The Soul Restoration Center, a colorful cultural and community hub for Black Portland, is closing this month after losing its lease in the historic Albina Arts building in Northeast Portland, founder S. Renee Mitchell said.
Mitchell, a former Oregonian columnist who went on to teach journalism at Roosevelt High School and is also an artist, poet, educator, community organizer and speaker, said that opening the center was the culmination of a long-held dream. Over the past three years, it has been a joy-filled home base for school field trips and forums, art classes, wellness sessions, parent support groups and dance, music and theater performances.
“I wanted anyone, no matter whether they just moved here or were just visiting, to walk into a space where they could let their shoulders down,” Mitchell said. “It’s what I hadn’t received when I first moved here, or ever since.”
She and her staff, including seasoned community organizer Sunshine Dixon, are vacating the space because of money. Mitchell said they had been unable to pay the rent since July after a series of financial tribulations and are moving out in lieu of paying the $15,000 that they owed the landlord.
The one-story brick building at 14 NE Killingsworth has a long history in the Albina neighborhood, once the center of Portland’s Black community and now the focus of an ambitious effort to draw back offspring of residents displaced by gentrification.
In the 1960s, the building was purchased by the Albina Women’s League Foundation and became a hub for the city’s young Black community members and their artistic expressions of all kinds. Mitchell said her understanding was that the Jefferson Dancers helped lay the wooden floor to use as a practice space.
But by the mid-2010s, it had fallen into disrepair and was taken over by the Oregon Department of Justice, which sought a nonprofit to oversee the building. It eventually landed on the Oregon Community Foundation, one of the state’s largest grant-making organizations.
Organizers with Don’t Shoot PDX, a nonprofit that advocates for social and racial justice in the city, launched an effort to buy the building in 2022, alleging that OCF had fallen behind on upkeep. After that, the Oregon Community Foundation sought to transfer oversight of the building to a Black-led organization.
They chose the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center, also known as POIC, a nonprofit that provides education, training and job placement services to underserved youth and adults.
Meanwhile, jazz pianist and composer Darrell Grant, who teaches at Portland State University, had begun a pop-up at the space, intending to spotlight how the arts can seed community revitalization. It was Grant who called the space the “Soul Restoration Center,” a title Mitchell kept when she took it over.
S. Renee Mitchell works to clear out the Soul Restoration Center, which is closing after a three year run.Julia Silverman
Mitchell was also looking for a home base for an organization she founded called I Am M.O.R.E., an acronym for “Making Ourselves Resilient Everyday.” Through the organization, she runs trauma-informed workshops, mindfulness classes and listening circles for Black youth.
The Soul Restoration Center was the perfect space, she said, particularly after the Portland City Council in 2022 set aside $800,000 in grant funding from the Black Youth Leadership Fund, an initiative championed by former city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty that redirected nearly $1 million from the Portland Police Bureau’s budget.
But Mitchell ran into time-consuming problems with the organization chosen to administer the grant, the Black United Fund of Oregon, which she says took months to reimburse her for money she’d spent on programming and a youth entrepreneurial training program. Eventually, Mitchell said, she hired an attorney to help her recoup some of the funds she was owed.
“In the course of our role as fiscal sponsor of the city funding for the Youth Leadership program, we did experience some delays in processing payments due to the need for additional information at times,” said Mike Alexander, who chairs the organization’s board of directors. “We worked directly with Dr. Mitchell in resolving and reimbursing her for a significant number of the items that were in question. Any remaining unresolved items were incorporated into the final report to the city of Portland for their determination.”
Data released by the city in response to a request from The Oregonian/OregonLive shows that the Black United Fund of Oregon spent roughly $560,000 of its initial $755,000 in grant funding and returned the balance to the city.
That money went towards “designing evidence-based curricula, offering hands-on training in areas such as business, finance, advocacy and policy, and providing stipends to encourage youth participation,” said Alison Perkins, a budget and finance spokesperson for the city of Portland.
A second round of funding for the Soul Center came from a $180,000 contract with the Urban League of Portland, which tapped Mitchell to help connect Black community members with services like rental assistance and bill repayment. But there, too, there were conflicts, Mitchell said, including what she described as trouble getting reimbursed for work she said she’d performed.
Mitchell acknowledged being unable to meet the contract’s reporting requirements after losing access to key documents while embroiled in a dispute with her sister, whom she’d hired as her personal assistant to help with I Am M.O.R.E. Her sister and at least one other employee believed they were entitled to funding from the Urban League grant in addition to their agreed-upon salaries, she said.
A spokesperson for the Urban League of Portland said the organization does not comment on contracts or employment, as a rule, to protect “our partners’ privacy.”
But he said it is the organization’s policy to promptly pay its contractors and that many Urban League members were very sorry to hear that the Soul Restoration Center was closing.
“We are a net 30 organization, which means that if we have a contract with someone and they filed an invoice, we will pay them within 30 days,” he said. “The idea that we wouldn’t reimburse someone is counter to our business experience.”
Mitchell’s dispute with her sister escalated until it wound up on the Judge Judy-created syndicated reality TV show “Hot Bench,” in which a three-judge panel considers a case and delivers binding arbitration. The judges ruled in Mitchell’s favor, but not before chiding her for sloppy business practices.
All of it took a toll, Mitchell said, and paying rent on the space took a backseat. Officials at POIC, the nonprofit, tried to help her cover expenses while she sought reimbursements from other organizations, she said. When she was summoned to a meeting with POIC leaders — who did not return a call seeking comment — she said she was told that short of paying in full, she had no option but to vacate the premises.
Last week, Mitchell and Dixon were clearing out the space, boxing up art supplies and starting to take down the art made by and about local and national Black icons that is everywhere you look.
“I was just trying to survive and keep the center open because I believed strongly in its mission and I wanted to complete something I started, and I knew we needed it,” Mitchell said. “So I just kept holding on, like by my fingernails, to keep this space open. And I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
— Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com
