Painting by Akram Sarraj
Portland Meet Portland's board brings an array of experience, diversity and knowledge to serve the mission of bringing people together to build cross-cultural community.
Staff Members
Kay Reid, Co-Founder and Executive Director
Kay Reid has devoted much of her life to seeking out and recording the unknown stories of individuals and organizations—what they have given this world, what they’ve fought for in bad times and good. She’s recorded and written the stories of legislators, oyster growers, and refugees. She’s told the stories of those who live on the town’s periphery and those in its centers of power. Kay has often worked in what Jane Addams called “the social claim” to achieve justice, fairness, and peace. She has directed several major oral history programs in the Pacific Northwest, including Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times thorough the Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University. She has great admiration for individuals and families who have built their lives, dreams, and neighborhoods against unlikely odds.
Board Members
John Keating, Board President
Former Assistant Director, New Columbia
Nonprofit Consultant
Sharon Chalem, Secretary
Artist and Librarian
Annabel Torres, Treasurer
Director of Labor and Education, Oregon Nurses Association
Eli Andrews
Director of Innovation, Accelerate Change
Co-Founder
Susi Steinmann, Co-Founder
Susi is the Co-Founder and former Executive Director of PMP. Susi grew up in Switzerland in a bilingual and multicultural household. She immigrated to the United States as a high school student and has personally experienced the adjustment challenges to a foreign, complex cultural and new language system in the United States. Like most newcomers, she never fully gave up her foreign identity and has pursued a lifelong passion for community building and working for the last thirty years with culturally and linguistically diverse populations – overseas in Africa and the Middle East, and currently in “her back yard” in the Portland area. Since 2008, Susi has worked with culturally diverse communities in Portland and has supported mutual the cross-cultural learning of immigrants and refugees in partnership with inspiring mentor-volunteers who have welcomed, educated and empowered newcomers from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. She believes that mentors together with their immigrant or refugee families build trusting relationships with are our community’s most important and least understood human assets for real community integration, development and peace.
