Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO) is an organization that brings together diverse groups to serve Oregon’s communities through direct service programs that house, feed, and care for Oregonians, while our advocacy, environmental and creation justice, and theological education programs advance structural change.
EMO is committed to making sure that diversity and equity are not an afterthought but instead are imbued in everything we do, starting with our internal policies. We promote economic justice internally through our pay equity plan, which focuses on supporting employees with lower or mid-range pay through policies such as an annual COLA increase. EMO prioritizes hiring people with lived experience relevant to their work. When you visit EMO’s various programs, our 80-person staff speak over 20 languages in addition to English. We have a strong emphasis on employee wellness that acknowledges the emotionally taxing work that many of our employees do. We shifted from a 40-hour workweek to a 32-hour workweek, without a reduction in pay, to allow time for self-care, with the goal of supporting staff to show up energized on the job and reduce burnout.
As a faith-based organization, the high value we place on inclusion is demonstrated through that unusual word in our name, “ecumenical.” We actively embrace people of all religious and spiritual paths, and those without one. We strive to serve as an example of how people can collaborate across differences on behalf of justice. This is true internally among our staff and externally among our community partnerships.
EMO’s commitment to diversity and equity doesn’t just apply to our staff. Our six direct service programs each focus on specific communities, including refugees and immigrants, the food insecure, youth experiencing houselessness, low-income adults living with HIV, and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. What equity looks like in practice varies. After conversations with clients and with staff, Northeast Emergency Food Program (NEFP), which runs Oregon’s most active food pantry, committed to a weekly food distribution prioritizing Portland’s Latinx communities. Spanish is the primary language spoken, and culturally specific foods are offered to clients.
NEFP is located in the Luther Memorial Building, which EMO recently purchased from the Oregon Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. NEFP has been operating in the building for almost 20 years, and this purchase will provide stability and space for growth. Our HIV Services–including both the oldest continually run HIV Day Center in the country and Daily Bread Express, an in-home meal delivery service—is actively fundraising to move into the same building, affording them a more stable future and continuing to bring food, services and community to individuals living with a disease who still face stigma in our communities. Sponsors Organized to Assist Refugees (SOAR) and SOAR Immigration Legal Services work tirelessly to resettle refugees in Oregon and provide individuals and families with free or low-cost legal support at a time when being an immigrant is more precarious than ever. Slavic Oregon Social Services (SOSS) supports Slavic-speaking individuals and families fleeing domestic and intimate partner violence in Oregon as the only Slavic culturally specific domestic violence program in the country. Second Home, our program that works with unaccompanied high school students to find stable housing, graduated 17 students in 2025 and is seeing a growing need for culturally diverse host homes to better serve referred students.
While our 2025 programming is winding down by the time this newsletter will hit your inboxes, we are looking ahead to 2026 and events, including theological educational programs such as the Collins Lecture, our long-running lecture focused on theology and social ethics. Past speakers have included politicians, academics, local faith leaders, psychologists, and nationally recognized faith leaders like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and The Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III. As part of our commitment to diversity and dialogue, we run a quarterly interfaith conversation meeting called Common Table, which in 2026 will be expanding to include a six-week class on resisting Christian Nationalism in Oregon, as part of a larger national conversation among ecumenical organizations.
We want to extend thanks to Partners in Diversity, specifically for including several of our staff in their Equity Summit last May. One staff member had the following to say:
One of the event sessions that stood out to me was titled “Prompts, People, and Power: HR’s Role in Shaping GenAI with Intention” led by Sergio Gonzales, Co-Founder and CEO of Engenai. As someone who does not work in Human Resources and is not up to speed on GenAI, much of the information was new to me. Sergio was clearly a subject matter expert that centered equity and inclusion concerns as they relate to this powerful new technology. I learned about the ways that GenAI reinforced dominant cultural norms and reified social constructs by the responses it generated. Participants were encouraged to think deeply about the implications of this technology, and how to craft inclusive prompts to help mitigate the biases that can occur. After attending, it was clear that there is a lot of work to be done in this area, and highlighted the opportunities that exist to innovate while remaining vigilant to harms associated with GenAI
To learn more about Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, visit emoregon.org. You can learn more about any of our programs, sign up for our various newsletters, or follow us and our programs on social media.
