The Continuance Institute

The Circles · C-28

Portland (Oregon) Circle

A city circle organised around other people's fruit trees.

Place
Portland, Oregon, United States
Recognised
1995
Affiliated house
Orchard House
Assigned steward
Naomi Whitlock
Convener
Terrell BoyceCabinetmaker. Term began 2025; second and final consecutive year.
Ordinary meeting
Weekly, Tuesday evenings; business quarterly
Typical attendance
21 to 29
Access
Open to visitors

Local history

Recognised in 1995, one of the first circles in the west. Its early years were unstable — three conveners in four years and a period in 1998 when it met in a car park — and its recovery is the case most often cited in the stewardship's papers on why circles should not be judged by a bad eighteen months.

Gleaning began in 2001 with one member, a ladder, and a neighbour's plum tree. The circle now works with a regional network and keeps a kitchen going for six weeks of the year at a pace it describes in its return as 'not repeatable and not negotiable'.

It is the only circle to have twice asked, and twice been refused, permission to hold a lease. Both letters are in the archive.

The outward obligation

Food

Gleaning and kitchen, held with a regional gleaning network and the district food pantry.

Fruit picked from unharvested trees in season, processed in the circle's kitchen, and given to the pantry. Roughly nine tons a year.

The forms it carries

  • The Quiet Twelve

    Twelve minutes are kept before the reading. Nothing is assigned to the silence.

  • The Repair Table

    A table, a bench, or a marked shelf where ordinary objects wait to be mended.

  • The Boundary Walk

    At the start of each season the practical boundary is walked and what is wrong with it is written down.

  • The Weather Entry

    Before the first shared meal of the month, one person writes the weather in the house book.

Local variation. The boundary walk is done in orchards rather than at a boundary, and the notes it produces go to the gleaning rota rather than to a repair table.

The shared forms, as they are kept in the houses

Also attached to Orchard House

Elsewhere in North America