On Friday, October 14, 2016 the Portland Monthly magazine awarded the Friends of Nadaka a Light A Fire Award in the category of Game-Changing Project. This award recognized an innovative collaboration that generates a transformative impact for one or more nonprofits. There were over 100 nominations submitted of which seven were given to organizations and five to individuals.
Check out the article published in the November Portland Monthly issue and the video at the bottom was shown at the gala event.
Join the Friends of Nadaka at the Columbia Slough Watershed Council’s Slough Celebration Gala event on February 5, 2016. Its really exciting that the Nadaka Park & Garden Project will be receiving an Achievement Award. 
Click here for more information and to order your tickets now.
On April 4th, 2015 the new 2 acre section of Nadaka Nature Park opened to the delight of the community. Read more about the opening in the article written by Jodi Weinberger of the Outlook.
The Friends of Nadaka Nature Park would like to thank Metro, Starbucks, Albertsons, Park Place Cafe, and the Center for Family Success for their donations which made the Grand Opening of Nadaka Nature Park & Garden Project a spectacular success; we greatly appreciate their generosity.
We would also like to thank the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, AARP Foundation, Center for Family Success, Outgrowing Hunger, Cathy Sherick with the Springwater Parks & Community District, the Audubon Society of Portland, and the City of Gresham for providing information and education to community members during the event.
Our wonderful volunteers at the Grand Opening included members from the community, Wilkes East Neighborhood Association, AmeriCorps leaders from HB Lee SUN program, former Camp Fire Girls and Cub Scout Troop #214. A special thanks to Representative Carla Piluso for being the announcer for the event and our guest speakers which included:
Mayor Shane Bemis
Metro Councilor Shirley Craddick
Urban Conservationist Jim Labbe- Audubon Society of Portland
Executive Director Jane Van Dyke- Columbia Slough Watershed Council
Executive Director Jay Udelhoven- East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District
Cherie Ludwig-Former Camp Fire Girl and City of Gresham Employee
Community Leader Lee Dayfield- Friends of Nadaka
H.B. Lee Student Andrei Viatlev
None of this would have been possible without the help of the following people and organizations:
Mayor Shane Bemis, Steve Fancer & others at City of Gresham
Mike Green, City of Gresham – Project Planner
Todd Jones & Norm Helgeson – Gresham Parks Staff
T. A. Nelson Family – Donation Property
Metro – Funding
Meyer Memorial Trust – Funding
Trust for Public Land – Owen Wozniack – Negotiated Transaction for purchase 2 acres
East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District – Funding
St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church Members – Gloria Trunk, Andrew Agler, Byron McKinlay & Many Others
MIG – Christina Frank designed nature based play area, Lauren Schmitt & Rachel Edmonds
Lora Price, Design With Nature – Project Manager for Friends of Nadaka Team
Adam Kohl, Outgrowing Hunger
Bob Michaud-Tradd – Belkor Logworks
Human Solutions – Jean DeMaster – Programming This Summer
Verde – Alan Hipolito, ExecutiveT Director, Ricardo Moreno & staff helped build community garden, nature based play, and did all the landscaping
Ron White, Probity Builders – Project Manager for Verde
Oregon Tradeswomen, Inc – Built Garden Sheds, ADA boxes, trellises
Sue Aschim – Graphic Designer
City’s Contractors: Cedar Mill Construction Co – Jesse Vail & Earthworks Excavation & Construction – Todd Erickson
Chief of Police – Craig Junginger – Boulders
Dayfield Family – Paul, Garrett & Nohelia and Sister Fran Dearborn – Continuing Support
Eastrose Unitarian Church – Fundraising & meeting space
Wilkes East Neighborhood Association
Rockwood Neighborhood Association
Monica McAllister – new Nadaka Nature Park Coordinator
Thank you for making Nadaka Nature Park and Garden’s Grand Opening a huge success!
Official grand opening celebration. Come and see the development of the 2 acre site at the South edge of Nadaka Nature Park. The Audubon Society of Portland’s Education birds will be there together with activities for the whole family and light refreshments.
Lee Dayfield and Jim Labbe
On Saturday April 4th, Gresham residents will celebrate the opening of the new Nadaka Nature Park and Garden. This innovate community park project represents a huge accomplishment in the face of declines in public park investment the last 15 years. The Nadaka experience is a potential model of how we can work together to renew public investment in parks and create healthier and stronger communities in East County. From our vantage, three ingredients were critical to Nadaka’s success.
Nadaka started at the grassroots and the passion of local residents has been essential all along.
First, Nadaka started at the grassroots and the passion of local residents has been essential all along. In 2008, the Friends of Nadaka began organizing clean-ups at the 10-acre Nadaka Open Space. Stewardship days soon became a regular occurrence. Soon a growing list of partners began working to bring two adjacent acres, owned by the Nelson family, into public ownership.
With funding from Metro and East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District (EMSWCD) and a generous donation from the Nelson Family Estate, the acquisition was complete. The acquisition of the Nelson Property on NE Glisan provided access to 600 new households within ½ mile of Nadaka, mostly in Rockwood. This 100% increase in the number of people with local access to Nadaka created a new, more diverse constituency which gathered for the first annual Nadaka Community Festival in 2011.
That same year over 17 organizations signed a Declaration of Cooperation to create the Nadaka Nature Park and Garden Project to ‘Nurture food, families and nature’. Immediate goals were simple: enlist the community to help fund, build and maintain (for at least 5-years) a neighborhood park and community garden while maximizing local job creation and education opportunities.
…the community’s ownership of the project has also been critical for leveraging resources, maximizing community benefits, and keeping things moving.
Making decisions on public parkland like Nadaka require an inclusive and transparent public process. However, the community’s ownership of the project has also been critical for leveraging resources, maximizing community benefits, and keeping things moving. Maintaining this delicate balance remains a second crucial ingredient to Nadaka’s success. Communication, compromise and shared leadership by all parties was key, but the willingness of City leadership- and especially the City Council- to embrace this new community-based approach was essential.
Nadaka is about fostering community, environmental quality, and economic well-being; not just a park.The approach made community development goals central to every project phase. Nadaka is about building community, environmental quality, and economic well-being; not just a park. Improvements have helped create dozens of local jobs and led to youth service-learning projects to enhance access, complete natural resources inventories, and document local history pulling in the time and resources of new Nadaka supporters at every step.
Voter-approved parks and nature funding remains a third essential ingredient of success.
Voter-approved parks and nature funding remains a third essential ingredient of success. If it wasn’t for the voters, Nadaka would never have been protected or improved. Gresham voters led the way in 1990 by passing an Open Spaces Bond Measure, the first in the Metro region. This bond measure leveraged regional, state and federal funds to purchase and permanently protect hundreds of acres of Gresham’s most spectacular parks and natural areas, including the 10-acre Nadaka open space for $500,000 in 1995. Voters passed similar tri-county bond measures in 1995 and 2006 to protect over 14,000 acres of natural area, including the 2-acre Nelson Property that expanded neighborhood access to Nadaka.
77% of the resources ($1.8 million) to create Nadaka Nature Park and Garden came from voter-approved funding measures.
All told, 77% of the resources ($1.8 million) to create Nadaka Nature Park and Garden came from voter-approved funding measures. That includes the $500,000 investment approved by Gresham voters which was leveraged threefold by attracting $1.5 million in other public funding and $278K in private donations and in-kind support. Nadaka demonstrates that local public investment in parks and natural areas in East County can be dramatically leveraged to create on-the-ground results that make our communities healthier, stronger, and more prosperous. Public and private funders are willing to help communities that invest to help themselves.
Nadaka is a success for one neighborhood that can provide example of what East County can do on a broader scale. Estimates indicate that local funding for parks in East County declined by at least 50% the last 15 years while the population grew by 30%. With shared leadership and citizen action and smart investment, years of dwindling park funding can be turned around and the quality of our communities dramatically improved.
Just like Nadaka, the Springwater District concept will take a grass roots advocacy to engage residents in determining investments in their community and supporting new voter-approved investment in the park system.
The proposed concept of a “Springwater Parks and Community District” presents just such an opportunity. This grassroots effort aims to establish a new parks and community development district among willing cities and school districts in East County. Like Nadaka, the Springwater Parks District concept recognizes that access nature is a core community value and essential to our way-of-life. The draft concepts would invest in shared community assets- pools, ball fields, parks, trails and natural areas- to optimize service, leverage outside funds, and attract new investment and jobs. Just like Nadaka, the Springwater District concept will take a grass roots advocacy to engage residents in determining investments in their community and supporting new voter-approved investment in the park system.
We hope East County residents think big about these possibilities in 2015.
Lee Dayfield is the catalyst behind the Friends of Nadaka. Jim Labbe is Urban Conservationist at Audubon Society of Portland and staffs Audubon’s East Branch office at Leach Botanical Garden.
A big thank you to MetroEast Community Media for putting together this great promotion for the grand opening celebration at Nadaka.
A big thank you to Metro Councilor Shirley Craddick for writing such a great article about Nadaka Nature Park for The Intertwine. Councilor Craddick has been a big supporter of Nadaka going back to when she was a City Councilor in Gresham.
The Gresham Outlook featured a section on “Exceptional Women” which featured the work Lee Dayfield has done at Nadaka. Read about the “magic of Nadaka“.
This Spring 2013, Audubon Society of Portland, Columbia Slough Watershed Council, Friends of Nadaka and the City of Gresham are collaborating with Rosemary Anderson High School (RAHS) to develop and implement a service learning project at Nadaka.
With funding from the City of Gesham and East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District, the Nadaka Urban Forestry Service Learning Project is providing education and technical training for eight RAHS students in the process of developing a laminated root rot assessment, tree removal and planting plan to treat the root infection in Nadaka Nature Park.
Project development by Audubon Society of Portland led the Columbia Slough Watershed Council to contract with Wolftree Inc. to provide hands on natural history training and technical skills to RAHS students in forest ecology, forest pathology, management, community relations and problem solving. Goals for the tree removal and planting prescription are (1) decrease the risk of future hazard trees, (2) reduce the spread of laminated root rot, and (3) enhance wildlife habitat. Additional project support is being provided by RAHS staff, Friends of Nadaka, Oregon Department of Forestry and St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church.
Click here for more information on laminated root rot at Nadaka