Birch Community Services

Our mission is to build a financially stable community by providing education, food, and nurturing accountability. <br><br>Founded in 1992, Birch Community Services, Inc. (BCS) is serving struggling working families in the Portland Oregon Metro area. Families receive food weekly, volunteer monthly, and enroll in our financial education to learn how to best utilize their grocery savings to make progress on their financial goals. BCS not only meets families' immediate basic needs through fighting food insecurity but also meets their long-term needs through financial education.

Building healthy, stable families.

Goal One: In the next year, our goal is to double the number of one-on-one meetings with families in order to build strong, encouraging relationships and provide timely financial advice.

Goal Two: BCS' goal is to help families save at least 70% on their monthly grocery bill, so those funds can be repurposed toward financial goals.

Goal Three: In the next year, Birch will increase our program participation by 20%.

In the past 12 months, the leadership team at Birch Community Services has hired a consultant to assist in implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). This has radically changed how our operations are run. EOS requires the leadership team to meet weekly, track target numbers, and make specific, tangible goals to be completed each quarter.

In the past 18 months, Birch has seen unprecedented growth and demand for our services. In January 2022, we were serving 575 families each week. By January 2023, we were serving just over 800 families each week. In February, we made the difficult decision to start a waitlist for new families to ensure we maintained our high standard of services for our families. The leadership team reworked the strategic plan and began fundraising immediately in order to eliminate the waitlist as quickly as possible. We have now hired an additional financial counselor and secured in-kind donations of approximately 1 million pounds of food and household items each month in order to meet the demand. Additionally, the leadership team has reworked Birch's strategic plan in order to keep up with the new growth rate. We now have triggers and strategies in place to have the waitlist eliminated and grow in proportion with our demand. A participant wrote to BCS: "When I walked into Birch, I was nervous. But as I talked to the people at the front desk, and eventually the Executive Director, all of that shame and fear went away. I learned about how Birch was enabling people to take charge of their own story, through community - a collective group of people who were there to help each other out, and empowerment."