Let’s start simply. Blanchet House and Farm is a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon that provides three services: food, shelter, and work.

At its most basic, Blanchet feeds people, gives them a place to stay, and involves them in meaningful occupation. Amidst a sea of hollow promises and unreliable help, Blanchet is a beacon of commitment and concreteness.

Food, shelter, purpose—what would any of us be without them? I don’t mean that rhetorically.

Structurally speaking, the organization has two halves. The first is the house and cafe. The second is the residential farm. They are separated by 30-some miles, and—except for vegetables—there does not seem to be much traffic between them week-to-week. Even so, it is remarkable how much the same Blanchet spirit lives in both.

But the material aid Blanchet provides is more than the sum of its parts. It is a foundation for a community of people who are being restored to themselves. Which is to say, the description “nonprofit social services organization” does not quite capture everything that Blanchet House and Farm is. For my money, I’d call them a microcosm of redemption. 

You can see it in their mission statement. To alleviate suffering and offer hope for a better life by serving essential aid with dignity. There’s nothing explicitly there about hunger or poverty or employment. It’s a bigger vision made of the alleviation of suffering, the offering of hope, and the demonstration of dignity. 

And yes, it is pronounced the cool, French way—like its Archiepiscopal namesake blan-CHAY.

Blanchet Cafe and House share a building in Portland’s Old Town Chinatown, which until World War II was “Japantown.” It is vaguely bordered by Pearl District, West Burnside Street, and the Willamette River. The Chinatown Gateway straddles NW 4th Avenue at West Burnside like a colossus. The red and gold street signs are labeled both in English and in semi-phonetic Cantonese. There are dozens of people living between the bilingual streetsigns.

The neighborhood is “very close in proximity to the train station and the waterfront,” says Julie Showers, who works at Blanchet. “Historically, Old Town has been where people immigrated to Oregon—immigrants’ first stop. Day laborers, people who have been marginalized due to race and ethnicity have been told, ‘You can live in Old Town, nowhere else.’”

The organization has been here since its founding in 1952, when a collection of graduates from the University of Portland began serving meals in the neighborhood. They were inspired by the now-famous example of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, guided by the movement’s core conviction that—as Julie puts it—“receiving help or aid should require nothing on behalf of the receiver.” Blanchet House has been in this neighborhood serving 18 meals per week, providing beds, and giving people dignifying work for 73 years.

It’s a sturdy, curry-yellow brick building. If you did not know what you were looking at there would be no reason to assume it was not your average urban, first-floor-commercial apartment building. The cafe's tall storefront windows wrap around the northern and eastern faces. Offices, apartments, and balconies look over 3rd and Glisan streets from the floors above. The southern face of the building wears a vibrant mural of a volunteer in her green smock serving plates of pasta.

On the first floor, the kitchen has an air of joyful seriousness. There’s work to do and the work is good, fun even. Havalan and Antoine are the chefs at the helm of a crew of a dozen or so residents. Havalan gives me the rundown on today’s menu: zucchini strand noodles, marinated artichoke hearts, braised chicken… at a certain point my note taking skills can’t keep up with the options. You’d have as much difficulty ordering here as at The Cheesecake Factory.

Disco is playing as residents unload vegetables from a large fridge with a photo of Christopher Walken taped to the door. (Get it?) They stand at stations dicing, grating, snapping—engrossed. The room is pressurized. It’s a fury as these diligent fellows prepare to open the cafe in about two hours.

Lunch starts at 11:30 am, and immediately the cafe is a hive. Guests wait at the host station to be seated at one of 16 square tables. About a dozen servers (it’s hard to get a solid headcount) are dashing about with hands full of plates and pitchers. You could put them on roller blades Ratatouille-style, and they still wouldn't be able to keep up with the whack-a-mole of raised hands flagging more food, more drink. There are flowers at every table and upbeat background jazz to set the mood, but the room buzzes tectonically. Shazam apologizes, “Sorry. I didn’t catch that. Try again.”

It’s electric in here. Every chair is full. Plates are speedily emptied. Guests are in every kind of spirit—some right at home, some a bit on edge. There are clearly regulars, folks who have been patrons of the cafe for years, but no matter who you are or what state you are in, you get a seat.

This has to be the busiest restaurant in Chinatown. But somehow, it doesn’t feel like a machine. It’s not got the high stress, get-the-plates-out, “I need an order of Scallops for table 12” brand of panic. For all its whirr and scurry, it is clear that people can see each other.

The waiters greet regulars with familiar warmth. They share updates from the week. First-timers or the generally-tentative are seated with care and soft welcome. Staff members and a Peer Support Specialist float about answering questions, checking in on folks, getting people connected with resources. Between the approximately 1200 plates the cafe serves on an average day, somehow they do not miss the meal for the ingredients so to speak.

Fundamentally, this is about human dignity.

When the cafe closes at 12:25 pm, the staff and volunteers get to eat. They shuffle through the kitchen in a buffet line. They wander into the now-empty seats and share a meal that feels downright eucharistic. It’s a calm before the storm of dinner prep. But it is also a time for people to celebrate, in a humble way, the work they have just finished, the work they have been doing for more than seven decades.

On the floors above the cafe are the offices and the residents’ rooms. The elevator takes you on a trip up Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, it seems. Blanchet employs some 35 paid staff and houses “45-ish men who are living in our building at any given time in this transitional housing program while they get back on their feet,” says Emily Coleman. She’s a volunteer-turned-employee who serves as director of programs and services.

The housing program doesn’t cost anything. You can live there for free as long as you need. The only requirement is that you work in the kitchen of the cafe for the first 90 days of your stay. Kristi Katzke is the case manager and intake coordinator at the house. She admits that part of the intake process is assessing fitness for kitchen work. “You have to be able to stand on your feet for a long time. You have to be able to chop, slice dice, navigate stairs, lift up to 40 pounds.” But it’s not an insurmountable barrier to entry.

Among the residents is Chris Brown. “They call me 'Downtown,' but my name is Chris Brown.” He’s been living at Blanchet house “since Halloween, 2022.” As a teenager, Chris broke both his legs and his back. “I went rock climbing. As soon as I got up there, I stepped backwards in this… I guess.. I thought it was a bush. It was a void. I fell 55 feet, this rapid tumble.” He has had many other falls since then: a botched surgery, an eviction during the recovery, an untimely layoff, “seven and a half years I was on the street.” Chris’ injuries left him unable to work in the kitchen. “So they found me other jobs… as an alternative for the 90 days.”

Chris has true grit, and life has not been easy. He is built like a tank—strong and square. His voice is gravelly and deep. He walks with a heavy limp. Even so, there is a tenderness in his crystal blue eyes. You can see it when he talks about the house. “I’ve never met God, but this place… it’s a God-send.” He gets a bit verklempt. “Being here. It’s actually—it’s righteous. It's Blanchet House that's providing all these clothing pieces out there, toiletries, the food, the meals. It's a chapter of compassion that we're all having to read out.”

“People can grow.” It’s what Chris says he hopes his four-year-old daughter might learn from his own story here at Blanchet. “They can change.” Small tears form again in his unclouded blue eyes

Then there’s Thor, an ironically un-thunderous fellow. His circular, cream-colored glasses are precariously balanced on his pale, thin nose. His voice is soft and musical. He has this calming presence—like he could convince a stray pup to crawl out from under a car and eat out of his hand. When he sits down he puts a coaster on the table under his glass because “that’s how I was raised, unfortunately.” His self-deprecation is relaxing.

Thor bought a one-way Amtrak ticket from his hometown in Chicago when he was 29. “I got to where I wanted to be, which was Portland, but I found myself in this transitional-looking facility.” That is, Blanchet House. “At that time there were only two case managers and two people working upstairs. Every other job was filled by a resident or a man who was going through the acts of sober living, just getting rid of the trauma. So it's funny to come back and see how much has changed. No, it's really wild. In a good way.” Now in his thirties, this is his second stay in the house.

“What are the friendships like amongst the residents?” I ask.

“What I do notice though is that the shared experiences… ‘Hey, I was on the street.' 'Hey, me too.' 'Hey, I have this trauma.' 'Hey, me too.' Boom.” Friendships arise out of some of the most difficult parts of the past. “I think I said it from my first day here, and I'll certainly take it with me afterwards, is that the outside world tore us all down. We're here because the world out there said, ‘Man, eff you. Yada, yada.’ We should really be here to support each other or build each other up.” 

Thor is gay, but that does not seem to have caused him any trouble living in the house. “It’s kind of like the last thing that comes up in conversation with residents. Or what's funny is residents will just be like, ‘You're a person, you're here.’ Or maybe to touch on that camaraderie aspect of what connects people. It's like… ‘We're both residents and that will connect us.’”

It is a beautiful thing—the redemption so starkly on display here. Some of the most difficult experiences a person can have are transformed. They become the basis for new friendships, a source of incredible power. They become testimonies, witnesses to what is possible in a person, in a relationship, in a community. But it only happens when someone takes the time to make humane space: a place where people can live and work without fear. For all its hustle and energy, that is what Blanchet House is.

It’s also what the farm is, but the two could not be more different.

It takes an hour to get to Blanchet Farm, most of it through the rolling wine country of the Tualatin Valley. The drive feels like a detox from noise and density. Yamhill County is a chimera of humble American farming and luxury viticulture. It is hard to imagine a setting less like Old Town Chinatown.

Quiet. Peaceful. Slow.

Blanchet Farm is, indeed, a working farm—62 acres bought in 1962. They raise chickens and goats. They tend a large garden. They manage two hives of very busy bees. They host a sounder of pigs, captained by an aging, 600-lb boar named Oscar. “I would love to have horses here,” says Ross Sears, the farm manager. 

Ross started out here as a resident back in 2008. He had been living at Blanchet Farm for about 18 months when he was approached and asked if he’d like the job. “It's like, what? You want me to be responsible for all this? I said, 'I don't know. I dunno, I got to think about it'…” But he said yes. “I was terrified. There was no book that taught me how to do this.” Now, he’s a fixture of the place, followed everywhere by a spritely terrier named Mack. The two of them tour us around the grounds.

There’s the old barn. “Obviously nobody really knows how old that is.” There’s the woodshop. The residential space, though, is brand new. “If you guys could have seen the old house… it is so far from this. Opposite as you could possibly get, but the guys have something nice.”

You can fit 25 guys in the new dorms, finished only last year. But they tend to keep it to 18 or so. It’s a deeper community that way.

The deal with staying here is the same as the house in Portland. You pay for nothing, but you work for the first 90 days. Instead of chopping vegetables, it’s the stuff of Green Acres: feeding the goats, collecting eggs from the chickens, sanding slabs in the woodshop. If you’re really brave you might join Katy Fackler as a beekeeper.

“You have to control your breathing because bees can sense when you're afraid. And if you start really acting afraid and start hyperventilating, they can tell and they get super defensive because they're afraid that you are going to hurt them.” It’s not for the faint of heart. “You're controlling your breathing, you're having this sense, you're in this suit, you're trying to keep yourself calm. And it's one activity where you have to be completely present for that activity.”

But caring for the animals is not just an exercise in jedi mind control. It’s also, it seems, a way of learning this most dignifying truth that we are all needed. “I usually start guys in the animals for a reason: it breaks down some of the hard stuff,” Ross says. “It breeds some empathy, sympathy, compassion—even trust. Because we [addicts] have huge, huge trust issues. You have a little bond with an animal.”

“I try to make sure people stay busy all the time and make sure the landscaping's good,” says Sam Cook. He’s the assistant farm manager, but he originally arrived as a resident. “I didn't know at all what to expect.” Now wisened, Sam has a clear eye about what makes a stay at Blanchet a success. “You got guys here that really want to be here and really want to keep busy. And those seem to be the guys that really are successful over guys that just are here.” Sam, you can tell, wants to be here.

The list of to-do items he has completed in the last few days is exhausting just to listen to. “Lots of weeding, mowing all the time. We pull blackberry bushes in the back. I don't know if you've gone in the woods back there. We took about four or five acres of blackberry bushes, probably about 15,000 pounds of blackberry bushes.” He says it doesn’t take as long as you think. I doubt that…

Sam has struggled with addiction. At Blanchet that is a source of strength. “You only know if you've been through it,” he says with a commanding sort of authority. “Some of it is a hard thing to describe to somebody that isn't an alcoholic or an addict. Even me being an alcoholic, it's hard for me to understand certain things from just addicts. We are similar, but we're also different. But it is fun to watch. It is really fun to be surprised that someone's changing.”

One of those people who is changing is William Wood. “So I've been in recovery a whole bunch of different times, but I never worked on the base reasons why I wanted to go out and use. The base reasons would be I felt less than, and I need to find confidence in myself again.” Blanchet Farm has been a different story though. “Now I feel more stable, more secure, more mentally and spiritually fit.”

It’s a tight regiment here. “I get up earlier, right at 6:00 am. I call my brother Dan Monday through Friday, and he's in the program with 20 years sobriety… After we're done now, like 6:30, I go have my own personal breakfast. I just have cereal and I don't have to wait for them to prepare anything. It's like a routine that I'm doing. And then I go back to my room and I study. I study for an hour in the Bible.” Then it’s off to work. “Tomorrow, guess what? I'll wake up, start the whole process all over again. Believe me, I'm not perfect every day. I find myself being short, not doing everything.” But it doesn’t seem to bother him like it used to. “And my self-esteem has improved… this place has given me a good place to take time and figure out my core causes.”

Blanchet Farm makes room for folks. It’s an entirely different environment from Blanchet House and Cafe in Portland. But the same spirit, the same philosophy is there. Provide for people’s needs with no barrier to receiving aid. Give human beings room to be. Involve them in the kind of work that teaches us the fundamental truth that our lives make a difference in the world.

It really makes you wonder… Why isn’t there more of this out there?

“At the time when I was hired, I mean, they used to say that Blanchet House was the best kept secret in town.” That’s Scott Kerman, the executive director at Blanchet House and Farm. “COVID changed that.”

In the pandemic, Blanchet didn’t miss a beat. So far as I can tell, they didn’t miss a single meal. “I think the only two places that had stayed open on a sort of a regular basis serving meals was us and the Portland Rescue Mission, which is just down the road here in Old Town. Everything else had essentially closed down, including operations that were taking in donated food.” In that trying time, Blanchet essentially became the big sibling to the social service nonprofit family of Portland.

“So at that time, every restaurant, every food service was closing and wanted to do something with their perishables other than throw it away. And it almost all found its way here. And we were getting a lot of news coverage at the time, and it just really raised our profile, which was great because it gave us a platform to talk about just how much people were struggling and suffering.”

A former school administrator and a lawyer by training, Scott himself seems to be the nexus where Blanchet’s in-house and on-the-ground work launches into a wider solar system of concerns. “A lot of my work right now is focused on macro-level and policy—in the city, in the county, in the state—that impacts not just nonprofits as a sector, but also the people we're serving and the people who might need our services tomorrow.” From city council decisions to federal budget actions, Scott can see everything the light touches. It’s not always an encouraging scene.

“The anchor for hope right now is, despite the fact that there is a lot of despondency in the work, there's also still a strong sense of community and togetherness between and among organizations, among leadership in organizations and not a sense of everyone for themselves, but really an authentic care for what's happening with you, what's happening with your organization.”

What’s happening with Blanchet is growth. Over the years, Blanchet has deepened their deck of support offerings significantly. When Scott started as executive director, “there were only six employees on payroll. I got here in August of 2019 and we now have 35, including me.” There are Peer Support Specialists, one caseworker at each location, and even a life coach at the farm. More jobs are posted to be filled on their website. It is remarkable the amount of support a person can receive, free of charge at Blanchet House and Farm. And yet it is still not enough.

The biggest line of growth at Blanchet right now is Bethanie’s Room. It will be “an overnight emergency shelter for women and people who identify as female and also gender expansive,” Emily says. “[We] see the rise in female identified folks experiencing homelessness, inching closer and closer to half of the homeless population.” While Emily says emphatically that life on the street is hard for anyone, “I think the realities of life on the street are inherently a lot more difficult for people who identify as female. And the women that we see coming into the cafe are very often in a state of crisis. They have often been subject to abuse and violence on the streets. And there's just such a need to help support folks in that vulnerable position.”

But even as the need for organizations devoted to women’s aid has increased, those exact organizations have been closing down in Portland. “Until recently,” Scott says “there was literally nowhere to send a woman that night to sleep. The only remaining overnight emergency shelter for women closed before COVID. It recently reopened.” But it is far from enough.

The inspiration for Bethanie’s room was a regular in the cafe. “Bethanie was actually one of our regular meal guests, was a guest here for years and beloved by a lot of the staff and volunteers. And she had a traumatic brain injury.” Emily recalls. “She was a dear sweet presence who would sort of apologize after an involuntary shout.”

One night she was killed in a hit and run accident at 2 am. “That hit our staff and community really, really hard.” Bethanie’s story was, in Scott’s words, “not surprising because there aren't a lot of paths for people that we serve who are chronically homeless and who have serious and persistent mental illness or other trauma.”

Scott acknowledges that a nightly emergency shelter is “probably, as I like to say, the least good.” A ‘fix’ like Bethanie’s room will not address the systemic issues, of which Blanchet is all too aware. But the actual Bethanie—the real live woman who lived and who was beloved at Blanchet Cafe and who died without justice—her life demands that something be done. “We just can't have it. We just can't have it,” Scott says. “And whether it's the least good type of shelter or not, we're going to celebrate the fact that in Bethanie's room, up to 75 people a night are going to have protection from harm and an opportunity to sleep.”

There’s no way around the concreteness of what Blanchet does. Almost literally, it hits you in the face. The meals are hot. The beds are sturdy. The work keeps getting done. This seems to be the heartbeat of the life that flows from this place: its inescapably, unavoidably, tangible difference.

Dorothy Day, the American face of the Catholic Worker Movement, was emphatic on this point. What people need is direct and concrete aid—without barriers. She had a kind of prophetic clarity on the irreducible role of materiality in the alleviation of suffering. “The only way to show our love is by being willing to lay down our lives for our friends, even for our enemies. And this is shown in the day-to-day caring, the feeding, the clothing."

Catholic Eucharistic Theology borrows a distinction from Aristotle: essence and existence. The essence of something is what it essentially is. What makes that thing that thing. The existence of something is how it happens to exist, its accidental properties. When it comes to the Eucharist, this distinction explains how a piece of bread can also be the body of Christ. It is essentially Christ’s body, but it exists as bread.

It was Thomas Aquinas who made a striking and playful theological claim. God is the only thing whose essence is His existence. You can’t pull God into parts. God is what God does, you might say.

In two days with Blanchet, I kept trying to figure out what was essential and what was accidental to the place—to see the “deeper meaning” behind the work of the cafe, the house, the farm. I wanted to pull a piercingly insightful rabbit out of the hat, to share with the world that “______ is really what Blanchet does.”

It just doesn’t work here, though.

Blanchet is an institution characterized by a Gibraltaresque faithfulness and concreteness. To get “behind” their actual, tangible work isn’t insightful. It’s blind. Without theory, abstraction, wishfulness—the here-ness of it all is frankly heart-melting. It’s as though there is no distinction between what they are and what they do: essence and existence. It all is what it is. For Thomas Aquinas, it’s the kind of simplicity that makes God unique. Maybe that’s what makes Blanchet just a little bit divine.