About
A free after-school program that takes kids seriously.
STENCH is a Portland nonprofit running six neighborhood after-school sites for kids in grades 4–8. We teach six subjects, charge no tuition, and have been doing it since 2011.
- Founded
- 2011, SE Hawthorne
- Sites
- 6 across Portland
- Kids served
- 1,240 in 2025
- Grades
- 4–8
The short version
STENCH stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Nothing, Crafts and Haircuts. It is a real acronym, in the sense that we wrote it down and then built a building around it. The name started as a joke between two people who thought after-school programs were too tidy. Fifteen years later it is on six buildings, forty-one staff shirts, and a van named Deb.
We are not a tutoring center. We are not childcare, though we are licensed as one. We are not a pipeline into tech jobs, though some of our kids end up there. We are the three hours between the school bell and dinner, run as if those hours belonged to the kids instead of the adults.
The acronym, unpacked
- Science — wet labs, creek water, field notebooks, and questions nobody can answer in one afternoon.
- Technology — repair benches, block code, soldering, and a standing pile of donated dead laptops.
- Engineering — structures, mechanisms, and the annual Bridge Disaster, which is a planned event.
- Nothing — a quiet room, no screens, no output. The hardest subject we teach.
- Crafts — clay, thread, wood, dye, and enough glue to qualify as a material budget line.
- Haircuts — a licensed student salon offering free cuts to the neighborhood.
Every kid chooses two programs per term. They stay in them for eleven weeks. Nobody rotates through all six like a sampler platter, because depth is the entire point.
How it is paid for
STENCH has an annual budget of about $3.4 million, which sounds enormous until you divide it by 1,240 kids and 180 afternoons. It works out to roughly $26 per kid per afternoon, including snack, staff, materials, transportation, and the building.
| Source | Share | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Individual donors | 54% | 412 monthly givers, a biennial letter, and one $50,000 bequest from a neighbor |
| Foundations | 24% | Multi-year grants for program staff and the Cully site |
| Corporate | 12% | Workshop sponsorships and one company that sends twelve engineers every spring |
| Government | 8% | A city youth program contract and a county transit voucher |
| Earned income | 2% | The salon takes donations for cuts. Kids set the suggested price. It is $0. |
Tuition is not on that list, and it never will be. We have been offered fee-for-service money four times and turned it down four times, including once when we badly needed it. That decision is written into our bylaws: no family may be charged for participation, and no program may be means-tested.
Where we are
Six sites, all on bus lines, all within a fifteen-minute walk of at least one partner school:
| Site | Neighborhood | Opened | Programs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hawthorne (HQ) | Richmond / Hawthorne | 2012 | All six + salon |
| Foster-Powell | Foster-Powell | 2015 | Science, Crafts, Nothing |
| Montavilla | Montavilla | 2017 | Technology, Engineering, Crafts |
| Cully | Cully | 2019 | Science, Crafts, Haircuts |
| Lents | Lents | 2022 | Technology, Engineering, Nothing |
| St. Johns | St. Johns | 2024 | All six + salon |
Who we serve
Last year, 68% of our families qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. 31% of our kids spoke a language other than English at home. 22% received special education services at school. 14% were in foster care or kinship care. We do not ask for documentation of any of it — we ask what a kid needs and then we try to provide it.
We also serve the neighborhood, not just enrolled families: the salon is open to anyone, the courtyard is a public garden, and the auditorium gets used by three community groups a month. A building that is empty at 7 p.m. is a wasted building.
There is a chair with your kid's name on it.
Enrollment is free, takes about six minutes, and does not require a test, a portfolio, or a parent who has it together.