frank2026 x Portland

Welcome to frank, the foremost gathering for people who use strategic communications to drive change. At frank, we divide our time among great talks by strategists, storytellers and scientists, informative skill sessions and casual opportunities to connect with other sophisticated communicators over coffee or cocktails. Our second stop in 2026-27 is in Portland, Oregon, on October 15, 2026.

Portland has always been a place where people drew lines — and where others crossed them. The Indigenous peoples of this place, among them the Multnomah, Clackamas, and bands of the Chinook, stewarded these lands along the Willamette and Columbia for millennia before displacement and broken treaties reduced a vast, interconnected world to a fraction of its former presence. A century later, the lines were drawn again — red ones, on maps, confining Black workers who'd come to build wartime ships to a single neighborhood called Albina, then erasing even that through freeway construction, eminent domain, and urban "renewal" that demolished more than a thousand homes to build a coliseum and a highway. Portland didn't just fail these communities, it actively unmade them, boundary by boundary.
And yet the city keeps pushing past what it thought was possible. In 2025, Portland seated a city council elected through proportional representation — the first major American city to do so — a structural wager that expanding who holds power changes what becomes possible. Its creative economy, its food culture, its civic institutions have long made it a place where ideas get tested before they travel. So has its willingness, however uneven, to look honestly at what it got wrong.
That tension, between what a place declares itself to be and what it has actually done, between the lines drawn and the lines crossed, is the terrain that change communicators work in every day.
At frank x Portland, we use the city as our classroom. We'll examine how communities rebuild trust, reclaim history, and find their way to something new — out of bounds, by design. Join us for this immersion and come back with sharper tools and a wider sense of what's possible.

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Info: Small group topical discussions

Info: Small group topical discussion

Event venue & nearby stays

Ecotrust Building, 721 Northwest 9th Avenue, Portland, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.

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