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The School of Education’s P.A.C.E. program (Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education) at the University of Portland began in partnership with the University of Notre Dame’s A.C.E. initiative in 1994, the two components separating in 1998 with the UP branch acquiring a geographical focus (PACIFIC) by placing PACE participants ‘locally’ in schools in the western-Pacific region (from Hawai’i to Alaska to Utah, anchored in Washington and Oregon).

PACE students pursue a two-year Master’s Degree in a three-year hybrid program, comprised of two years of full-time teaching in the field during the school year framed within three summers of intensive instruction in Teaching Arts. The schools they serve are financially challenged Catholic elementary schools. The program thus permits the University to project institutional support by training and sending teachers to assist the survival of these community-based parish grade schools.

The ALLIANCE section of the model is this: the University sharing and serving, lending inspired and skilled workers to areas of need supplying our larger community a complementary return that extends and spills well beyond filling classrooms. (Our student body draws new students from these same states each year, and so the PACE placements model reciprocity; a gracious return-on-investment.)

Which brings us to the CATHOLIC EDUCATION element of the program title. PACE students carry out their work at a Catholic school. But they are not sent as religion teachers; and in practice the student body of the typical parish school represents a near-even population of Catholic and non-Catholic families; with a pronounced diversity of ethnic background and economic opportunities adding to the mixture. In the language of mission, the parish schools aim to serve an under-served population; and the University has devised the PACE program to assist and strengthen that work. And that is the Catholic character of PACE; showing forth a dynamic example of how education is a fundamental CATHOLIC value and service.

And that is Catholic education, a Holy Cross education, lived out of the values expressed in the life and activities of Fr. Basil Moreau, CSC, founder of the Holy Cross Congregation:

If at times you show preference to any young person, it should be the poor, those who have no one else to show them preference, those who have the least knowledge, those who lack skills and talents, and those who are not Catholic or Christian. If you show them greater care and concern, it must be because their needs are greater and because it is only just to give more to those who have received less.”
Christian Education (1856) in Basil Moreau: ESSENTIAL WRITINGS (edited by Kevin Grove, C.S.C. and Andrew Gawrych, C.S.C., 2014); p. 338.

Genuine education has no room for indoctrination. It is a little more like paying-forward a debt of gratitude. The PACE vision of Catholic education places the PACE teachers as middle-school specialists leading classes in math, guiding science labs, in addition to those teachers focusing on reading and language skills at all grade levels. Remember, these teachers are also students. Literally. The activity of teaching necessarily molds the lessons learned by the apprentice teacher. Also, the presence of PACE might allow the school the ‘luxury’ of a dedicated position for the special needs and learning challenges that often motivate families to enroll in Catholic grade schools. (Not to mention the over-committed PACE-ers volunteering for after-school coaching.)

Below, SMILING portraits of PACERS as rendered by their students, (Laura Burchett ’13, Alaska; Victoria Flores ’14, Utah; Amanda Membrey, ’14 Utah; Allison Mouton ’13, Alaska; Kayla Witt ’13, Utah); plus personal testimony from a member of the first cohort (Dave Devine ’96). All from Portland Magazine, Summer 2013, pp. 35-33, Summer 2009, p. 12; respectively.

Following World War II and the demobilization of the armed forces, The USA went to work. Though opportunities were not uniformly accessible to all, and some people discovered walls and locked doors, unable to find a way into economic gain or stability. Rev. Francis Kennard, a priest of the Cathedral parish, walking the streets of downtown Portland, saw that the soup-lines of the Depression — different in character and persons and circumstances — reforming to a new, newly current need. A challenge.

Another credit goes to Bernie Harrington, ’42, Portland native, UP grad and Navy veteran, who brought Fr. Kennard into contact with the local students club in 1948 when Bernie’s younger brother Dan (UP ’50), along with Jim O’Hanlon ’50 and Gene Feltz ’50 and other Portland natives, were casting about for a project and proper challenge for Sigma Pi Upsilon social club.

The steps and stages and formal and informal connections and personnel were not noted down at the time, but the stories converge on the calendar record: Blanchet House served its first meal to the houseless and hungry on the streets of downtown Portland on February 11, 1952 (beans, bread, butter and coffee for 227 clients).

Fast forward: the University of Portland Alumni Outstanding Service Award was presented to “The Founders and Perpetuators of the Blanchet House of Hospitality” in 1983. This was a freshly inaugurated annual award, and this first award appropriately celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of Blanchet House. Belated or not, the award illustrates the generational legacy tying and binding UP and Blanchet House. The 1983 list of honorees — though partial and inadequate to the many UP alumni who served as volunteers, leaders, and board members — included some 35 names. Because, from the beginning, Blanchet House was a community thing. The work of many hands. With an origin of many stories. Changing lives for volunteers and clients alike through the mission of feeding, housing, and providing safe-shelter to those who are on the streets due to poverty, illness, addiction, homelessness.

Granting recognition and awards is a matter of reflected glory, though encouragement and commitment are also demonstrated.

Leaning into Blanchet House’s fortieth anniversary, the University awarded Gene Feltz ’50 an Honorary Doctorate of Public Service in 1992 for a career of intertwined public and community service. In 2010 the University bestowed The Christus Magister Medal on the group of founders whose fifty-year-plus commitment continues to express and inspire the ideals and values of the Holy Cross and Catholic mission of the University of Portland.

And continuing: marking the seventieth anniversary of Blanchet House, Blanchet House conferred their 2023 Service Award on the University of Portland, specifically The School of Nursing and Health Innovations. This reciprocal recognition demonstrates how hands and feet are important and continuing adjuncts to ideals. The citation notes: “The University of Portland’s outstanding nursing faculty and nursing students bring their spirit of innovation in community health care to Blanchet House’s residents and meal guests. This Service Award honors the outstanding impact they make in our community.” Impacting how? When these unusual suspects offer aid to those in need — beyond food and shelter for people experiencing homelessness — the special-skilled nursing volunteers add a particular hospitality through foot care clinics.

This is the story of how from humble beginnings, UP students have been making a difference by being the difference. Aligned with the mission of UP, inspired and sustained by the community of UP students and alumni, the Blanchet House of Hospitality at 70+ is a lasting, continuing autonomous commitment and evidence of the University of Portland as OF, FOR, and WITH the city of Portland.

Sources:
Columbia Prep Columbiad Yearbook, 1945
Alumni Bulletin, September 8, 1952
The Beacon, February 22, 1957; February 6, 1959
Alumni Bulletin, April 1972.
Portland Magazine Fall 1983
Portland Magazine, Blanchet House Celebrates 70 Years, May 2022
Commencement Program, 1992
Commencement Program, 2010

The School of Nursing & Health Innovations was awarded the 2023 Service Award at the Blanchet House annual Lending a Helping Hand Brunch. In addition to the familiar volunteer services of food, shelter, and companionship (helping hands) for the homeless in the city of Portland, the Service Award highlights the added-value difference that only Nursing volunteers provide: foot-care clinics and assistance in staffing the Harrington Health Clinic.

Health Care is community care. On-site at Blanchet House in downtown Portland since 2020, the Harrington Clinic provides transient and displaced clients a point-of-entry to health care. Here client and health care system are afforded a gentler and earlier direct nurse-led gateway offering primary care and screenings in the hope of circumventing crisis intake at the Emergency Room or Urgent Care Center later. Both the cost savings and the humanity of this approach are transparent. Partnership with UP nursing students makes this innovative intervention happen.

Community-based care interventions are not new or recent to The School of Nursing & Health Innovations. Nurse-volunteers creating community clinics to provide immediate direct patient care for the Portland homeless is documented already in the early 1990s when nursing students helped create clinics and foot-care services at St. Andre Bessette Parish / The Downtown Chapel. Also during the 1990s and into the 2010s, the School of Nursing partnered in an Introduction to Parish Nursing certification. Through the years different innovations arise to meet changing social conditions. That is, we find neighborhood nursing programs hosted in various community-based settings. Since 2016 community engagement has included placing nursing students at four high schools in the Portland area: the Rosemary Anderson High School (RAHS) partnership includes instruction and conversation with at-risk youth and the larger school population.

Community health care initiatives have always been woven into the character and curriculum of nursing education, these innovative partnerships are on-going and continuing today (and beyond) at the University of Portland extending the halls of education into the city with programs such as the Harrington Health Clinic and the Integrative Health Coaching program.

Related Links

Community Programs (School of Nursing & Health Innovations website)

Nurses are Superheroes (PortLog article)

A Given Life: A Center for Social Concern (PortLog article)

The Moreau Center for Service and Justice has their office and meeting areas in St. Mary’s Center.  That is not where the Center works.  Although located on campus, The Moreau Center has a larger horizon as an educational experience that does not take its focus from lecture, discussion, and essay assignments. The Moreau Center’s working space is off-campus, and, oftentimes, far, far, far indeed off campus.

The program year starts with the beginning of the school year, with an Urban Plunge witnessing the needs, conditions, lives of the dispossessed and houseless communities in the city of Portland.  This is a participatory field trip, where eyes are opened and hands engaged.  The fundamental learning principle is that our community is nested and situated within a network of communities.  The program-goal states the learning outcome as: Learn how University of Portland is the University OF, FOR, and WITH Portland and how you will be OF, FOR, and WITH Portland, too!  The human take-away of Plunge is how the participant enacts (is an action) human-formation, providing experience and witness to the truth that no person is an island to themselves.

The same mix of involvement, awareness, and education characterizes all witness and action, presence and service in Plunges and Immersions, whether local, stretching across the country, or beyond our national borders.  In the photo gallery here there are images from the decade 1987-1996, suggesting, correctly, that there is history here.  First, that economic insecurity and houselessness have a long pedigree.  Second, and notably, that UP has seen itself involved in our community for a very long time.  It is a character-value for the University which is often first rooted in the experiences of students, such that the institution takes this value from the students.  For example, already in 1952 Blanchet House was founded in a downtown Portland parish by Rev. Francis Kennard, the priest of that parish, and by students from UP (one of those students having grown up in that parish and bringing his UP classmates out to the city, into community service).  The Moreau Center and student immersions are continuous descendants of the Office of Volunteer Services (1985) and the Urban Plunges of that period.

• Programs (a selection): Urban Plunge, Christmas in April, Transition Projects, Migrant Camp, Blanchet House, Salvation Army, Rural Plunge, Sisters of the Road Café
• Tasks: painting, bread, hammering, scraping, cookies, stew, shovels, wheelbarrows
• Goals: connection, service, awareness, sharing, compassion, equity, character, justice

The opening issue of the Beacon for the 1964 school year generously notes the “unofficial enrollment of the class of 1968, numbering about 600”.  The number is approximate because there is always some melt in the first weeks of the frosh year; the Admissions Office records 434 first-year students that fall.  However, the tally of 253 who crossed the stage four years later receiving Baccalaureate degrees on May 11, 1968 is also a precise number.  The completion rate is an unenviable 60%.  At UP during the 1960s, the perception of low graduation rates was widespread and accurate; the disparity between enrollment numbers and the number of degrees granted after four years was a cause for general concern. 

Vernon Chatman, a Pilots basketball fan, spoke directly and specifically to the president about that drop-off, proposing several programs to support Black and minority students through to graduation.  Rev. Paul E. Waldschmidt, CSC, then University president, swiftly hired him for UP to implement his plan for student assistance and retention.  Mr. Chatman became an adviser to the president, students, a community liaison, and even a student himself (M.Ed ’72).  Already in 1968 when he approached UP, Mr. Chatman was active in the Urban League of Portland, where he served as director of education until 1987 (pictured here in 1978).

Mr. Chatman’s leading initiative was the Project 21-Family Away From Home Program.  This and other programs reached into local Portland area high schools to promote recruitment of Black students for college, including pre-college counseling, SAT prep, and following up with career counseling and job-fairs such as the Urban League’s Career Awareness Day hosted for many years at the University; and then once students arrive at the University continuing support was offered by participating in a host-family mentoring-to-success program**.  Here retention and recruitment programs were aligned.  Also, he was a skilled Scholarship matchmaker, encouraging dreams and assisting to provide the opportunity and means to achieve dreams.

In 1968 he is listed as advisor to the president; later, as his programs took regular shape and began to be implemented his office was housed within the Counseling center, in the Division of Student Life.  By 1973 his title in the faculty directory is Black Student Advisor.  From then until the present, under evolving nomenclature, labels, and titles—Minority Student Advisor, Coordinator of Minority Services, Director of Minority Programs, Multicultural Coordinator — the University has maintained and funded initiatives in the area of Student Services to encourage, promote, facilitate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts at UP.

Prior to the 2018-2019 school year the Office of International Education, Diversity, and Inclusion was established with the charge to implement recommendations of the University’s Vision 2020 Strategic Plan to create, coordinate, and facilitate intercultural endeavors and opportunities.  As in 1968, a Presidential appointment responding to community-raised concerns. This office and the directing Associate Provost, Dr. Eduardo Contreras, continue to address priorities of opportunity and access and support that are central to the University’s mission though—even after fifty years– not thoroughly realized in University life.

** “A Crisis in Black and White?”, Portland Magazine, Summer 1986, p. 7, reports a 95% graduation rate for the athlete mentoring program.

Supplemental Exhibits from the University Archives (click to enlarge):

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Diversity Belongs to the Recipe

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