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Michael Dunne From KLCC Studios, this is Oregon on the Record. I'm Michael Dunne. Now is both a great time and a horrible time to be a nonprofit. It's great because there is so much need and the work is amazingly impactful. It's horrible because widespread funding cuts at the federal level have imperiled so many organizations. Yet despite such existential challenges, the work of nonprofits gets done because of the staff and volunteers who keep it going. All this week, we're going to feature nonprofits in our community who may not be household names but are nevertheless doing amazing work, sometimes with very little in the way of resources. Today on the show, we'll bring you the story of Siuslaw Vision and the work it does to improve communities on the coast and in the Siuslaw region. That's next on Oregon on the Record.
Will Acosta is the director of Siuslaw Vision. Will, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
Will Acosta Thank you, Michael. The pleasure is all mine, and it's exciting to be here.
Michael Dunne Yeah, why don't you tell our listening audience what Siuslaw Vision is?
Acosta Absolutely. Siuslaw Vision is a nonprofit organization here in the Siuslaw region, which is western Lane County. That encompasses the communities of Mapleton, Florence, Deadwood, Swisshome, Dunes City and Glenada. It's a pretty large region here in western Lane County. We are basically building a better Siuslaw community together. Siuslaw Vision convenes, catalyzes and connects individuals and organizations who want to improve the quality of life for people living out here. Our goal is to make sure that everyone living in these communities is working, healthy, educated, connected, creative and active. So we have our hands in quite a few different pots, but essentially, we are just a community-building nonprofit. That's what we're all about.
Michael Dunne Okay, maybe give us some details. How many staff people do you have? How big is your board? Maybe talk a little bit about when you were founded, those sorts of things.
Acosta Absolutely. Siuslaw Vision was founded in 2018 after a communitywide survey determined the need for a visioning group. That led to a fiscal sponsorship and some funding and backing from the Ford Family Foundation and the Western Lane Community Foundation, and they really helped us get our feet on the ground and become established here as an official nonprofit, an official 501(c)(3). We're a fairly small group. We have about seven board members. We recently added Russ Pearson from Lane Community College, and then we have three staff members: myself and two others. We have an outreach coordinator, Kate Harnedy, and our connections coordinator, as we like to call her, Lindsay Phillips. They do fantastic work and have been here in the community for quite a long time. I myself have been living in Swisshome, just up Highway 36, for about two years now, so I'm relatively new to the area. I migrated over from Texas to escape some of the heat and really just fell in love with this whole place.
Michael Dunne Yeah. You know, in researching your organization, it really looks like your organization is a connector. Talk about the collaborations you've formed throughout your service territory, your service area.
Acosta Absolutely. That's kind of what we are first and foremost, Michael. As you said, we are connectors and conveners. We're all about getting people together who are trying to accomplish similar goals. In that pursuit, we've established some fantastic connections with the Mapleton School District, as well as with other programs and nonprofit organizations in Lane County. We've established and helped out some smaller organizations, for example, the Deadwood Resilience Collaborative, which is a group of two organizations coming out of Deadwood: Deadwood Community Action and Deadwood Creek Services, which facilitate the community center up there in Deadwood. We recently fiscally sponsored them through the United Way, and they were recently awarded a rather large grant to jump-start their two-year project, which is going to get started here soon. Right now, they're focusing on resilience and emergency preparedness. Recently, they were granted an emergency trailer full of goods and supplies you might need during an emergency. So they have a trailer full of MREs, walkie-talkies and all sorts of emergency preparedness tools and items. This grant is going to help support them in putting up a repeater system throughout the hills in Deadwood. As you know, whenever the power goes out or there's some sort of large emergency, connectivity can be quite an issue up there. Having this repeater system in place so community members can communicate at long distances is going to help tremendously with resilience, and this is also going to establish the Deadwood Community Center as a resilience hub. That's kind of what we've done recently. We've done all sorts of partnerships and programs in the past, and I'm getting to learn all about them right now since I've just come into this role. This is my second month in this position.
Another thing Siuslaw Vision is very proud of is that we helped start the Florence Farmers Market, which is rather large now. That was an initiative of Siuslaw Vision and is now a standalone nonprofit organization. I'm actually involved quite heavily with them as well. I help manage the market on Tuesdays, so I'm tied to them as well, and they're a fantastic group. We also work a lot with the Oregon State University Extension Service, LCOG, which is the Lane Council of Governments, LCC and Live Healthy Lane. Really, all of these community programs and organizations are ultimately trying to help the community and build programs and tools for community members to utilize and make their lives easier. We've partnered with a lot of them in the past on specific projects, or we've put them together with other folks so they can work together to achieve that same goal.
Michael Dunne Okay, some of our listeners certainly know the area, but may not be as familiar with some of the unique challenges people living in the Siuslaw region are experiencing these days.
Acosta Absolutely, that's a great question. The Siuslaw region is a rather large area, as we all know. Lane County is huge, and western Lane County is humongous. It really takes up a large area.
Michael Dunne We know we're big when a former Texan says it's a big county.
Acosta Yeah, absolutely. There are big counties in Texas, but trust me, Lane County is almost near the size of Connecticut. It's pretty big. So we encompass the communities of Mapleton, Swisshome, Deadwood, Florence, and then you go south of Florence and you get Dunes City and Glenada. Those are really the communities that fall into our region along the Siuslaw River. These communities face many challenges, especially those upriver communities like Mapleton, Swisshome and Deadwood. They're rural communities, so there's not a lot of access to public transportation. There's not a lot of access to health care. The emergency response time up there is at least 30 minutes, maybe more. So those are just a few of the challenges. And then you start to think about some of the environmental challenges. We're prone to landslides, prone to flooding and things like that. So again, those are just a few of the challenges we face, along with access to reliable internet connectivity and lots of other smaller, niche problems we have to deal with just being such a rural area. That's kind of where Siuslaw Vision steps in, along with other organizations, to help solve some of these problems. That's where the United Way grant for the Deadwood groups is really going to help boost their emergency preparedness and resilience.
For those who may not be familiar, if you just take Highway 126 all the way out toward Florence, that's where you get into our region. You'll get to Mapleton, go left to Florence, or go right up Highway 36 toward Junction City and Triangle Lake. That's where you'll find Swisshome and Deadwood, along with all the other tiny communities that exist there.
Michael Dunne Yeah, yeah.
Acosta Huge area.
Michael Dunne Yeah, absolutely. On this show, I've talked to a lot of nonprofits, and a lot of them have told me that fairly recently, funding has been a real challenge, especially for organizations that rely on federal or even state funding at certain times. I'm wondering, are you seeing challenges increase? And is this idea of local groups coming together to support themselves, as you've just detailed, not only important today but probably going to be even more important going forward?
Acosta Absolutely, this is a huge topic of conversation. In fact, I just had a meeting with staff this morning, and this was a big chunk of our conversation: building sustainable funding. A lot of nonprofits, like you said, really rely on grant funding. Most nonprofits are mostly, if not entirely, funded by grants, whether that's government grants from the federal government or the state, or foundation grants, smaller grants coming from foundations throughout their area, state or community. That's been a big topic of conversation, like you said, and it has been challenging. There's been a lot of questions up in the air about whether federal funding is going to be sustainable. There have been a lot of stories recently of people being granted money and then immediately having to return it. It's almost a day-to-day occurrence now, where it's like, well, that may be the story today, but what's it going to look like tomorrow? That whole landscape is changing so dramatically and so quickly. It's tough to have to rely on those funds, and that goes along with sourcing money from smaller foundations as well. I think there are a lot of challenges, and a lot of foundations are reworking how they award funding and who they're going to prioritize. And this is big picture, but the use of AI when it comes to grant applications is creating an overload of applications for funders. That's making it not only harder for foundations to pick through applications and choose who they fund, but it's also making it harder for everyone else who's trying to get funding. Whether it was maybe 50 applications in the past, now there are 500. So there are lots of different challenges we're facing right now.
This is a great opportunity to talk about the diversification of funding for different nonprofits and what Siuslaw Vision has done recently that's been working. We've been partnering with different organizations and groups, but we've also set up a fiscal sponsorship program. This is similar to what we did for the Deadwood organizations. We were a fiscal sponsor for them, which allows an organization that doesn't have nonprofit status to go and seek grant funding through Siuslaw Vision. There's a small fee for service there, but that's another way we can work together to solve problems in the community and also raise a little money while doing it.
Michael Dunne We're going to take a break. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. When we come back, more of our conversation with Siuslaw Vision as part of our weeklong feature on local nonprofits.
And we're back. I'm Michael Dunne, and you're listening to Oregon on the Record. Let's get back to our conversation with Siuslaw Vision as part of our weeklong feature on local nonprofits. Speaking of money and where it goes, let's talk a little bit about, you've talked about some of them, but maybe talk about some of the specific programs you're excited about that Siuslaw Vision runs.
Acosta One thing that's been a big focus for Siuslaw Vision has been catalyzing child care in the Siuslaw region. This has been a development over the past year or so from a child care working group that Siuslaw Vision put together, involving all sorts of people from throughout the community: folks involved in local government, different organizations and businesses. This year, in fact this month, we'll be opening an early learning center, which will add a new center co-located with affordable housing, with four early learning classrooms, in Florence. This was an initiative of the Siuslaw Childcare Friends nonprofit, which Siuslaw Vision offered formation and capacity-building support for. This early learning center is actually going to open this month. They're going to do the ribbon-cutting. I'm not entirely sure on which date, I'll need to double check my calendar, but that's something we're super excited about, and it's been, again, a long time in development, really just to boost some of the child care capacity within the community. That's something we continue to strive and work toward. The opening of this early learning center is really an achievement we can be proud of, not only for ourselves as a community-building nonprofit, but really for the community in general. We offered capacity-building support for this new nonprofit, and they were able to find the funds and really get this ball rolling on building this community space that will provide affordable housing and, of course, early learning classrooms for children.
Michael Dunne Yeah. You know, as you're talking, I'm thinking, in the for-profit world, they're often called incubators, or sometimes they're at universities, sometimes they're on their own, where they provide startup resources for a business to grow. It kind of sounds like that's what you do in the nonprofit world.
Acosta Yeah, it's interesting. We do offer quite a bit of capacity building for newer organizations, or organizations that are just getting started. We're able to fiscally sponsor these organizations so they can seek grant funding prior to actually becoming an official 501(c)(3). Or if they are a 501(c)(3), we can not only offer fiscal sponsorship of the organization, but we can fiscally sponsor a specific grant. We can help them apply and do some administrative, behind-the-scenes work for them in that grant-seeking endeavor. That's kind of what we've done for a few different Deadwood organizations. We've been able to help them out either through fiscal sponsorship of a specific grant, or by fiscally sponsoring an organization that may not have nonprofit status yet. That's something we've been focusing on: allowing the resources for that kind of capacity building and assistance for smaller organizations in the community, and putting people together who may want to solve a specific issue so they can get together and start working on it, and maybe that leads to a newer organization or nonprofit. So it's pretty interesting how we've been able to fit this fee-for-service model into how we operate.
Every year we put on a grant-writing workshop as well. We have a fantastic grant writer we contract with. She's a grant-writing professional. Her name is Susie Lacer, and she's great. Every year we've worked with her to put on this workshop to get local community members and organizations together to talk about the grant-writing landscape, how that's always changing, and how we can be successful writing a grant, getting it submitted and, hopefully, being awarded that money.
Michael Dunne Yeah, yeah. So if folks listening right now, especially if they haven't heard about you, how can they get involved? How can they support you?
Acosta Yeah, absolutely. Head to our website, siuslawvision.org. From there, we have a donation page, but you can also just read about all of what we do. You can read about Siuslaw Vision. You can read about the region. You can read about us and our team, our philosophy, our community-building approach, who we partner with, who has funded us in the past. Really, just everything about our organization. Again, you can look at our focus areas, which are: we want folks to be working, healthy, educated, connected, creative and active. Some of the different programs we offer. In fact, this is a great opportunity for me to plug our event later this year. On Oct. 6, that's a Tuesday, from 11:45 a.m. to 3 p.m. out in Florence at the Florence Event Center, we'll be hosting a resources roundup, which is a fun name. I like to call it a funders forum. We're just getting together all sorts of different funders from throughout the state, as well as the Lane County region. This is in partnership with NAO, but we'll have Western Lane Community Foundation out there, Three Rivers, which is a local funder here in Florence, I believe Ford Family Foundation is involved, and a few others. This is going to be a great opportunity for folks to come together and get face time with these funders, ask them specific questions, talk to them and get introduced, and start building these relationships.
But check out our website, go on there, see how you may want to get connected with us. We also have a few different resources we offer for the community. If anybody out here in the Siuslaw region, or even just in Lane County, has an event or a program, or whatever it may be, if you have something you want to get out to the public, we have a few different resources. Again, we have a press release form, which you can fill out real quickly on our website, and that's going to send it out to all the local publications here in the Siuslaw region. In addition to that, we also have what we call our RiverCal. This is just a global calendar of all the different events and things happening in the Lane County area, mostly western Lane County, but this is again a resource for everyone, so we want everyone to be able to utilize it. Check it out, go on there again, siuslawvision.org, and check out some of these different resources. See how you may be able to partner with us or work with us. And if you just want to make a donation, that'd be fantastic as well.
Michael Dunne That sounds great, that sounds great. He's Will Acosta, director of Siuslaw Vision. Will, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much.
Acosta Thank you, Michael. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me on here. This was great.
Michael Dunne That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show, we'll bring you the story of another nonprofit that, like an amoeba, expands and flexes to fill needs in South Lane County. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
