visionPDX RESULTS

Through our outreach in 2006, visionPDX received over 13,000 completed surveys and discussion notes from over 75 small group discussions. We estimate that over 15,000 people took part in visionPDX during our main engagement phase in April - September 2006.

Another 2,000 or more have been involved in the project through the community check-in this past spring and summer 2007, the series of Sojourn Theatre performances in the fall of 2006 and in our preliminary outreach work in the summer and fall of 2005. This large number of people rivals the most extensive visioning outreach projects in North America (1), and has raised the bar in Portland for truly bringing new voices to the table.

For the 15,000 who connected with us during our 2006 outreach work, over 13,000 of them filled out all or part of the demographics portion of our questionnaire.

We also asked people whether they had filled out the survey in the past. If they said yes, their demographic information was not included in the analysis presented here. So out of a total of around 15,000 participants, we are able to report on the demographics of 12,315 respondents.

Who were the people we talked to?

• About 57% were female, and 42.3 male, and 0.8% identified as transgender.
• Eighty-two percent of respondents live in Portland (all zip codes) and 65% worked in Portland.
• About 44% have lived in Portland 11 years or longer, while about 18% moved here within the past five years.
• Almost 12% spoke English as a second (or third) language.
• Respondents tended to have reached a higher educational level than the Portland population as a whole. This was especially noticeable when comparing the percentage of respondents with a graduate degree or higher (21.6%) with the percentage in the general Portland population (10.8%). On several of the other educational categories, the visionPDX results matched closely to the Census data.
• Of those respondents who answered the sexual orientation question, over 12% identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual. An additional 3.3% identified as “other,” with various responses recorded in the space provided. A larger proportion (22.5%) left this question blank than others.
• visionPDX respondents represented a smaller percentage of whites/Caucasians than the Portland population as a whole has. The demographics indicate that visionPDX was actually able to oversample both the African American and the Native American/Alaska Native communities, which has been challenging both for the Census and for market research polling methods.

1. The City of Calgary, Alberta, with a population of over 1 million, reached 18,000 people in its imagineCalgary process in 2006, and Envision Central Texas engaged 15,000 people between 2002 and 2004, 12,500 through a mail survey.