My name is Maquette and together with other artists and business owners, we volunteer to be the permit-holding, service providers for a once renegade art festival that happens monthly on our neighborhood mainstreet in the Alberta Arts District of Portland, Oregon. 

For the past fifteen years, once a month, especially in the warm ones, our street fills with artists selling their work hanging from chain-link fences or on card tables. Buskers and musicians line the street. Kissing booths gather dollars while a parade of stilt-walking bathers in a tub dance by. The fire performers gather and the food carts billow with steam. Welcome to Last Thursday.

Friends of Last Thursday volunteers are the host of the party. Besides carrying the permit and holding the insurance, we provide the services including the security personnel, a friendly crew of neighborhood ambassadors, toilets, trash and recycling, and street closure. Last Thursday is free for attendees and all artists, performers, buskers, musicians and creatives to participate and vend. We pay for all of this by holding fundraisers, seek out grants, find volunteers and ask for donations. We do not allow direct corporate sponsorship so as not to change the nature of this grassroots, low barrier, micro-business generating, truly creative event. Oh, and did I mention that we had 20,000 visitors to our street for two of the summer months last year?

It is our Street Operations Team that is on site at each of the peak summer events (May-September). They build the street closure signs and barricades to city specs, maintain these in working condition, and place them on each of the 32 side street entrances. Street Ops set out garbage/recycling bins and oversee port-o-potty placement. At 10:00 the event ends and the team opens the street as they remove all of the above via a borrowed truck and trailer.

FoLT is wanting to purchase a used box truck for our Street Operations Team. We will take that box trailer and retro-fit it to carry all of the barricades, street signs, and garbage/recycling bins and what they get filled with at the end of the night. FoLT will then lend out the trailer to other community groups at low cost, with the funds helping FoLT to become more financially sustainable.

Your contribution would support all of the people mentioned in the previous paragraphs. This box trailer can help us support a multicultural community's economic engine, grassroots art, creative thinking, performance opportunities, personal expression, dreaming, et al. Your contribution may be tax deductible. Our fiscal sponsor is the Non-Profit Association of Oregon.

Other Ways:

Shoot, if you don't have $ to give, please take a moment to pass this along to friends and help us get the word out!