Executive Summary

Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble (PJCE) creates and performs original jazz music that engages and supports our community’s diverse artists, cultures, and place. In our strategic plan we are preparing to do this work for more people, in more diverse and creative ways, and with a stronger financial foundation. 

The world around us is changing. We completed this planning process during the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic recession, and an urgent movement for racial justice.  Our plan is both compelled and motivated by those conditions and by the changing cultural and economic demands on Portland artists. Building on our previous achievements, we believe that a growing PJCE will better support its dynamic community of artists, audiences, and students of jazz in Portland.

In this strategic plan, over the next two years PJCE will pursue a strategy that supports:

  • Equitable, broad, inclusive community participation by as diverse a population as possible among artists, audiences, and PJCE leadership. 
  • Flexible, adaptive programming that supports and engages our community during and after pandemic conditions.
  • Increased financial growth and sustainability to ensure a robust future for original jazz in Portland.
  • Efficient, effective, impactful organizational Infrastructure to maintain the highest possible professional expectations.

Through our strategic work, we commit ourselves to a Vision of Success that accomplishes:

  • Defining concrete goals for maintaining and improving diversity, equity and inclusion in our programming. 
  • Investment in contemporary Black artists, audiences, and leadership in order to honor the central role that Black artists have played in the formation of jazz music.
  • A curatorial approach that will increase support for composers working with their own small groups. 
  • A return from a brief hiatus of our 12-member jazz ensemble when public health conditions allow, with the goal of the small group program operating as an “incubator” for large ensemble projects.
  • A vibrant audience community that includes a larger and more diverse audience from which new financial supporters will emerge.

Our Strategic Planning process.

Our strategic planning process began about one year ago with approval by the PJCE’s Board of Directors, and has been enacted by PJCE Executive Director Douglas Detrick, the Board and a Strategic Planning committee with consultant Bill Flood. Key steps have included a survey of our artists and audience, and analysis of financial and program data from the last three years.  

This plan establishes our goals.  Setting priorities and work on implementing goals will be an ongoing process, with additional community and stakeholder participation to meet our vision for success.  

We offer our thanks to Oregon Cultural Trust for providing partial funding for this process, to consultant Bill Flood for his guidance, and for the input and many contributions to this plan by our stakeholders.