Think Out Loud

The Lullaby Project was created more than a decade ago by the Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute. The program pairs singer-songwriters with parents who are incarcerated or experiencing homelessness, and together they create a lullaby.  In Oregon, those songs are arranged for the Oregon Symphony and then publicly performed. 

Ada McGraw was one of the first women to participate in this program after it expanded to the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility last year. While serving her sentence, McGraw was paired with singer-songwriter Bre Gregg. The lullaby they wrote was for her son Legend and included a poem from Legend’s father.

Jessica Katz is the director of The Family Preservation Project and facilitated their meeting. We talk with Katz, Gregg and McGraw to hear about this creative process and learn more about the larger impact of The Lullaby Project. 

On Thursday, musicians drove down to Coffee Creek to begin work on the next set of lullabies with women in custody. We’re rebroadcasting this segment that first aired live on May 5, 2026 to kick off Staff Picks, an occasional series highlighting some of our production staff’s favorite segments 

Scientists at Oregon State University set up cameras and recorded 12,000 hours of video footage to track changes in how marbled murrelets feed their chicks across four years of varying ocean conditions. Poor ocean conditions, for example, are generally associated with warmer marine temperatures that can affect the availability of fish like Pacific sand lance the small, stocky seabirds catch to feed their chicks. 

The scientists found that not only did the chicks receive fewer fish per day during poor ocean conditions, they also took 25% longer to leave the nest, which made them more vulnerable to being eaten by predators like ravens and hawks. That raises concerns for the future of a species that’s listed as threatened in California, Oregon and Washington under the Endangered Species Act. Climate change is affecting marbled murrelets’ population recovery by making marine temperatures warmer and El Niño events stronger, and harming the old-growth conifer forests where the birds nest. 

Jim Rivers is an associate professor of wildlife ecology and the director of the Forest Animal Ecology Lab at OSU. He joins us for more details.

 Last week, the city of Umatilla voted to declare a state of emergency in response to Gov. Tina Kotek’s data center moratorium. The city says preventing future data centers could cost their community millions. Data centers have drawn growing bipartisan opposition across the country. They've also created increasing concern for Oregonians on both sides of the aisle. Umatilla City Manager Dave Stockdale joins us to share more on the state of emergency and the state moratorium's broader impacts.

 It’s been nearly two weeks since the shooting at a Bend elementary school. As new details emerge, experts have shared their ideas for preventing school shootings in the future. School shooter prevention has grown to a $4 billion industry, but researchers and advocates say many of the current efforts turn schools into places that can actually bring more fear to students.

Amie Wexler is the executive director of Alliance for a Safe Oregon. It argues that increased access to mental health support for families, reducing youth access to firearms and changes to the physical environments of schools can prevent future mass shootings. The Alliance also notes that increasing the use of Oregon’s Extreme Risk Prevention Orders could also help prevent mass shootings before they occur. Wexler joins us to share more.

Earlier this month, the Urban League of Portland released top-line findings from a new report that examined how Black communities across Oregon are faring. The latest State of Black Oregon — which follows up on a report of the same name from 2015 — found persistent challenges in education, while documenting substantial gains in several measures of civic participation, including voter registration and Black representation in the State Legislature. We talk with the study’s lead author, Jazzmine Waugh, about the new report and possible solutions to the issues it identified. We’re also joined by Aislyn Brown, a Multnomah County teen and Black cultural  librarian, to discuss the role of mentorship in building resilience among young Black Oregonians.