The Pacific Island Council of Oregon (PICO) provides summer sport camps, clinics, and training for children ages 8-14 years old throughout Portland Metropolitan area.

PICO was founded in 1998 by Ace Salu. The philosophy is to use sport as a tool to educate, teach and mentor our youth to become successful in life.

The Pacific Island Council of Oregon started their annual sports camp in 1999 as a way to educate, empower and encourage youth, especially Pacific Islander/American youths, to be proud of their culture and heritage.

Our summer camp is five days of enhancing athletic skills, broadening social skills and providing a drug free and safe environment. At camp the youth learn and begin demonstrating positive leadership, team-building skills, social appropriateness, and are taught role modeling for younger peers.

Also in 1998, PICO, in a collaborative effort with the International Refugee Center of Oregon (IRCO) and with a grant from the city of Portland, funded the first PICO Learning Center that served over 100 Asian and Pacific Islander students of the Portland Public School District. The Learning Center provided an after-school homework club, tutoring, arts and crafts, computer access and many more activities. Many students who attended dramatically improved their grade point average, which was the goal of the PICO Learning Center.

Through empowerment strategies and group-building activities, we teach individuals who participate in our program to advocate for themselves.

The mission of PICO is to provide the leadership necessary to support the Pacific Islanders/American families and communities of Oregon enabling them to empower and advocate for themselves, in order to preserve and promote their cultural heritage, and in all way prosper through social, economic and political opportunities.

Sports was the tool that bought these youth to camp. But as each student found out PICO camp is a lot more than learning how to play a sport. It is the learning of the life lessons taught by coaches and guest speaker each day that will make a difference in their young lives.