Oregon Humanities

Telling the Story

Board member works to ensure a healthy economy for Oregon’s future.

Raina Hassan

Gillian Floren admits she is a little uncomfortable about being interviewed. As a communications professional with a lengthy background in journalism, she hasn’t been on the other end of the microphone very often. Her life’s work has centered around telling other people’s stories.

“What I’ve always appreciated about journalism,” she says, “is the opportunity to find ways to tell stories that are compelling, share important ideas, and try to make those stories and ideas accessible to your audience.”

But Floren, who has been an Oregon Humanities board member since 2008, has an interesting story of her own. A meandering path through early adulthood began with her first job as an auto mechanic. She later worked in a medical lab examining cancer cells and then for the Arizona state Senate on the research staff of the education committee.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at the age of thirty, Floren immediately entered graduate school and earned a master’s in journalism from the University of North Carolina. “I saw journalism as a career choice that would open up worlds, rather than narrow them, and that suited me well,” she says.

Her first journalism job was with the Independent Weekly in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The brainchild of Duke graduates who believed in high-integrity journalism as a mechanism to effect social change, the publication covered culture, art, and regional politics. “As a small, local publication, that was where we had the chance to have the most impact,” Floren recalls.
She then went to Eritrea in northeastern Africa in 1996 through a USAID-funded exchange program between the University of North Carolina and the University of Asmara, where she taught journalism to university students and Ministry of Information officials. Eritrea had recently won independence from Ethiopia after a thirty-year struggle, and Floren remembers it as a time in which the people were optimistic and hopeful for change. Helping the citizens of a fledgling independent country understand the power of their voices as journalists was a “tremendous experience,” she recalls. “I recognized in a very powerful way what free press means.”

She returned to Oregon in 1997 and took a teaching position at Linfield for a semester and then was offered the custom publications editor position with MediAmerica, publishers of Oregon Business and Oregon Home magazines. Floren became editor-in-chief of MediAmerica and then served as editor of Oregon Business for six years. “What I discovered was that the people who own and run and start businesses are some of the most passionate, creative, interesting, intelligent people around,” she says.

Floren later served as publisher of Oregon Business before taking the position as vice president of marketing and business retention with Greenlight Greater Portland in 2007, which she currently holds. She also spends time as an American Leadership Forum senior fellow and serves on their marketing committee, and on the board of the Oregon Independent Colleges Foundation.

“In my current work with Greenlight,” she says, “I am still endlessly engaged in the stories of the business community and the passion that businesspeople bring to what they do.” And by sharing the engaging narrative of Oregon’s business community, Floren is doing her part to ensure a vibrant economy into the future.