Practical Leadership
for District 17
A Neighbor. A Problem-Solver. A Leader Who Gets Results.
I’m Autumn Sharp—a working single mom, community leader, and Northwest Portland resident running for State Senate.
I’ve spent over 20 years solving real-world problems across nonprofit and business sectors. But what matters most is the work I’ve done right here in our neighborhood—bringing people together to make our parks safer and our community stronger.
I’m running to deliver practical, compassionate solutions that actually work—for families, for small businesses, and for the communities we love.
Experience
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Autumn is the Assets Operations Manager for Ecotrust. She leads strategic programming and manages operations for the Redd on Salmon Street campus in Portland's SE Industrial District and the Natural Capital Center in the Pearl District. Autumn cofounded Friends of Couch Park, a nonprofit centered around keeping Couch Park and its surrounding neighborhood safe for children.
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Autumn's background reflects 20+ years of strategic operations and communications leadership, with a career spanning the nonprofit and corporate sectors.
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MSc Ethnobotany with Distinction, University of Kent, Canterbury
MFA Creative Writing, Pacific University, Forest Grove
BA English, Portland State University, Portland -
Community Advisory Committee member for Multnomah County's Homelessness Response System.
Advise Multnomah County Homelessness Response System elected leaders and members on strategies and approaches to the Homelessness Response Action Plan. -
Common-sense leadership for safer schools, parks, and neighborhoods. Autumn is a working, single mother and renter in Northwest Portland. She's running to combine real safety with real compassion in places where others have failed—and she's done it before.
Real safety means keeping drugs, needles, and dealers away from schools and parks. It means that children, the elderly, the disabled, and those struggling with addiction are protected from unsanitary conditions and predators.
Real compassion means helping our homeless neighbors and those with substance use disorders to improve their lives, not leaving them to die in the streets—which is what happened to nearly 400 individuals in Portland last year because existing leadership abandoned them.
She's done it before: three years ago, Couch Park was dangerous. Children at the neighboring school were routinely threatened by intoxicated individuals and stepped over needles daily. Today, Couch Park is inviting and thriving due to the efforts of Friends of Couch Park and community partners, who set standards of behavior that welcome everyone to the park while not tolerating antisocial behavior.
Autumn believes Oregon needs leadership that lives in and with the communities it serves—learning from successes (like Couch Park) and failures (like SB 1573 dying in the Oregon Senate)—to steer a steady, practical, and community-minded course.