2021 Volunteer Award Honorees

Department of Community Justice - Victim & Survivor Services

Ariana Donaville

Ariana is highly skilled at producing visually appealing communications materials. She has taught our team valuable marketing skills that helps us better serve our community.

Department of Community Services - Animal Services Division

Belinda Davis

Belinda has been an excellent foster volunteer for us for many years. She is highly skilled, shows compassion toward everyone, and is always willing to take on the toughest cases.

Caroline Garrett

Caroline has been fostering for MCAS for many years. She's always up for taking on cats that have behavior challenges and require a skilled foster with a lot of patience. We appreciate her depth of knowledge and commitment to volunteering.

Jim Gibson

Jim has been volunteering at MCAS for a few years but really stepped up to the plate as a transport volunteer in 2020. When volunteer activities in the shelter were suspended, the flow of animals needing transportation to our Animal Shelter Alliance of Portland partners didn't stop. In fact, transport became an even more important part of our work as in shelter pet adoptions were also suspended and we needed to get animals to other shelters that already had plans in place to conduct virtual adoptions. Jim started driving the transport van in December of 2019 and quickly became a go to driver for our regular transports, especially the longer drives. This role isn't very visible but it's incredibly important to us. Thank you Jim for your dedicated service.

Douglas Miles

Douglas is one of our impressive foster volunteers at MCAS. He has spent countless hours providing a safe space for some of our tougher to place cats. Douglas is patient and compassionate while working with these cats as they slowly get comfortable in their new surroundings and start to blossom into social companions. We appreciate Douglas for spending his time and talent as a foster for MCAS.

Kimberlee Padgett

Kimberlee has been an outstanding foster volunteer for MCAS. She takes on some of the toughest medical cases and serves as a long term foster for animals in need.

Brandy Trotter

Brandy is one of our fantastic foster volunteers. Always up for a tough placement, a medically fragile animal, or just a bit of an odd placement, Brandy is just a phone call away. We rely on our fosters to take in animals that need some TLC and the best place for animals to recover from an injury or medical condition is in a safe and comfortable home environment. Brandy comes through time and time again for the tough cases and we are so grateful for it.

Rebekah Uhrick

Rebekah is a fantastic foster volunteer who is always willing to take on medically fragile animals - old or young. It's not an easy task and it takes a lot of compassion. We appreciate Rebekah for all of their contributions to the animals in our care.

Department of County Human Services - Aging, Disability & Veterans Services Division

Barb Rainish

Barb is a strong and stalwart advocate. She is particularly thoughtful and supporting to her colleagues and follow advocates. We appreciate that she is willing to show up authentically in service of the community, particularly for those individuals with intersecting identities and lived experiences of being houseless. The DSAC is made better by her participation.

Department of County Management - DART

Robert Boyer

Robert Boyer has been a long time member of the Board of Property Tax Appeals. He was not able to serve this year due to COVID-19, but has always brought his love of community and unique perspective to the appeal proceedings.

Sharon Cowley

Sharon has been the chair of the Board of Property Tax Appeals for the last three years. She's faced extremely unusual circumstances during her time as the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc with property tax hearings both in March and April of 2019 and again this year. She taken those changes in stride and done her best to evolve with the rapidly changing times.

Ernest Cooper
Tony Duarte
Ben Hilton

Ernest, Tony and Ben have been board members for the Board of Property Tax Appeals for the past three years and were part of the board this year that, due to COVID-19, had to adapt to an entirely virtual process in order to hear property tax appeals from the public.

Health Department - Public Health Harm Reduction Program

Margaret Breithaupt

Margaret joyfully and enthusiastically supports Harm Reduction services. She showed up throughout the pandemic, signing up to help with multiple shifts every month and quickly built relationships with our team and participants.

Multnomah County Library

Lynn Alderman

Lynn has been not only essential in helping one GED student graduate in a short period of time, but she was also the GED educator's back up at Rockwood when we started out and she has been tutoring one of our wonderful students off and on for over a year, as well as several others. She is amazing and has helped look for missing info/edits to the math curriculum as well.

Alain Bally

This last year Alain has been the glue of our makerspace community. It has been rough on all of us and Alain is no exception. Alain attended (online) Makerspace meetings every week without fail and even stepped into facilitate when Makerspace staff were unavailable. Alain reaches out to the other volunteers on his own time to make sure everyone feels welcome, questions are answered and volunteer needs are take care of. This connection to a bigger world is an essential piece of the makerspace learning because if you can connect what you do for enjoyment in the makerspace to a career path or a life skill, it can elevate the experience and give meaning to action. This is something that Alain also provided for the teens who came to the makerspace when we had in-person instruction. We can't wait to see him in person again.

Dan Friedman

Dan has facilitated the in-person Talk Time at the Central Library for several years. He writes a weekly newsletter that goes out to all current and past Talk Time attendees and he worked with the original planning team that helped create and execute the current Talk Time program. He rarely misses a Wednesday Talk Time session.

Misty Ibsen

Misty has just joined the drop-in tutoring program at the Central Library when the pandemic closed everything down. She has been integral in helping the new virtual Talk Time get started. She faithfully attends the bi-monthly planning meeting, contributes content and leads the opening activity at most of the weekly Talk Time sessions. She also works one-on-one with 2 other English learners.

Quinn MacNichol

Quinn served on the Library Advisory Board for 7 years (2 terms). They led LAB's Finance Committee (mandated CBAC) for the entirety of this time. During their tenure as LAB Chair, they led the board through a challenging strategic revisioning process with grace and prolonged dedication to better align LAB's work and functioning with library values and priorities. Quinn has been an invaluable leader and thought partner, and their contributions to LAB will be felt for years to come.

Reba Sundberg

Reba re-started tutoring during the pandemic with a Mandarin-speaking husband and wife. She has been very creative in designing ways to communicate with them over zoom, using translation options and ideas she has gathered from many online sources. One of her former students (who passed her citizenship test with Reba's support) asked to join the group and brought her neighbor. So now 4 Mandarin-speakers gather with Reba weekly to practice English on zoom.

Arnold Vinnard

Arnold regularly volunteers 20+ hours each month working with multiple learners who study English. He has invested in his own zoom and ESL library account to work with learners. He is comfortable working with beginners to advanced English learners.

Robin Weitzer

Robin started as a one-to-one ESOL volunteer tutor at the Central Library on Thursday mornings. She was part of the original group that organized the virtual weekly Wednesday Talk Time. She contributed many conversation topics, helped manage the working documents and coordinate the group efforts. She moved over to the Tuesday evening Talk Time, so she could volunteer in the new K-12 tutoring program.

Office of Community Involvement

Angel Brophy

It's been such a pleasure to welcome Angel to the CIC and I have appreciated her willingness to dive into committee work, especially during such a challenging time. She brings such an important perspective to the work and I truly enjoy supporting her work on the committee!

Sam Caldwell

In Sam's own words he joined the CBAC team to learn more about the County and how its funding works. Over the past years Sam approached the process with an inquisitive mind which led to great discussions regarding program funding, equity and inclusion, as well as, the tougher discussions around whether we should be funding the program or not. Sam has shown dedication and commitment to DCA/DCM and to the County. We really appreciate and value his perspective, compassion, and willingness to learn! It has been our pleasure to work with Sam and get to know him, we wish him well on his next adventure.

Mercedes Elizalde

Mercedes arrived to the DCS Community Budget Advisory Committee three years ago and her contributions were immediate and lasting and her questions were thoughtful, which led to insightful committee discussions.

Cynthia Escamilla

Cynthia has been a reliable member of the MCDA CBAC and her contributions are much appreciated. She always brings great questions and has been a strong advocate for an increased use of data in the budget decision making process.

Rhiannon Martin

Rhiannon brings such an important lens to all CIC discussions and has been such a pleasure to work with her on the Community Involvement Committee! We also appreciate her flexibility and continued engagement as we adapted the CIC to a virtual sphere.

Sahar Yarjani Muranovic

It's been such a pleasure to work with Sahar on the CIC over the last 2 years. We consistently appreciate their perspective, thoughtfulness and the compassion they show toward others on the committee!

Amanda Squiemphen-Yazzie

We deeply appreciate the passion and perspective Amanda brings to the CIC! It is truly a pleasure supporting her work on the committee.

Sachini Weerawardena

Sachi brings a vibrant energy and perspective to the Community Involvement Committee! We especially appreciate all of her hard work and active participation over the last year, as we switched to fully virtual committee work.