Next stop: Portland. October 15, 2026.
Welcome to frank, the foremost gathering for people who use strategic communications to drive change. At frank, we divide our time among great talks by strategists, storytellers and scientists, informative skill sessions and casual opportunities to connect with other sophisticated communicators over coffee or cocktails.
frank is on a three-U.S. city tour in 2026 and 2027. We spent an amazing day in Montgomery, Ala., in April.
At frank x Portland, we use the city as our classroom. We’ll examine how communities rebuild trust, reclaim history, and find their way to something new — out of bounds, by design. Join us for this immersion and come back with sharper tools and a wider sense of what’s possible.
Portland has always been a place where people drew lines — and where others crossed them. The Indigenous peoples of this place, among them the Multnomah, Clackamas, and bands of the Chinook, stewarded these lands along the Willamette and Columbia for millennia before displacement and broken treaties reduced a vast, interconnected world to a fraction of its former presence. A century later, the lines were drawn again — red ones, on maps, confining Black workers who’d come to build wartime ships to a single neighborhood called Albina, then erasing even that through freeway construction, eminent domain, and urban “renewal” that demolished more than a thousand homes to build a coliseum and a highway. Portland didn’t just fail these communities. It actively unmade them, boundary by boundary.
And yet the city keeps pushing past what it thought was possible. In 2025, Portland seated a city council elected through proportional representation — the first major American city to do so — a structural wager that expanding who holds power changes what becomes possible.
Its creative economy, its food culture, its civic institutions have long made it a place where ideas get tested before they travel. So has its willingness, however uneven, to look honestly at what it got wrong.
That tension, between what a place declares itself to be and what it has actually done, between the lines drawn and the lines crossed, is the terrain that change communicators work in every day. It’s also, not coincidentally, what frank is for.
Stay tuned for updates…
Lodging Information
Our event’s primary hotel will be the Canopy Pearl District. We have secured a block of specially priced rooms for frank participants starting at $170 per night (plus taxes and other charges). Use group code ’90S’ and book before Sept. 13, 2026 for the preferred rates.
The Residence Inn by Marriott Portland Downtown/Pearl District, the Hampton Inn & Suites Portland-Pearl District, the Cambria Hotel Portland-Pearl District and the Harlow Hotel & Cafe Bar are also lodging options within a brief walk to the gathering’s primary location, The EcoTrust Building.
Our Venue
The October gathering main stage programming will be held in the EcoTrust’s Irving Street Studio (721 NW 9th Ave, Portland, Ore.). This venue is considered one of Portland’s most iconic green building, a mixed-use 1890s warehouse in Portland’s Pearl District. Read more about EcoTrust’s mission.
Plan Your Day
The gathering will kick off a 9 a.m. with opening ceremonies at the EcoTrust building. We’ll host a mix of provocative and informative frank talks, facilitate two smaller group discussion blocks (huddles), welcome snack and beverages, luncheon and a farewell reception starting around 5:30 p.m. Stay tuned for gathering program, speakers and events.
Add some professional development –
the frank Academy, Friday, Oct. 16
Once again the Center for Public Interest Communications is providing an add-on to the gathering activities with opportunities to earn a digital badge in public interest communications frameworks. In Portland, we’re offering two cohorts of the frank Academy, a fundamentals track and a next level track, on Friday, Oct. 16.
frank Academy Fundamentals
9 a.m.-noon
The Science of What Makes People Care
Build the World You Wish Existed – activating systems thinking and human centered design to bring change
1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Four Questions: Back-of-Envelope Strategy
Six Spheres of Influence
frank Academy Next Level
9 a.m.-noon
Building an Evaluation Plan
Real Good Segmentation
1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Ethics of Story
Finding Your Story & Story Strategy
Share your ideas… host a huddle
In between our main stage talks, we schedule huddles, or breakout sessions. These breakout sessions are 75-minutes long and offer opportunities to share your knowledge and skills with the frank community. A session might focus on storytelling for impact, practical tools to remove barriers, tools for coalition building or having conversations that bridge divides. Case studies, research insights, strategies, and big picture thinking can be frameworks for huddles.
Huddle leaders must register for the gathering and will receive a discount on registration if selected. Nominate a session by Sept. 2 for best consideration.