OSTA: Empowering Park & Marina Residents
If you are an Oregon Manufactured Home Park or Marina resident who owns their home, but rents the space or slip in which your home is located, then we are here for you.
OSTA is your support network, a trusted source of information about your rights, and your advocate for more secure housing through improved legislation.
Through these efforts and initiatives, we enhance your quality of life.
OSTA is a nonprofit, grassroots organization that seeks direction from members, avoiding a top-down approach, regarding decision-making on critical issues affecting members’ lifestyle choices, quality of life, and rights as residents in manufactured housing and floating home communities.
OSTA works to provide an expanding array of programs, information, and services to its members. It is an organization focused, not only on protecting the rights of homeowners as residents in parks and marinas but an organization that supports all aspects of manufactured and floating home living.
To enable this to happen we rely on members, teams, and colleagues, across the state who support this common vision. This work requires time, investment, and dedication to serve our 80,000+ residents and we rely solely on memberships and donations to achieve our goals.
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https://oregontenants.com/membership-account/membership-levels/
OSTA: Empowering Park & Marina Residents
Support Systems Beat Solo Efforts When Parks Organize
Hungry neighbors and holiday budgets collide long before the lights come down, so we set out to answer a hard question: what actually helps right now? We walk through the rising need created by SNAP cuts and share a counterintuitive lesson from our own park—don’t start a new food bank just because it feels proactive. Strengthen the ones that already exist. We break down the unseen work of food banks, from collection logistics to storage safety and security, and show how green bag programs and needs-based donations deliver more rice, beans, and shelf-stable proteins to the people who need them most.
Community care also looks like a shared table. We talk about potlucks that turn leftovers into a steady stream of meals and connection. Two turkey carcasses became broth, pulled meat, and enough soup to serve multiple households, with a pan of tetrazini for variety. These small acts stretch budgets, reduce waste, and invite neighbors to swap recipes and ideas that travel farther than any single drop-off.
Then we shift from food to tenant power. Many manufactured home parks struggle with inconsistent rule enforcement and corporate indifference. We outline a volunteer-led course we’ve proposed through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute to help residents start an OSTA chapter, organize effectively, and document issues in ways that lead to action. From first meetings and roles to escalation paths and engaging the attorney general for enforcement, the focus is practical, repeatable tools any park can use.
If OLLI approves the course, you’ll be able to join us there; if not, we’ll host it through OSTA with video modules and written guides. Either way, the goal is the same: support your local food banks with intention, turn leftovers into community, and build the structures that protect your park year-round. If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a neighbor, and leave a quick review to help more residents find these resources. What’s the first action you’ll take this week?
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Email: bbateman@oregontenants.com
Copyright OSTA2045,2025 Not for rebroadcast w/o express written permission. Please share and download for educational purposes with attribution.
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Well, hi everybody. I'm Bill Bateman, part of the team here at Osta, the Oregon State Tenants Organization, and we've got some stuff to talk about this December. First, we're going to be talking about food banks and how important they are, especially around the holidays, and then some new courses and classes that are going to be available for you. Come on in and let's get up to date. Well, thanks for stopping in. This Osta update is happening on the fourth day of December. I cannot believe Christmas is sneaking up so fast. And the holiday season, whatever you celebrate at your house, is always a good time for friends and family. It's a good time for reflection and thinking back, as well as making plans and looking ahead to the new year. One of the things that came up in our park, and this is just last month, because of all the insanity in Washington, with the SNAP programs being cut, funds being cut for a lot of different services, we're finding there there were folks without food. Now I know they had a crab buffet at the White House, but a lot of folks in our neighborhood were looking at going without. And we are blessed with some people in this park who are innovators. They've got ideas they want to get fixin', they want to get solving, which I imagine is like you, uh folks at your park, because Osta people are active, and uh we appreciate that. Something came up and the idea was I know there are a lot of food banks around the area, why don't we start a food bank right here in the park? And the idea being it would be right here in the clubhouse, the community room, and folks wouldn't have to drive over to the church. There's a church in our area that hosts the food bank, and this got some discussion going, and I was really impressed with what we came up with. The idea is yes, food banks are a sad necessity, it's something that's going to have to happen for a ways down the road, but starting yet another food bank is not a good idea, and here's why. If you're going to donate to a food bank, please do. I know during December, especially, because holidays are especially tight, and with the SNA and food stamp problems, more and more people are going to be needing to take advantage of that service. So supporting it is it's a no-brainer. That's what we do at our house. And we are fortunate that someone in our park is part of the green bag program. Now I don't know if this is all over Oregon, but I do know it's quite big in our area, and they are literally green bags which you fill up with food and you leave out a certain day of the week, and they're picked up by volunteers and they go to a food bank in our area. We started looking at what it takes to run a food bank. First of all, there's the soliciting the donation, there's the picking up the donations, there's the sorting and categorizing the donations, there's uh storage, there's safety, there's making sure that the cans are in date, or if it's bread uh or other baked goods, that they are within time. You don't pass out stale or unusable or perhaps even moldy products. There is a lot of work that goes into running a food bank. And if you're doing it, thank you. Uh, your efforts are not going without being noticed. To try and start another one, a competing food bank, it would then lower the donations to the existing structures and require you to set up a lot of things you may not be expecting. I know that security is something that uh you're not going to want to have to deal with and having folks breaking in because it it can happen, it does happen. So let's look at supporting your local food banks, especially at uh the at the current time, and working to build donations and to coordinate so you don't end up with nothing but cans of soup when in fact you also need rice and beans and things like that. So if you want to be an innovator, if you want to be helping with the food shortages, yes, support your food bank. We're supporting the green bag program in our area. That's in the uh Southern Oregon, Ashland, Phoenix, Medford uh area. And if you have an a program in your area or you have some innovative ideas, please use the address at the front and share them with me, and I'll include them in another Osta update. Another thing we do in our park that's worked out very well, we have occasional potlucks and holiday-related dinners. And for example, after Thanksgiving, we were fortunate enough to have a couple of turkeys that got uh cooked and were looking at uh the carcasses. And somebody finally said, you know, I could put that carcass to work. So in addition to passing out the leftovers to folks who might be interested in having those, uh, we found that uh by rendering those carcasses down, we got both extra meat and we got some s some very good turkey broth, turkey soup fixings. And it wasn't long before we were making uh turkey noodle soup. Or if you haven't uh tried it, turkey tetrazini with some of that leftover meat is going to replace some of the turkey sandwiches that seem to uh pop up after the holidays. So there's a lot of ways to get extra mileage out of your leftovers, and by putting your collective heads together, you can come up with some really good ideas. So, again, if you've got a suggestion, if you've got an idea, the address is at the front of the podcast. Please share it and I will include it in future Osta updates. Also coming up, and I'm kind of tickled about this, I work with OLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University, and it is a program designed to, and it's a volunteer program. I'm not getting paid for this. It's uh a volunteer program to share courses and information with seniors. And it's everything from preparing your will or end-of-life choices to uh real estate, to psychological, to playing the harmonica. I have proposed a course for OSTA, and it's basically going to be how to start your own OSTA chapter. What are some of the problems happening in parks? What are some of the solutions? And what are some of the tasks we need to come together and fix? The big one, of course, being the enforcement of the rules and regulations, and getting maybe the attorney general involved in the enforcement arm of the violations that we're seeing by a lot of these big corporations. So we are going to be offering this course. First of all, if Ali approves it, I've just submitted it. I turned it in actually the first of December, and I got a letter. Yep, we got it. I'm hopeful that uh they'll pick it up, and if so, I'd like to uh invite you all to take that course. If not, it's going to be available through Osta. So stay tuned. If you're interested in organizing your park and the idea of trying to book one of us to come out and help you do it, because we will, and we do, uh, that's another option. But having this course in an actual video format with some supported written materials is a good way that you and your friends can sit down and organize together and get things happening. So stay tuned. It's just the early part of the month. I'll be knowing fairly shortly what they're going to do about it, and I will keep you up to date. And in either case, I'll be either presenting an OLI course that you can take part in, or we'll be working here directly through Osta to make sure you've got the information you need to come together and start moving forward. Okay, that's all for this update. We have more ahead, obviously, and I hope everybody at your house is settling down, getting ready for a nice holiday season, and kind of keep things in perspective. It's uh it's family, it's friends, and it's planning for tomorrow. And we hope you're going to be able to do that at your house. Until then, this is Bill Bateman. We look forward to chatting with you soon. Be safe. The preceding program was a presentation of Retired Guy Productions.
