Eliot Feenstra, Project Manager
Eliot Feenstra (he/they) is a long-time community organizer, facilitator, performer, teacher, poet, and gardener. He grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and currently lives and works in rural southwestern Oregon.
During COVID, he worked with the Rogue Action Center to develop the LGBTQ+ Listening Project, a community organizing hub for rural LGBTQ+ folks in Josephine & Jackson counties. As a facilitator, he trains people to lead reflective dialogues with Oregon Humanities. He is the co-artistic director of Beyond Boom & Bust, an incubator for community-based arts projects that use theatre to explore economic and social issues in rural southwestern Oregon. He is also the co-chair of the Governance Committee for the Queer Data Design Project, an emergent statewide research project with LGBTQIA2S+ community in Oregon.
Eliot holds an MA in Performance Studies from York University; he also studied social practice at Portland State University and has a BA in interdisciplinary studies from the University of Chicago. He lives on an old commune in Takilma, OR with his wife, Sophie, and cat, Antigonick.
Tiff Ganir, Project Associate
Tiffany Ganir (she/they) was born in the Philippines and grew up on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. She moved to Oregon in 2013 and received a BS in Public Health and an MS in Adult Learning from Portland State University. Tiff participates in youth, student, and migrant grassroots organizing with the Filipino community. She was previously an academic and career advisor at PSU and teaches an academic skills course to incoming freshmen. Her hobbies include gardening/ plants, trying and cooking new food and water sports when the weather is nice.
Sarah Giles, Project Manager
Sarah began working for the National Policy Consensus Center in 2007 and currently is a project manager for Oregon's Kitchen Table. Sarah manages community engagement projects on a range of topics - from education to natural resources to election redistricting - of all sizes, from neighborhood size to statewide. She works with public agencies and decision makers to design processes, content, and outreach and coordinates a team of multi-cultural and multilingual translators, interpreters, and community organizers to create ways for community members to share what they think in their own language and in ways that are most inviting and comfortable for them. Sarah has a special interest in using plain language to connect complex, technical policy decisions to people's everyday lives. She also researches and writes on a range of issues related to collaborative governance, and has taught a collaborative governance capstone course at Portland State. She was previously a Research Assistant at Oregon Health and Sciences University. From 2002-2006 Sarah taught writing at the University of Arizona where she also received her MFA in Creative Writing. Sarah holds a BA from Vassar College and was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany, where she taught English to elementary and secondary level students. Sarah gardens and loves craft projects of all kinds, especially with her two sons.
Wendy Willis, Director
Wendy Willis is the founding director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table, a statewide community engagement platform designed to give every Oregonian a voice in the decisions that affect them. Wendy has also served as the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Kitchen Table Democracy, and City Club of Portland, She has also served as an Assistant Public Defender for the District of Oregon and a law clerk to Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr., of the Oregon Supreme Court. Wendy is co-author of Collaborative Governance: Principles, Processes, and Practical Tool and is currently under contract to write another text book on community engagement provisionally entitled Kitchen Table Democracy: Engaging Communities in the Decisions that Affect Them. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law Center and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Pacific Lutheran University and a B.A. in political science from Willamette University.
Oregon’s Kitchen Table is a program of the College of Urban and Public Affairs at Portland State University and is housed within the National Policy Consensus Center.