Plan provides a healthy mix of trail planning food-for-thought.Well, drop us in the water! We nearly lost our personal flotation devices this month when we heard that Tualatin Riverkeepers is renting canoe & kayaks at Cook Park through Labor Day. One Benjamin for four hours of paddlin'? Get out of town! And take us to the river! Falls guys. Alliance  partner Walker Macy is leading the Willamette Falls Legacy Project -- a publicly-informed transformation of the sprawling site formerly occupied by Oregon City's Blue Heron Paper Mill. The coming months will dictate the future of these 23 acres at the base of Willamette Falls, so get involved! Pedal forward. Last Friday, 150 elected and civic leaders joined us for this year's annual Policymakers' Ride as we cycled from Corbett to Cascade Locks along recently-completed mixed-use sections of the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail. Organized by Cycle Oregon and the Urban Greenspaces Institute,
were invited to contemplate the complete route -- when residents of The
Intertwine will be able to walk or ride from Portland to The Dalles
without ever setting foot on I-84. |
