Clackamas Service Center has been providing food and community to a desperately low-income, under-resourced neighborhood in outer SE Portland since the 1970s. Originally founded by three women who pooled their bingo winnings to help support less fortunate neighbors, the Clackamas Service Center now helps thousands of low-income individuals and families and unhoused people, including those who live along the Springwater Corridor and who camp in the food deserts and resource-poor areas of unincorporated Clackamas County. Their work during the pandemic has been vital, and they have continued to provide hot meals, food boxes, service referrals, mail service, voter registration, hygiene supplies, and other essentials during the COVID-19 crisis, the wildfires, the ice storm, and all of the other havoc wreaked by 2020-2021.
