Blanchet House pivoted to serve to-go meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. We continue to offer three hot meals a day, six days a week free to all. Blanchet House’s residential housing program provides a holistic pathway from homelessness to lasting self-sufficiency. We serve all people with dignity, compassion, and without judgment.

Our 2020 Impact

After nearly 10 years of planning and fundraising, all the while serving those in need, the Blanchet House board was able to build and open a new building. LEED platinum certified, the new and improved Blanchet House increased our capacity to feed and house those in need. We feed nearly 1,000 people a day and house up to 50 men.

On Thursday, September 15, Commissioner Nick Fish spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony of the new Blanchet House located at 310 NW Glisan next door to the original building. The new building will provide more space including a larger kitchen and three floors of residential rooms with a central shared bathroom, laundry, and community room on each floor.

The building’s design serves to enhance the surrounding historic Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood and provide a positive, supportive space for the people who will use it on a daily basis. SERA architects took design cues from the nearby buildings by adding balconies with details referencing the nearby Chinese Garden.

“I hope we serve the need that is there through a combination of God’s divine providence and some work we do ourselves, not just sitting on our rears,” founding member Pat Carr told the Catholic Sentinel in 2002. “All of us really have gotten more out of Blanchet than we have put in.”

Always a humble group the members of Blanchet House celebrated anniversaries with little fanfare.

“It was our duty,” says Gene Feltz.

Erected in 1911, the Blanchet House, a free-standing masonry building was no longer liveable. It was not economically feasible to repair the old building so the board began an ambitious 10-year campaign to raise money to build a new Blanchet House next door. Finally, in 2009, Blanchet House reached an agreement with the City of Portland to construct a new building on city-owned land at the corner of NW Third and Glisan. The new 36,500-sf, the four-story building would triple Blanchet’s space, increasing the residential capacity from 28 to 60 people. Blanchet House would be able to significantly help more people in need of housing and meals.

“The building has served us well, but it’s reached the end of its use and it’s nearly 100 years old,” said Dan Petrusich, son of an early board member and now a board member himself. “There’s something very special about this place. Our challenge will be to replicate that feeling in the new building.”

Read more about construction of the new Blanchet House

By Ron Kartin, Catholic Sentinel, Jan. 4, 1985

Some of the original founders of the Blanchet House and their sons teamed up this holiday season to serve the traditional Christmas dinner to Portland’s homeless and hungry.

Portland lawyer James O’Hanlon and stockbroker Dan Christianson–among the original founders 32 years ago when they were enrolled at the University of Portland–were assisted in feeding the hungry by their sons Tim O’Hanlon and Peter Christianson, both students.

Attorney Eugene Feltz was accompanied by his son-in-law, Dave Gunderson.

The young men have joined their fathers on the Blanchet House board of directors.

With 2,000 pounds of donated turkey and all the trimmings. About 700 people were served.

“We don’t want to see this end,” said Dave Gunderson. “As long as there are people who are hungry, we want to get them fed.”

For decades, Blanchet House focused on its mission to provide life essentials for those with nowhere to go. The line for dinner during the 1980s was captured by the University of Portland Beacon. Most people found Blanchet House by word-of-mouth on the street or a peer organization.

Always funded by compassionate individuals, Blanchet House staff put coin collection cans in Portland area bars to raise money to feed and house those in need. Many generous donors surprised the members of Blanchet House with bequests that allowed them to modernize and expand operations. A small contribution goes a long way to alleviating suffering for someone going through a hard time.

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The board long understood that there was a need for a place outside of Portland where those struggling with addiction could escape the “temptations of the city.” They raised money to purchase a 40-acre prune farm in Yamhill County and called it Blanchet Farm. Dormitories were built to house up to 22 men, common spaces, barns for animals, and a woodshop. Operated according to the same principles as the House, the farm provides lodging and therapeutic labor for men seeking sobriety in a peaceful rural setting.

There is room for 22 men to live within a program designed to facilitate recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. Blanchet Farm now includes a Case Manager to support residents in securing medical and mental health care, employment, and housing.

Learn more about Blanchet Farm

10 years after opening, the Blanchet House of Hospitality had increased the number of meals it could serve and the breadth of services it could provide thanks impart to the addition of full-time Executive Director, Al Riley, who served for 38 years starting in 1960. Al answered a classified ad for a house manager and worked for free. The ad read ‘Apostolic work. Director needed for Blanchet House seven days a week, 17 hours a day. No pay.’

Agreeing to try out the job for a year, he became a fixture at Blanchet House, as well as a friend to thousands of needy people. He personally wrote all of the newsletters and mailed out an annual appeal on a half-sheet of paper. Funds came from individuals, businesses, bequests, and foundations.

“He had a way of calming the waters in people,” said Jim O’Hanlon, a founding member of Blanchet House. “It was his love for people that enabled him to do his job so well.”

After a decade of service, Blanchet House had become an important institution in the social fabric of Portland. Word on the street always spread to those in need.

By 1958, the Blanchet Club had raised enough money to purchase the entire building on NW 4th for $25,000. The building was christened the Blanchet House of Hospitality. 340 NW Glisan, which still stands, is an orange masonry building with a small basement for storage, the main floor that contained a public dining room, kitchen, manager’s office, and bathrooms. The founders and their families cleaned up the upper floors to use as short-term housing units for men who, in exchange for room and board, would work in the kitchen and help serve.

Father Francis “Frank” Kennard inspired by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement to “stand up for the poor” became the advisor and chaplain to the Blanchet Club at the University of Portland in 1948. The young men of Blanchet Club were motivated by Fr. Kennard to “get out in the streets and do something meaningful. Help people!” After years of service small acts of charity, the nine members of Blanchet Club searched for a permanent location to carry out their mission to feed, clothe, and offer aid to those in need.

The founders of Blanchet House of Hospitality include Jim O’Hanlon Sr., Eugene Feltz, Joe Moore, John Moore, Tom Moore, Dan Harrington, John Little, Hugh McGinnis, Pat Carr, Dan Christianson, Kev Collins, and Bernie Harrington. All alumni of the University of Portland and devote Catholics. Although named after the first Archbishop of Oregon, François Norbert Blanchet, it’s not an agency of the Catholic Church.

“He believed in the dignity of everybody we served, even if they abused it,” said Gene Feltz, remembering Father Kennard in a Catholic Sentinal article. The priest, who died in 1994, eventually became a missionary in South America and returned to Portland, where he lived in Old Town and ministered to homeless people.

Photo courtesy of the Catholic Sentinel.

Read more about Blanchet House’s founders.

Read more about Fr. Francis Kennard.