Town Hall Presentation materials – Oct 12, 2019

This is the first of three blog posts about Portland Shambhala Meditation Center’s Town Hall on October 12, 2019.  The second covers what we heard from a panel of leaders from other spiritual communities about having moved their centers in the last few years, and the third post reports on what those present said about the choices we face.  There were about 25 of us who made it to the meeting.

The afternoon’s Agenda – Portland Shambhala Center Town Hall 2019-1012 was posted and we reviewed it at the beginning of the meeting.  Co-director John Smith led a discussion of some of the background information that he had gathered, beginning with a map of how Portland fits into the larger context of Shambhala Centers in North America.  We are at some distance from Shambhala’s center of gravity (Halifax, Nova Scotia and Boulder, Colorado).

Over time, interest in mindfulness (and meditation) have increased, as reflected in Google Trends data on searches between 2004 and now.

Unfortunately, searches for “Shambhala” have actually fallen since 2012.

 

Shambhala as a whole has lost a lot of members since 2018, as has the Portland Shambhala Center (from a one-time high of 130 to our present count of around 80 members).  Vajrayana students are an (influential) minority globally and as well as in Portland.  It seems like the mass outflow of members has ended, although membership growth has not returned to it’s pre-2018 level.

We are not clear why Seattle appears to have continued to grow since 2016 while Portland has not.  Maybe we could learn from them (or maybe we are defining membership more narrowly or are more careful about keeping the Shambhala Database up to date).

We looked at some elements in our history in the following time-line:

Co-director Jane Perlstein discussed a range of statistics about Portland as  our local context, including population growth, increases in rents, racial composition, education, and age profile.  Our center has a considerably older profile than the Portland general population.

Mark Douglass walked us through the Relo Team Town Hall Handout, which talks about the two locations under consideration, The Carnegie Building, where we presently are, and a building on NE Sandy Blvd., which is being considered as a possible new location..  This Google Map shows the location of the two sites under consideration:

Jack Bodner presented a 2020 Budget – Summary that sketched out some of the budget ramifications of the stay or move decision.