Hello wonderful All Souls Community! I hope you have all had a wonderful winter–restful, but rich in dreams.
Although there haven’t been any newsletters for a little bit, things have in fact been quite busy for PDX All Souls.
The 4th Annual All Souls River Procession will be Saturday November 2nd, which means it will fall on actual All Souls Day this year. We are anticipating it to be an even larger event than ever, and are already working with Portland Parks to get everything permitted and fully in order.
We are kicking off our 2024 volunteer season with our annual Beltane / May Day celebration which will be early May in the Green Anchors pollinator gardens. This small event for our volunteers and community members is a lovely chance for us all to reconnect–and to find out about some of the big, exciting upcoming PDX All Souls plans! If you are on the Volunteer Mailing list you should have received an email with all the details.
We’ve been applying for grants! We are seeking funding to support the creation of a permanent location at Green Anchors to hold puppet-building workshops and mask-making and lantern-making classes throughout the year, as well as to store our growing collection of giant paper mache constructions for the procession. We’ll know more about the status of the grant applications at the end of April and will let everyone know if we have success.
This past February Willamette Week published an article “24 Reasons to Love Portland Right Now”, and the Portland All Souls River Procession tied with PDX Krampus Lauf for reason number 23 to Love Portland Right Now:
It is quite exciting to be getting press this early—almost 8 months before the event, and we haven’t even sent out any press releases yet.
And lastly, we have a proper domain name now: http://www.pdxallsouls.org , with a real website scheduled to go live in mid-March. Our social media handles have been updated to match the website address, so you can also find us at https://www.instagram.com/pdxallsouls and https://www.facebook.com/pdxallsouls . We are also pdxallsouls on Discord where our community can stay in touch online–volunteers should have received an email with an invite link.
Wishing you all the very best, and hope to see and catch up with many of you soon!
Moni J. Sears (she/they)
Artistic Director & Volunteer Coordinator
PDX All Souls
www.pdxallsouls.org
