Max List regularly sponsors public events in our hometown of Portland, Oregon.

This allows job seekers, employers, and others to gather and make new friends and connections.

We recently teamed up with Be Local PDX to host a panel conversation about meaningful careers in Portland and how to align your job with your values.

Here's a recording of our conversation.

Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for coming out tonight.

My name is Wes Griffin. I use he and him pronouns. And I'm the executive director at B Local PDX. Before I tell you about what we do, we're a really small nonprofit.

We're normally the ones asking for sponsors.

Rarely are the sponsor on the stage.

So I got to milk it a little bit, right?

I'm just going to tell you a little bit of my story and my why and kind of how I ended up here tonight.

So we're lucky to be friends and partners with Max List and really proud to be sponsors of the event tonight.

Let me take you back for a second to 2014.

My first visit to Portland, I was working at Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans, Louisiana,

pretty far from here.

And I'm not entirely sure why.

I was running their restores, their secondhand home improvement stores.

And the conference for restore leaders was in Portland, Oregon for the

whole country. And I had never been to the Pacific Northwest, and a detail you don't need to know,

but it's important here. My new girlfriend and I were doing long distance, and we didn't get to

see each other very often.

So when one of us was traveling, the other one said, can I find a cheap ticket?

Let's go.

...