Nuestro negocio es tuyo Kathryn Lopez, Associate Director Adventures in Spanish Hacer conexiones de negocios Portland is still a small town and relationships matter here. The Chamber hosts 80+ events each year, giving your company access to Portland’s most influential business leaders. LEARN MORE seaside is for Remembering how much fun having fun is EXECUTION: SEASIDE BIKING FILE NAME: seaside_OBJ_4.625x4.875_biking_the_prom.indd PUB: Oregon Business Journal FINAL SIZE: 4.625" wide x 4.875" tall seasideOR.com @visitseasideOR Worksystems — now have jobs running sound at large venues or are full-time freelance sound technicians. And the organization is also working on making the venue sustainable in a variety of ways. One is a membership package inspired by season-tickets packages offered by finearts organizations. For a flat fee, youth — or parents, grandparents or community members — can buy a membership that lets them attend three shows at the Offbeat per month. (The venue plans to host more frequent shows than that — the target is 100 per year — which means members will have to choose which three shows they want to attend, he says.) Mulu Habtemariam, Friends of Noise’s interim board chair, says the organization is also open to renting the venue for events that aren’t necessarily Friends of Noise-sponsored. The new club will have a capacity of 400, up from the current building’s capacity of 250. The board determined that that’s what it will take to make the club economically viable. The organization is also expanding its educational offerings. They include classes on the particulars of working in the music industry, either as a musician or a sound technician; one class planned for the fall is how to protect one’s hearing as a musician. In 2023 the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls — a space founded in the early 2000s to teach girls and nonbinary kids to write and perform songs — folded. But it passed on its name, mailing list and equipment to Friends of Noise. And Middleton plans to resurrect it as a Black Rock Camp for Resistance, which will include a curriculum discussing the influence of Black and Indigenous artists on contemporary rock music — from the proto-punk band Death to country legend Charley Pride to the late-’70s ska-punk Fishbone — as well as how Indigenous rhythms from all over the world have influenced American music. Middleton says the venue will be open to all genres of music. And even though it’s not set to open until spring of 2025, the venue is fielding inquiries from bands wanting to play there. In September the organization hosted outdoor shows in the parking lot of the venue-to-be and in the courtyard of Friends of Noise’s office, which it shares with Oregon Contemporary, formerly known as Disjecta — and will continue to do so until spring. Middleton projects the buildout will cost about $500,000. That’s a lot, especially considering that the organization does not own the space, but he’s committed to making the project work over the long haul. “I have to show the universe—not just the Portland donor class — that I can do this,” Middleton says. 39
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