The process of forming Oregon Creative Industries (OCI) as a new non-profit business alliance has been deliberate and methodical. We are building an organization to last so it can have a true impact on growing the creative economy in this state and rushing into it could set us up for failure.

Based on my past experience founding other non-profits, I’ve learned that starting with a high-quality legal and accounting team who are 100% on-board with and experienced in your mission is an essential foundational component.

Because OCI’s core mission is economic development for creative industries, our goal was to partner with a legal firm and an accounting firm who have demonstrated success in both of those areas.

I’m happy to report that we’ve found exactly what we were looking for because Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt have joined as our legal team and Perkins & Co. will provide our accounting support.  These firms are at the top of their game in the Northwest and both are listed among the Portland Business Journal’s Most Admired Companies and Oregon Business Magazine’s Top 100 Companies.

This is the same legal/accounting team that founded Greenlight Greater Portland, the regional economic development organization.  Both firms have strong creative industries-related practices and clients, so they understand the creative economy ecosystem and will also be helpful making important connections for OCI.

In short, we couldn’t ask for better partners to start this journey with.

Specific contributing members on the OCI team will be Michael Cohen & Katherine VanZanten at Schwabe and Dave Sullivan, Roy Abramowitz & Allison Elliott  at Perkins.  Looking at their bios, you’ll see that each has a personal connection to creative endeavors.  Both companies will have a representative on the OCI Board of Directors.

With this team in place we are already underway with the necessary steps to forming the OCI legal entity, which will be an Oregon Nonprofit Corporation with Federal 501(c)(6) tax-exempt status.

I’d like to thank Don Krahmer of Schwabe and Dave Sullivan of Perkins, both of whom I have had the pleasure of knowing for over 15 years, for being the internal champions for OCI within their respective companies.

SG

The order of business for this meeting, the big question: Do we want to move forward as an organized Creative Economy cluster? To do this would mean forming a new 501(c)6 non-profit trade association called Oregon Creative Industries to support the core missions as established from conversations and roundtables with the community and detailed in the draft Oregon Creative Industries proposal published in February of this year. The core missions are networking, promotion and advocacy as related to economic development of our cluster.

Jerry Ketel of Leopold Ketel & Partners and President of the Board of PAF made a motion to vote on the forming of this organization. The vote was unanimous! During this meeting an OCI working group called Creative Economy Council (CEC) was also formed, made up of association leadership.

There was a great energy around the table as all of the associations pulled together to support this initiative and those three core elements. The next step, the meeting at City Hall with city officials and Portland Development Commission. It was agreed that as a show of support and true collaboration all would attend this meeting at City Hall to present some of the findings from previous roundtable discussions and the proposal for the formation of the trade association, Oregon Creative Industries.

There is still a lot of work to be done. We look forward to future collaborative efforts that we know will strengthen the mission and goals of all involved. Stay tuned!!

JG