After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1995, Laura moved to Portland, Oregon. While she found a lively community of environmental activists in Portland, Laura found that she was hard put to keep track of all of the opportunities available to people in and around the city. Three years later, after volunteering and working for various organizations, she began sending informal email messages to her friends which listed fun environmental events, culled from a variety of resources and organizations.

The idea for The Dirt! grew when Laura realized that there were more folks out there like herself who wanted to know about what was going on in town, but did not have the time (3 years?!) to investigate the matter. Working with a business graduate student, she conducted a feasibility study to assess the need for an idea of the publication she envisioned. They concluded: with more than 121 environmental groups, government agencies and even more environmentally-friendly businesses in the Portland/Vancouver area there was definitely a need for adequate and efficient publicity about events and participatory opportunities for interested people.
In August of 1999, the first issues of The Dirt! were born. Since then The Dirt! has made a weekly appearance, with only a few exceptions to this present day. Click here if you would like to subscribe to receive The Dirt! by email. The readership has grown primarily by word-of-mouth with most outreach efforts taking place on or near Earth Day.
The journey of The Dirt! publication has always been one that demanded a significant amount of support from the community. Laura knew that creating a legitimate publication within the community was something that would take community-wide support on multiple levels. Pulling from the ground up, creating this grass-roots information and educational effort engaged supporters on all levels in the form of donors, advisors, editors, outreach table representatives, graphic designers and significant technical expertise that was required to maintain the email lists, host the website and design the database(s) from the back-end.
Enlisting help, an Advisory Committee was established early within the first years of the publication. The Advisory Committee served to steer, brainstorm, apply for a grant and help research decisions that would determine the future of the publication. A question that needed to be answered from the start was: are we a publication or an organization?
In July of 2003, the Advisory Committee after an in-depth search to find an Umbrella Organization made the decision to go the route of incorporating The Dirt! into its own nonprofit organization. However, when Laura went down to Salem to file the papers for the name, she found out that there already existed a "Dirt Corporation." Not to be deterred and seeing this rather as a unique opportunity, a brainstorming-new-naming meeting was convened at an inner SE brew-pub that always has a lot of barking dogs outside. Inside the laughter rolled thick throughout the night as dedicated friends and volunteers thought of images that seemed to fit with The Dirt! When next Laura headed to Salem for the 2nd attempt, she was armed with the top 3 choices. When the #1 name was also taken, she combined the remaining two and Spreading Roots, Spring Forth was made to stick.
April of 2004 the first brave five board members stepped up to the plate to finish the process of applying for 501c3 status from the IRS. Simultaneously as always, the publication continued to be published but already new digs had started up to revamp the website by June of that year. Ten months later, 12 new writers, and 1 new office later and the elaborate website you see here was brought up on-line in February 2005.
Who knows what merry adventures the future holds next for this little publication that started as just a grain of an idea? We cannot wait to see.