Kathy Stromvig is in the process of helping inner southeast Portland tell its own story, and she is using community asset mapping to do it. Kathy is the Coordinator of the Inner Southeast Portland Caring Community. The kind of network that Kathy is building is rooted in community member's desire to be an active part of the place where they live.
Nobody can describe inner southeast Portland better than the people who live there.
Fortunately, there are lots of people and institutions that have been committed to the project. The Caring Community has been working with capstone students, who are involved in a community service based learning experience at Portland State University. The capstone students, under the direction of Meg Merrick, have taken the lead in creating and distributing a survey that will later be used to form a database of resources that are in or near inner southeast Portland. Eventually, the database will be a user-friendly resource accessible to any community member at Cleveland High School. It will also be loaded into a Geographic Information System, enabling people to map the locations of community resources.