Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025
Our fourth annual Community Impact Week has wrapped! With nearly 40 projects across Clark, Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington counties, and over 400 volunteeers mobilized, we've collectively made a huge impact across our region. This week is special to our team, it helps us connect directly with the work we do in Housing, Early Learning, and Disaster Resilience all year. It introduces us and the volunteers who join us to a diverse array of incredible nonprofits doing amazing work across our region. And it reminds us of the importance of mobilizing the caring power of our community, encouraging our work for the year to come.
Thank you Portland for showing up and helping out! This city is truly a beautiful place full of loving, giving people, who are ready to work if you give them a worthy task. Check out some of the photos and project highlights below for more information, and we'll see you next year for Community Impact Week round five!
Laurelhurst Park Clean Up
We brought out a huge group of volunteers to help beautify the already pristine Laurelhurst Park. Wanna know the secret to how it stays so gorgeous in this park? Volunteers! We were lucky enough to be guided by the experience of several longtime volunteer leaders. In a moment of kismet, we ran into Joy Cooper (pictured above), a former United Way of the Columbia-Willamette board member from the '70s, at Laurelhurst Park. She was leading our volunteer group there in mulching, planting, and cleaning up the park, and shared how volunteering ensures our community can enjoy this beautiful space:
"Hands On is amazing. Our volunteers work so hard, they never complain about what we ask them to do and it's not clean work!" Cooper said. "This park looks as good as it does, despite the low number of city employees to keep it up, because of Hands On and the volunteers they bring."
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ReBuilding Center
Talk about a gem of a place! If you're ever up in Mississippi neighborhood, check out this awesome resource for building materials, education, and skill-building. We brought out a team of volunteers to help clean up the space, both indoors and outdoors.
One volunteer said, "I can't believe I never knew about this place. I live in the neighborhood and have driven by so many times, I love that I was able to discover it while volunteering at the same time!"
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Human Access Project - Duckworth Dock
We had over fifty volunteers join Human Access Project and Solve to clear several tons of concrete debris along the Willamette River’s east shore near Duckworth Dock. In just two hours, the crew removed between 10 and 20 tons of rubble—revealing a natural pebble beach unseen for decades.
The cleanup transformed the once debris-strewn shoreline into a more inviting public space, removing rebar, fallen branches, and concrete chunks by hand and rearranging large rocks to level the bank. There's something deeply powerful about joining in a human chain to clear out space for recreation, the ease that it brings to have many hands working on a hard task. It reminded us that there are so many projects to get done in our imperfect, but beautiful city, but when you join in community to work toward a shared goal, the immensity of those tasks becomes doable.
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After a week of community building, sweat, friendly banter, and hard work, our team at Hands On Greater Portland and United Way of the Columbia-Willamette are filled with just one feeling: gratitude! Thank you to all the partner organizations who gave us a shared goal, all the volunteers who came out to do good, and to our sponsors - Holman, Colliers, Metro, and Kind - for helping us make this week a reality!