GoFundMe: Help WeShine Keep Lighting The Way Forward 🧡

Our dear friends over at WeShine have started a GoFundMe for their important mission. We are forever grateful for our collaboration with WeShine. We teach art workshops at three alternative shelter villages as well as work together to paint murals and fences, and plant greenspaces to beautify the homes for residents. It is a truly heartwarming partnership!

Please read below and considering donating.

Help WeShine Keep Lighting the Way for Portland's Most Vulnerable Neighbors

Right now, in three Portland neighborhoods, people who had nowhere to sleep are waking up safe.

They're making coffee in a shared kitchen. They're feeding a neighbor's dog. They're walking to a health care appointment, maybe for the first time in years. For many of them, this is what healing feels like.

WeShine Initiative makes this possible. Since 2021, we've operated small, community-centered transitional shelter villages in Portland, places where neighbors know each other's names, where staff show up every day with lived experience and genuine care, and where people don't just survive their housing crisis, they begin to thrive.

The work is succeeding. We are fully staffed; all three of our village sites are operating at capacity; we have an impressive rate of "graduations" to housing; and we are in the middle of significant improvements to our physical infrastructure to serve more people more effectively.

But here's the hard truth: the public funding environment for homelessness services is under real pressure right now. And like many nonprofits doing this work, we've had to absorb costs our budget wasn't built to carry. We've done it because the alternative was to slow down work that simply can't wait, but it has left our administrative reserves thinner than they should be.

We're turning to our community because you've always shown up for us.

Your gift today goes directly toward keeping WeShine strong, covering operating needs, protecting the capacity we've built, and ensuring that when the next opportunity arises to expand or improve our services, we're ready to seize it. A healthy organization is the foundation everything else rests on.

This isn't a crisis. It's a moment to invest in something that's working. We know that's not always where donations flow, but we believe our community understands: the most impactful gift isn't always the most dramatic one. Sometimes it's the one that keeps a proven team intact and a proven model running.

Our goal is $30,000. Every dollar goes to work immediately.

If you've ever believed that people experiencing homelessness deserve more than a bed and a curfew, that they deserve community, dignity, and a real path forward, this is your chance to fund the organization that's proving that's possible, right here in Portland.

Thank you for being part of what we're building.

WeShine Initiative, Inc. is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.