Blanchet House

Blanchet House is a non-profit social services organization located in Portland, Oregon providing meals, transitional shelter, drug and alcohol recovery programs, and support services to those struggling with homelessness and addiction. As a House of Hospitality, Blanchet House offers hot meals without question six days a week, three times a day. Blanchet House was founded in 1952 by a group of University of Portland students encouraged by their priest to "get out in the streets and help."

History
In the early 1940s, a group of University of Portland students started a fraternity called the Blanchet Club. The club took its name from Oregon’s first pioneer Catholic priest, Rev. Francis Norbert Blanchet. The students were encouraged by their club chaplain to “Do something meaningful” so they began doing acts of charity like serving sandwiches and coffee out of the back of a car to those experiencing homelessness and food insecurity. The founders believed that everyone in the world had a right to food, clothing, and shelter. They wanted to provide the poor, sick, homeless, and unwanted people of Portland a place of immediate relief with no moral judgments or religious requirements. The men wanted to have a larger impact on the community, so they began searching for a permanent location to serve meals from.

In 1952, they moved into the ground-level floor of the former New Meyer Hotel previously managed by S. Yamaguchi until 1931 when it was sold and became the Hotel New Meyer. At the time, the upper floors were used as a brothel. On Feb. 11, the group served its first meal to 227 people. The organization bought the building in 1958. By 2018, Blanchet House has been serving three meals a day, six days a week to an average 1,000 people a day. It is a house of hospitality, inspired by the Catholic Worker’s Movement. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin created the Catholic Worker newspaper and then opened up houses of hospitality and farms. People across America, like the founders of Blanchet House, were so inspired by their activism that they started their own Catholic Worker communities, each one independent from each other. Now, the Catholic Worker movement can be seen as a dialogue between Catholic social teaching and radical Christian anarchism. In 1962, a farm in Carlton, Oregon was purchased by Blanchet House which hosts a residential program for men who are rebuilding their lives from drug and alcohol addiction, job loss and other obstacles. Blanchet Farm in Carlton, Yamhill County, Oregon runs a rural program offers a recovery through work. Participants engage in work such as caring for animals and gardens along with learning woodworking and beekeeping.

Blanchet House operated from the same building until 2012 before moving to a newly constructed building nearby at the former site of a gay bar Dirty Duck. The organization acquired the location in which Dirty Duck was located with a land trade deal with Portland Development Commission. The new building is larger and the upper floors are used as transitional housing. Blanchet House demolished the historic Yamaguchi Hotel on March 21, 2023 despite opposition from Restore Oregon. The organization plans on building a health clinic on the site of their old building.

Services
Blanchet House serves three meals a day to anyone in need, Monday through Saturday, with capacity to serve 1,500 meals a day.