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Our Story

Face-to-Face Portland makes a long-term commitment to be an anti-racist organization. This is intentional work and we want to be thoughtful and deliberate on how we address the future while aligning with the expectations of people of color. We will not be disingenuous and false-hearted at a time when we have to stand by our black community and join them in implementing change. We look forward to meeting as a team and navigating our future with guidance from our values of UNIFYING people, REDEFINING our approach, TRANSFORMING relationships, creating CHANGE.

We believe that trust between police and all communities is possible.

We believe that we can build cohesive connections between cops, kids, and our community.

Face-to-Face Portland is committed to collaboration with people and organizations to collectively build a new approach and bridge some gaps.

Our Liaison Family Program (LFP) connects police officers with families in the Portland area. We ask Liaison Families to provide support, friendship, community history, community events, area introductions, and anything else that will help integrate our new police officers into their community. And our community is given the chance to share their different, dynamic, diverse voices and play a vital role in shaping the future of our city. We help make face-to-face connections between people who wish to participate, based on mutual trust and respect.

The wide gulf between our police officers and our own communities is a growing opposition that we cannot afford to ignore. We all share responsibility for creating our future, our best future.

We are fortunate to have the skills to support and create positive transformation in my community.

Our passion is unifying people and developing unique relationships. Each person should have an equal voice in the complexities of the relationship and impacts of the genuine connections that are made.

We believe most human beings want to do what is right. Our commonalities bond us together and help us navigate through the challenges we face as a country. We all deserve to have a voice, and I want to help people find and use their voices!

It’s up to all of us to assure a future of opportunity and hope, for ourselves and for our children. Our police, our community.

Getting Formal

In October of 2017, a group of people came together dreaming of one vision—trust between police and all communities.

Some of us grew up in Portland, some of us have police officers in our close circle of loved ones (some of us don’t); the one thing we all had in common is that we believed we could use the power of relationships to initiate positive solutions in our city. Together, we believe we share responsibility for creating our future, our best future.

Face-to-Face Portland—our team, our founder, our families, our police—have a desire to make positive change, we believe in doing the right thing, and we understand that we hold a unique opportunity to inspire others through genuine connections with each other.