Women's Rainbow Farm
KPTV (July 9, 2025) — A recent feature highlights DeRose Community Bridge's Women’s Rainbow Farm, a vibrant community garden in southeast Portland offering immigrant and refugee women nearly 30 regenerative plots to grow culturally meaningful produce. Participants cultivate fruits and vegetables from their homelands, heal from trauma, build community across 10+ countries, and learn skills like harvesting and seasonal preservation. The project, supported by the Portland Clean Energy Fund, also contributes to environmental health through regenerative farming practices and sustainable soil building. Garden produce is shared via a Halal food pantry, and Dr. Rose Vakkai’s vision continues to draw a waitlist of eager participants, with dreams of expanding toward several acres.
A Portland Farm Heals a Painful Past
Portland.gov (October 24, 2024) — The farm-to-fork produce at De Rose Garden in Southeast Portland adds a twist to the typical Northwest harvest. There are dozens of sour leaf plants for adding tang to soups, dark slender leaves of Chinese spinach for mashing into a side dish and long, skinny peppers - a ghostly pale green - ready to make a curry pop. The soaring stalks of African corn don’t grow sweet ears. But to the immigrants who garden here, Roseline Vakkai says, the flavor of the sticky kernels tastes like home.
Vakkai is executive director of De Rose Community Bridge and Holistic Wellness, which is using a three-year, $1 million grant from the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF) to build and operate a small farm. Its four locations include this long unused lot in an outer Southeast Portland neighborhood, where African and Asian immigrant and refugee women cultivate food and relationships with their new country. The inaugural 2024 class includes 16 women who are originally from Congo, Liberia, Somalia, Ethiopia, Burma, Guinea Bissau and Sierra Leone.
Community Health Assesment
Presented By: Priya Christensen, HSERV 375, University of Washington School of Public Health (Spring 2025) —
Poverty rates among people in Portland is an ongoing and growing issue that needs to be addressed, and there are certainly steps that can be taken to combat the rise. This reading of the community health assessment takes a closer look at the services De Rose provides to help address the problem.