Date: Saturday, July 7th
Time: 11am-1pm
Location: Taborspace lawn | 5441 SE Belmont St
Price: FREE! Please register in advance so we know how many people to expect.

Join us for an Independence Day picnic and Civic Saturday, a gathering of friends and strangers for a shared purpose. This is an opportunity to connect with the PUGS community, neighbors, and friends, plus there will be poems and songs along with a civic sermon from poet, essayist, lawyer, and Portlander Wendy Willis!

Civic Saturday is a civic analogue to church: a gathering of friends and strangers in a common place to nurture a spirit of shared purpose. But it’s not about church religion or synagogue or mosque religion. It’s about American civic duty—the creed of liberty, equality, and self-government that truly unites us.  It is free and open to all.

"Civic Saturday exists so that together we can remember that no condition in our country was created yesterday, and no citizen of this country will live forever. Civic Saturday exists so that we can teach each other how not just to tell the truth about our history but also reckon with it." -Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University

This is the first Civic Saturday in Portland. Civic Saturday is a project from Citizen University, in partnership with Oregon Humanities, Healthy Democracy, Kitchen Table Democracy, Deliberative Democracy Consortium, and the Attic Institute.

Bring a blanket or a lawn chair!

Speaker: Wendy Willis is a poet and essayist living in Portland, Oregon. Her second book of poems, A Long Late Pledge, won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and was released by Bear Star Press in September 2017. Her first book of poems, Blood Sisters of the Republic, was published by Press 53 in 2012. Wendy has also published poems and essays in a wide variety of journals, including New England Review, Oregon Humanities, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, Zócalo Public Square, and ZYZZYVA. Wendy is a faculty member in poetry at the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon.

Wendy is the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the founder and director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table. She also serves on the Boards of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation and Tavern Books. Wendy has served as a federal public defender and as the law clerk to Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr. of the Oregon Supreme Court. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law Center and holds a B.A. from Willamette University and an M.F.A. in poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.