Lewis & Clark and Albina Vision Trust are launching an ambitious new chapter in their partnership, backed by a four-year, $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. The funding will support “Face-to-Face,” an initiative that connects Albina residents with Lewis & Clark students and faculty through for-credit courses, research, and creative projects, as well as a summer institute. The award recognizes Lewis & Clark as a national leader in transforming college curriculum and extracurricular activities to better engage and serve the broader community.
For many years, Albina was a thriving neighborhood that was home to 80 percent of Black Portlanders. But decades of discriminatory “urban renewal” policies, including redlining, freeway expansions, eminent domain, and more recently gentrification, have displaced residents and disrupted community bonds. In 2025, Albina Vision Trust, a community-driven nonprofit dedicated to reinvigorating and nurturing the neighborhood with housing and services to center and reroot Black residents, announced a multiyear partnership with Lewis & Clark to co-create an education and economic empowerment hub in Albina.
Face-to-Face is central to this effort. Lewis & Clark students and members of the community will participate together in a track of five new collaboratively designed and taught courses in public humanities, along with workshops, creative productions, and a speaker series—all addressing topics central to Albina.
Programming will include an innovative four-week York Summer Institute for the Study of Place. Using interdisciplinary methods and working with community experts and L&C faculty from a variety of fields, institute participants will examine the Indigenous history of the land Portland occupies; the Lewis & Clark expedition and its legacy; the history of race in Oregon; and current challenges in the region. While colleges elsewhere in the country have undertaken similar efforts to explore their institutions’ relationships to slavery, the York Summer Institute will be the first such effort to address the relationship between higher education and Indigenous dispossession, with particular attention to how that dispossession ripples through more recent policies such as redlining to contemporary urban issues in the Pacific Northwest.
“The Mellon Foundation’s investment underscores that humanities skills, including inquiry, collaboration, research, reflection, creativity, and compelling communication, remain central to solving real-world problems,” notes President Robin Holmes-Sullivan. “They’re called the humanities because they are what make us human. Machines and AI cannot replicate or replace the kind of thinking and action needed for communities like Albina, and all of Portland, to flourish.”
“We chose Lewis & Clark as our education partner because they share our belief that education must be woven into the fabric of community,” says Winta Yohannes, executive director of Albina Vision Trust. “Too much of Albina’s history has reflected the destruction resulting from discriminatory urban policies, including destroyed homes, businesses, and community resources. Face-to-Face is about co-creating knowledge and opportunity through the understanding that our shared grasp of history can help us create a future brighter than our past.”
Lewis & Clark has an established record of creating community-engaged courses, often centered on projects that inform policymaking, provide expertise to local nonprofit service providers, preserve community resources, or directly serve community members. The Mellon grant will deepen these efforts with a sustained focus on the Albina Vision Trust partnership, expanding community-based knowledge and strengthening educational opportunities for Albina residents.
Albina Vision Trust
