Author: Team BerniePDX

Celebrate 10 years of BerniePDX and say goodbye to the grassroots group at our BBQ Potluck on Saturday, Sept 13, 3-5pm, at Mt Scott Park (Site D)! 

Please RSVP at http://tiny.cc/bpdx25 so we know how much food to get.

Reconnect with old friends and make new ones as we eat, play games, stencil Bernie art, reminisce, and discuss next steps post-BerniePDX.

We’ll provide hamburgers, veggie burgers, and some snacks. Please feel free to bring a dish, drinks, or yard game to share. 

Stencil your own “I ♥️ Bernie” tote bag! (Tote bags are free while supplies last.)

From Friends of Preschool for All: Over the past month, our coalition and our community came together to say, NO CUTS, NO COMPROMISES. Thank you for every email, phone call, public comment, and PB&J assembly line for toddlers at evening meetings.

Together, we won Preschool for All – AGAIN! The tax cuts are paused!

Send a letter calling on Kaiser CEO Greg Adams to keep their promises at the bargaining table and pledge that Kaiser is here to stay!

Recently, on August 7th, community and labor filled Terry Schrunk Plaza standing with OFNHP members and the Alliance of Health Care Unions to demand that Kaiser show the respect these healthcare professionals deserve. We demand that Kaiser finally honor their agreements and settle a contract that ensures safe staffing, fair pay, and a stable future for our care systems. When healthcare professionals win a good contract, patients get the future of care they need!

Meanwhile, it has come to our attention that Kaiser recently rescinded an agreement that would have required a successor owner to maintain the employment of current health professionals and honor workers’ Collective Bargaining Agreement, should Kaiser choose to sell. Send a letter today!

Send your letter here!

From Welcome Home coalition: Our coalition stands firmly in its value that everyone deserves a safe, stable place to call home, and ultimately, a shelter bed is not a home. With the Mayor struggling to open his 1,500 new overnight shelter beds, we ask you to join us in encouraging him to reinvest that funding into housing resources. Rather than growing our stock of shelter beds, we can free up more shelter space by moving people out of shelter and into a safe place to call home.

Only 1 in 5 people in Multnomah County are moving from shelter into stable housing. These numbers are even more disappointing at mass shelters managed by the City of Portland. As it stands, only 12% of people living at city-run mass shelters were connected to housing. This means that the majority of people who accessed city-run shelters returned to homelessness. This system failure is due to a lack of resources that move people out of shelter and into housing. Ask the City to invest in what works!

Click here to send your letter!

Preschool for All, our free, year-round, full-day public preschool program, is under attack, again. Free preschool for all is about making our region more affordable for families. The proposal to cut it will hurt our local economy by cutting jobs, increasing costs for families, and hurting small businesses. Take 30 seconds to email the county commissioners using this easy form and tell them “Hands off Preschool for All!”

Multnomah County is hosting a series of public meetings in August on Preschool for All. Preschool for All is still under threat. Please come out to show your support for the program and urge the County Commissioners to save it! 

Date: August 6, 2025 | 9:30 am – 12:00 pm
What: Preschool for All Board Briefing #1
Where: Multnomah County Board Room (501 SE Hawthorne, Portland)
Topics: Mechanics of indexing, parameters for tax year 2026 changes

Date: August 19, 2025 | 9:00 am – 12:00 pm
What: Preschool for All Board Briefing #2
Where: Multnomah County Board Room (501 SE Hawthorne, Portland)
Topics: Economic benefits & value of PFA, the path to universal coverage, impacts of changes, debunking economic myths, and PFA TAG recommendation

Date: August 20, 2025 | 9:30 am – 12:30 pm
What: Preschool for All Work Session
Where: Multnomah County Board Room (501 SE Hawthorne, Portland)
Topics: Discussion of Board proposals

Date: August 20, 2025 | 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
What: Preschool for All Public Listening Session
Where: Multnomah County Board Room (501 SE Hawthorne, Portland)

Date: August 21, 2025 | 10:35 am – 11:35 am
What: First Reading on Preschool for All Board Proposals
Where: Multnomah County Board Room (501 SE Hawthorne, Portland)

Date: August 28, 2025 | 10:40 am – 11:40 am
What: Second reading and vote on Preschool for All Board Proposals
Where: Multnomah County Board Room (501 SE Hawthorne, Portland)

From Friends of Preschool for All: You may remember that Multnomah County Commissioner July Brim-Edwards was the only one of the Commissioners who didn’t speak out against the Governor’s undemocratic moves to kill Preschool for All, and that’s because she shares the Governor’s goals. But her strategy relies on something a little sneakier: on August 28, Commissioner Brim-Edwards will bring a vote on “indexing” the program to the full County Board. Indexing sounds like a common-sense tool, but it’s a covert guarantee to cut this program.

Indexing refers to adjusting for inflation the income thresholds above which the tax is levied. It’s touted by business interests as “common practice”, but not even the state of Oregon indexes high incomes to inflation, and neither should Multnomah County. Inflation affects high income groups differently – they are more insulated and their incomes also rise more quickly than those with lower incomes.

Jeff Renfro, Multnomah County Economist, has been clear that indexing means program cuts, and that the program would go into the red, with no reserves, two years after it hits full universality. That will mean serious cuts, and lost slots, just after it finally meets its promise to the voters.

Program cuts means lost jobs, increased childcare expenses, a heavier burden on working families, women leaving the workplace, and small businesses shuttering. It means the rich keep their money while families are screwed.

What can you do?

There will be several opportunities to speak up before this crucial vote, including at our Town Hall on 8/13. RSVP here! And stay tuned as we share additional critical opportunities to give testimony to keep up the pressure: Hands off Preschool for All. They all made promises to protect this program during the SB106 snafu, and they need to honor those commitments. REMIND THEM.

“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), will hold a town hall on Thursday with more than 100 teachers and educational leaders at the U.S. Capitol to discuss the teacher pay crisis impacting schools, students and communities.

Joining Sanders at the town hall will be Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.); Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT); Princess Moss, vice president of the National Education Association (NEA); and educators from across the country.

‘It is simply unacceptable that, in the richest country in the history of the world, 40% of teachers have to work extra jobs just to make ends meet. The situation has become so absurd that four hedge fund managers on Wall Street make more money in a single year than every kindergarten teacher in America combined — nearly 120,000 teachers,’ Sanders said.” Read the rest here.

The event will take place Thursday, July 24, at 9:30am and be livestreamed on Bernie’s social media accounts.

RSVP Here for this virtual event.

The Trump Administration is targeting immigrant Oregonians, harming families and communities across the state. More than 90 organizations formed the Oregon for All (OFA) coalition to protect and defend immigration communities.

Join Portland for All to hear from OFA leaders Isa Peña of Innovation Law Lab, Ana Muñoz of Latino Network and Romeo Sosa of Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition on how we can help our immigrant neighbors, friends and colleagues.

If you are or were a PFA family or teacher, please take this short Friends of Preschool for All survey to share your story of positive impacts and suggestions for improvements!

We need your help to defend Preschool for All from the 1% and Governor Kotek, who’s joined their campaign to kill off our national model of a program – on track to be available free to all kids in Multnomah County by Fall 2030.  The program is:

• Offering lots of choices for families of schedule, language, cultural context and size of setting 
• Providing livable wages, benefits and professional development for teachers
• Funded by a small tax on high-income households