The Porch Coffee Space, located in the middle of the southeast Portland neighborhood, on Kelly Street, is a donation-based and volunteer-run community space. According to their website, they are “actively creating a safe space to build relationships with our neighbors and serve our community.”
Their menu features coffee of different varieties, as well as matcha, chai, hot chocolate and more, all marked with a suggested price or donation for customers. Most importantly though, The Porch is beautiful inside and out as it is designed to be comfortable and welcoming. Painted navy blue and white with their signature porch out front, it is found to be an incredible space to do work, drink coffee, or be with friends.
Outside of building connections during their working hours, they partner with other nearby organizations. “We have different community connections that we really focus on,” The Porch founder Brett Prior explains. Prior continues, discussing current partners: “Kellogg is one of those, Warner Pacific is another one, and then Lilac Meadows is a transitional housing place right up off 77th.” Each of these is one of the community connections that The Porch finds valuable to work with.
The Porch works with these partners to do many projects in order to improve the neighborhood and broader Portland community. Some examples are coat drives, Christmas present drives, donating toiletries to Lilac Meadows, offering discounted prices to Kellogg students, and simply walking around with hot coffee for neighbors.
Alongside their work with others in the community, The Porch also hosts a multitude of events at the interest of the neighbors. “The one that I’m finalizing right now is a guy who came in and just wants to watch the movie Speed,” says Taylor Bolan, the newly-made manager of The Porch. He continues, “[We are] finding ways to accommodate when people want to use this space for more than just getting coffee.” Aside from movie screenings, they have hosted events like baby showers, wedding receptions, art installations, and more.
“I would go to coffee shops to work on my papers and schoolwork and different things with my practicum, and I just loved the idea of community converging in that third space,” states founder Prior, expanding on how the idea for this coffee shop came up. He emphasizes his love for a space to inhabit when you “don’t want to go home. When you don’t want to be in school or at work, you need a place kind of to be.” Prior’s goal of opening a coffee shop came to fruition when he moved to Colorado. However, he landed here in Portland after a friend of his offered him what is now the current Porch space, to create a location purely centered around the community.
Bolan has many tasks as current manager, one of the most important being finding volunteers to work with. He describes this search process as being relatively simple, with most of their volunteers finding The Porch on their own. According to Prior, even just a few months ago there were about eight regular volunteers, yet now there are about 15 currently working. Bolan and Prior express their enthusiasm for this immense growth, with Prior stating that “this community is awesome, they just kind of have adopted this as their space and it’s been really fun to see [the growth].”
The most valuable thing to the staff at The Porch is to have a positive environment for their volunteers and that they are adding to that positivity. “We‘ll get the coffee thing down, that comes with time,” says Prior. “But the number one thing is that you are remembering people’s names, you’re seeing people as they are entering this threshold, and they’re immediately acknowledged as a human being … that they could just feel valued and loved and that their dignity would be maintained.”
The Porch is a non-profit organization; all the donations go directly back into improving their project. However, for non-profits like them it can be difficult to stay economically sufficient with only donations. The Porch is connected — both physically and financially — to the Genesis Project, a church directly next to and literally connected to the coffee space. Prior explains that they fall under the non-profit status of the church. “We want to make sure people know it’s not a bait or a switch,” he says, emphasizing that while the two projects are connected, they are not inseparable: A donation to The Porch is not a direct one to the church. He continues, stating that the relationship with the church is something they are still trying to gauge and figure out but that they find it very valuable.
Prior summarizes the goal of the coffee space: “Coffee is the vessel but hospitality, when you strip it all back, is what we are about.” At The Porch, community is the idea along with having a space that is focused on other people. The Porch is located on 6725 SE Kelly St. To find out more, you can follow them on Instagram @theporchcoffeepdx.
