What We Did

Working with community engagement partner We All Rise, Field States facilitated a structured listening process across community-based organizations, OMSI staff and board, and district stakeholders. We emerged with a strong set of community-informed priorities, but OMSI did not have a clear plan for embedding them into the district development that would follow, beyond the conventional Community Benefit Agreement framework. We had seen the CBA negotiation process derail high-profile Portland projects in recent years, and felt that a 10+ year district development should involve the community in a continuous process of defining civic value, rather than flattening value to a single, tensely negotiated and static transaction. Our insight was that CBAs fail not because they lack good intentions, but because they assume that the civic value of a development can be fully defined before the development begins. We designed an alternative governance structure – the Civic Value Framework – a learning-based approach that brings stakeholders together to discover and create value at every phase of development, adapting as the district evolves rather than enforcing terms set in a different era.