Candidate Statement: Erin Reome AICP

Erin will bring 18 years of experience in the planning and field to the OAPA Board, paired with a passion for creating more equitable, healthy, and livable places. She has been an active member of OAPA’s Education and Outreach and Awards committees since 2016. In 2020, when wildfires devastated numerous communities across Oregon, she spearheaded OAPA’s efforts to provide volunteer planning assistance to communities across the state. Her greatest strengths are her abilities to foster strong relationships and connections, actively listen, and synthesize complex problems and issues into succinct action steps. She is also the proud mama of two amazing kiddos who are my daily inspiration for why creating accessible, resilient, and livable communities matters.

Erin came into the planning field via architectural programming for community facilities (recreation centers, libraries, etc.). She loved solving the puzzles of how those buildings come together. Community planning is like that type of puzzle-solving on a grand scale–one with so many different factors and considerations that it is an ever-evolving challenge.

Cheesy though it may sound, she truly hopes that the work that she does is making the world a better place for future generations. She loves having the opportunity to influence so many of the critical systems that our society relies on: where development should occur and what it should look and feel like, where and how we move around the communities we live in, and where and how we locate places and spaces to come together as a community, recreate, and play.

Erin recently had the opportunity to plan and facilitate a pro bono workshop for the Division Midway Alliance (DMA), helping the community envision the future of the Division corridor. Partnered with DMA translators and community liaisons, the workshop had nearly one hundred participants working across 8 different languages. It was beautiful and humbling. She hopes that multicultural collaboration, bringing so many diverse voices to the table, can become the standard practice for all planning projects.

She is a complete podcast addict. Most of them are literature and history-focused, but she does have a soft spot for the APA podcast as well. And if folks haven’t checked out our very own OAPA Better Planners Podcast, she highly recommends it!