Nancy Cosper Page 10 RAIN Oct./Nov. 1983 The State of the Umbrella by Rob Baird To say that the Rain Umbrella, Inc., is in "a state of transition" has become something of a cliche. It often seems to be a permanent transition! Part of our continuing change is staff turnover, and there has been an unusual amount of that during the past year-and-a-half. Even more significant is the change that has been taking place in the goals and activities of the organization. The Umbrella is made up of two separate, but closely interconnected parts. RAIN magazine consfitutes one half. The other half is the Rain Community Resource Center, which was formed in early 1981 by the merger of the magazine with the Portland Community Resource Center, a citizen involvement organization. (For details on that merger, see John Ferrell's "Magazine from Ecotopia" article elsewhere in this issue.) The goal of the new Rain Community Resource Center was to foster and support community self-reliance activities in Portland and the Pacific Northwest. Put another way, the Resource Center helped the Rainmakers to implement their original goal of doing locally and regionally what they were writing about in the magazine. The Resource Center started off with an ambitious one-and-a-half-year Community Self-Reliance (C.S.R.) Project funded by the Northwest Area Foundation, RAIN TODAY: (L to R) Steoe Johnson, Rob Baird, Kris Nelson, John Ferrell, Ann Borcjuist, Jeff Strang. Mervyns/Dayton Hudson Foundation, Collins Foundation, Yarg Foundation, Templeton Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, and the Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust. As part of the C.S.R. Project, the Resource Center (together with the RAIN magazine staff) published Knowing Home: S tudies for a Possible Portland. A wide range of information services and a number of community education programs were also implemented through the C.S.R. Project. Today, the Resource Center continues to provide a similar range of community services. The Rain Library, which is open to the public three days a week, has over 4,500 books and receives 600 periodicals from around the world. Library topics include renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, bioregionalism, community self-reliance, community computer applications, and much more. Our responses to information requests from individuals and organizations range from simple referrals to detailed research reports. Forums, workshops, and conferences on a variety of community self-reliance topics are another continuing concern of Resource Center staff, and Rain also seeks to foster self-reliance through participation in community projects and organizational coalitions in the Portland area. Recent examples of Rain Community Resource Center activities include: • coordination of a conference on "The Future of Agriculture in the Northwest"; • presentation of a forum (in cooperation with Portland State University) that featured "soft energy" advocate Amory Lovins; • organization (in cooperation with the Eliot Energy House) of a farmers market in a low-income Portland neighborhood; • computer system design assistance to community groups, including development of an arts resources database and a neighborhood needs and resources database; • assistance in setting up community gardens and a small truck farm for local Southeast Asian refugees; • co-administration (with Oregon Appropriate Technology in Eugene) of the U.S. Department of Energy's Appropriate Technology Small Grants Program for Oregon. The initial Community Self-Reliance Project funding ran out in August 1982, and since then, the Resource Center operation has been funded by grants and contracts for specific projects. (RAIN magazine is self- supporting through subscriptions and advertising but
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