Ecotrust Event Spaces
Green Practices
Commitment to community
Ecotrust Event Spaces provides premier venues for green meetings and events. Venues where individuals, communities and organizations can convene to celebrate, share ideas and build the relationships that will inspire positive changes in the world.
Our venues have been renovated to celebrate and enhance the character of their original structures while incorporating environmentally-innovative materials and techniques, and they are beautiful to boot. The use of natural light, windows, exposed brick, hardwood floors and lofty ceilings create healthy meeting spaces.
Cooks in Our Kitchen
We allow only the most sustainable caterers in town into our kitchens. These chefs love the bounty of this place and prove it in their menus. Finding inspiration in local and seasonal ingredients, our caterers are helping to build a robust regional food economy. When there is left over food, our caterers participate in Portland's Fork It Over program and others like it, which redirect surplus food to hungry mouths in the City. Beyond food, our caterers grow their businesses using sustainable strategies, create healthy work environments for their employees and minimize energy use and waste.
Walking the Talk
We know that being authentically green is about more than acquiring green certifications. What really matters is that our venue and services are of the highest quality and are sustainable to the core.
Natural Capital Center
We offer the following laundry list of achievements to our clients:
- Portland's flagship eco-savvy building. We're the first historic renovation in the Nation to become Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold Certified
- PGE Earth Advantage Certified (now known as Earth Advantage)
- RecycleWorks Award Recipient
- We offset our facility's electrical (carbon) use by purchasing Green Tags from Bonneville Environmental Foundation.
- As of January 2008, we've banned the use of plastic water bottles in our event facility.
- Events can produce plenty of post-consumer waste. To deal with this, we have a compost bin and comprehensive recycling containers and we're not afraid to ask you to use them.
- Our parking lot is intentionally small not to frustrate you, but to encourage you to ride your bike (We have ample bike parking.), to walk, and to take public transportation (We're a stop on the Portland Streetcar line.)
- As a nonprofit organization, we exist to provide a green venue in which communities can gather to share ideas and make plans to change the world. To make our venue more accessible to organizations with varied means we discount our rates for nonprofits.
- Ecologically sound forestry is paramount to our mission. This manifests in a very tangible way in our building. We've used top notch wood to deck our halls. During renovation, if we couldn't reclaim wood from the existing structure, we sourced Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified wood. To learn more about Ecotrust's myriad sustainable forestry initiatives visit our Forestry program page.
- 98% of our building's storm water is managed on site. This means it stays out of the Willamette River where it doesn't belong. We do this with brilliant technology and gravity. Learn more about our ecoroof (It helps regulate our building's temperature too!) and bioswales here.
- And last, though perhaps not the sexiest (though certainly one of our most celebrated eco-amenities), we are the first privately owned building in the State of Oregon to install waterless urinals.
