Oregon Grantmaking

The Foundation's activities in Oregon include grants to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, the Micro-enterprise Inventors Program of Oregon, Saturday Academy, Strawjet, Oregon MESA, and Hillsboro High School's Pre-Engineering Program.

The Inventors Ball Room, the centerpiece of OMSI's Innovation Station, encourages visitors to develop their creative problem-solving skills.

Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI)

The Lemelson Foundation is one of four founding partners of OMSI’s Innovation Station, the museum's flagship hall. Innovation Station offers visitors of all ages a variety of ways to engage in problem solving, technology and innovation. It highlights outstanding inventors and showcases the development and use of high- and low-tech solutions to global and local challenges.

About OMSI: Founded in 1944, OMSI is a world-class attraction and educational resource. Ranked as one of the top ten science centers in the U.S., it has earned an international reputation for its innovative exhibits and educational programs. For more information about OMSI and Innovation Station, visit: OMSI

Strawjet

Strawjet – a for-profit company in Talent, Oregon – seeks to enable citizens in the developing world and victims of natural disasters to live in safe homes without depleting the world's supply of timber and non-renewable resources. It is creating a building industry around renewable resources, agricultural by-products and non-toxic materials. With grant funds from the Lemelson Foundation, Strawjet is building a working proof of concept prototype for its Straw Collator Mechanism. This device uniformly arranges randomly-oriented straw so that it can be fed into a machine – the Strawjet – that produces low-cost, non-toxic, energy-efficient corded housing material from waste straw (straw left over after the harvest of grains). Trials have shown that Strawjet cords tolerate stress from earthquakes better than the typical brick and mortar construction used in the developing world. To learn more about Strawjet, visit: www.greeninventor.org

Saturday Academy

The Foundation grants funds to Saturday Academy, the Portland-based enrichment program, to collaborate with the Lemelson-MIT Program on building a model for implementation of its InvenTeams concept in Oregon. InvenTeams, a nationwide program that fosters inventiveness and creativity among high school students, supports teams of students that, with the help of teachers and mentors, identify problems and develop a prototypes to address them.

Teams from any Oregon high school are eligible to apply for InvenTeam grants, and Lemelson-MIT and Saturday Academy make make special efforts to reach out to schools with significant populations of low-income and minority students. For the 2006-07 academic year, four Oregon teams were awarded IvenTeam grants:

• Gresham High School (Gresham, Ore.): Drip-irrigation system to water household plants
• Hillsboro High School (Hillsboro, Ore.): Self-installed automotive heads-up display
• Newberg High School (Newberg, Ore.): Portable, lightweight solar Stirling generator to provide electricity to remote villages
• Westview High School (Beaverton, Ore.): Tactile graphing calculator for the blind

For more information visit: Saturday Academy

Micro-enterprise Inventors Program of Oregon (MIPO)

The Foundation granted funds to MIPO to provide independent inventors in Oregon access to resources, mentoring, training and networking to protect, market, and grow their inventions and intellectual property. MIPO is an entrepreneurial program of the East County One Stop Career System, a 501(c)(3) organization.

MIPO compliments other inventor’s clubs throughout Oregon by offering educational, print and web resources, as well as internet webinars delivered by experts in their field. As part of its program, MIPO will also award scholarships to a number of inventors to fund comprehensive feasibility assessments, including arranging a meeting with a patent agent to determine the viability of a concept.

“Support for independent inventors is scarce,” says Julia Novy-Hildesley, Executive Director, The Lemelson Foundation. “By providing Oregon inventors with access to resources, information, training and networking, MIPO is filling a significant gap. MIPO's comprehensive services will enable inventors to take their ideas to commercialization, resulting in enterprises that provide jobs and contribute to the growth of our state's economy." To learn more about MIPO visit: www.eastcountyonestop.org

Oregon MESA

The Foundation granted funds to Oregon MESA (Math, Engineering, Science, Achievement) to support its 2006 outreach activities, including an annual engineering, math and science competition for 6th – 12th grade students held at Portland State University.

Oregon MESA, a non-profit organization, is a pre-college academic program based at Portland State University’s Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. MESA's goal is to provide students underrepresented in the fields of mathematics, engineering, science and technology with opportunities to develop their talents by conducting hands-on, inquiry-based projects in teams and pursuing studies in college that lead to rewarding careers in technical fields. More than 50% of the 750 students participating in MESA are girls; more than 45% of MESA participants are African American, Native American and Latino students. For more information visit: MESA

Hillsboro High School’s Pre-Engineering Program

Hillsboro High teacher Don Domes is using a grant from the Lemelson Foundation to:

• Develop a course based on the Cooper Hewitt Museum’s Design for the Other 90% exhibition. Student teams are creating working prototypes of innovations that are simple, affordable, and reliable – they will display the devices on school grounds.
• Purchase, with matching Federal grant funds, a laser cutter that enables students to create objects of real world complexity.
• Create media tool kits that students use to produce documentaries or promotional pieces around their invention/design projects.