Wallowa County

Well, I know you need these diapers to go.

Yeah, but what's interesting is that one of the things they said to me was, but you know one of the disadvantages we have is Wallowa County is like basically the size of the state of Connecticut and Enterprise sits at the top but you've got people in other surrounding communities that, you know, may have to travel 45 minutes to get to that office, or maybe they can go to Legrand.

And they'll tell you, it's like, you know, it's just a very different thing when you've got to drive 45 minutes for everything.

And yet, y'all are saying y'all have exactly

You could probably find diapers everywhere.

The access to affordable diapers is just as real here as it is there.

And in fact, it may be more complicated here because in Wallowa County, you may have to drive 45 minutes, but it's pretty cut and dry.

There's one ODHS office.

Well, I would say that oddly the, the words of wisdom are the same regardless of whether or not we're talking to philanthropic funders or the public sector.

Oftentimes, what we try to do is piecemeal our way to transformative work, right? We say, "Hey, there's this really important project going on in Albina, but there's also several other important projects all over the city, all over the state." Instead of investing in a catalytic way in one place or in two places this year, uh, and then transition into another couple places next year, why don't we give everybody a, a little bit, right? Say we got $20 million to dole out, uh, why don't we give two million to Albina? [chuckles] Why don't we give two million to, to sisters? Why don't we give two million to Wallowa County? And what we create is a world where, uh, everybody has gotten enough to need to come back the next year and have to ask for a little bit more.

And that actually doesn't allow us to work our way out of the challenges that we're facing as communities, right? We need to be able to address our issues in comprehensive ways, um, in 360 degree ways, which means that we need to be able to ask for, uh, everything necessary in order to get beyond the triage work of trying to stop the bleeding and actually cutting to the root of the reasons that we're experiencing the challenges we do in working communities across the state.

So my push to funders would be focus in on work you truly believe in, in a few places.