Did you miss State of the Re:Union’s piece about Oakridge on NPR’s Weekend Edition? Don’t fret, you can listen now:

You can listen to the full hour, watch our documentary Dear Oakridge, read the Dear Oakridge Letters and much more at our Oakridge page.

SOTRU - Dear Oakridge

State of the Re:Union is excited to announce to release of our newest documentary, Dear Oakridge. Back in the timber industry’s heyday, small mill towns in Oregon were thriving. Business was booming. Then in the early 1990s, the saws stopped. The mills shut down and their economies crumbled. State of the Re:Union visits Oakridge and hears from resilient residents that write love letters to their work in progress.

For more information or to listen to our radio episode, Oakridge – A Work in Progress, please visit our Oakridge page.

Mountain Bike Oregon (MBO) captures the essence of their community in numerous ways. Not only do they offer exhilarating mountain biking adventures for everyone from beginner to expert in some of the most beautiful terrain in the world, they are a major part of the Oakridge community’s rebirth. (more…)

On our Facebook page, we recently asked you what your dream job as a child was, and what your dream job is now. That got me thinking.  As so many of us are dependent on wage labor, how can we begin to think about our “dream” jobs?  It’s almost as if we don’t have time to think about what we would really want to do.  Or maybe we know what we’d ideally do, but don’t realistically think we can actually make it happen.  But I think maybe we can actually do what we want to do.  In fact, we’ve reported stories from all over the country about people who are, yes, DOING WHAT THEY WANT TO DO. (more…)

Listen to the episode and check out our video docs, podcasts, images and articles about Oakridge!

If you’ve listened to our Oakridge episode, we want to hear from you. Please tell us what you liked, what you didn’t like and what you thought we could have done differently. The SOTRU team appreciates your feedback!

We’re heading to Oakridge, Oregon (pop. 3,755), the recently coined, “Mountain Biking Capital of the Northwest” in a few days.  I’m getting really excited to dig into to the once prosperous timber town, which has since, like so many other small towns across Oregon, fallen on hard times .  But as is often the case, there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel.  More on that later. (more…)