For people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, addressing everyday needs can be a constant challenge. From where to find food and a bathroom, to where to sleep safely and take care of hygiene needs – basic tasks can take a lot of time and energy, and there are instances when these fundamental needs simply go unmet.
Katie Lindsay, Program Analyst with the City of Portland’s Impact Reduction Program, spends her workdays finding ways to help people living outside access services that provide these types of simple, yet critical necessities. It was while working on her Master of Social Work at PSU that Lindsay first started to recognize the desperate need for more hygiene programs. “I started to understand just how impactful it can be for someone to not have access to places where they can get clean, use the bathroom and wash their clothes. Laundry is especially a problem here in Portland, where your clothing is going to get soaked if you’re outside even for an hour during many months of the year.”
For Lindsay, a growing understanding about service gaps sparked an idea, which grew into a plan and, years later, finally resulted in a new endeavor that would not only provide laundry service to people experiencing homelessness, but would also create new, easy-entry job opportunities, and keep (literal) tons of textile waste out of the landfill.
The result was The Wash House, opened in Portland’s Central Eastside in late September of 2024. Initially funded by the Impact Reduction Program (IRP), The Wash House is a laundry facility staffed by participants of GLITTER, a program of nonprofit Ground Score Association (Ground Score Association is fiscally sponsored by Trash for Peace). GLITTER participants were already providing tent-side waste collection services on a contract with IRP. Adding new GLITTER positions at The Wash House was a way to build on existing success and generate more job opportunities for people who often have barriers to employment and have had challenges maintaining steady income and housing.
It's the power of addressing so many challenges at once that is the most exciting aspect of the program for Katie Lindsay: “Either way the City is spending money to respond to waste. By funding things like the laundry program, we are investing in more impactful uses of our funds as it provides work opportunities, reduces impacts on our landfills and provides clean, dry clothing to vulnerable community members.”
The Wash House serves customers who lack access to laundry, giving them the opportunity to drop off one bag of laundry per day. Customers are given a ticket that lists what time their laundry will be ready, and they come back to pick up cleaned, dried items – typically the same day or next day. Providing this service has impactful outcomes for people’s health and well being by improving hygiene and reducing stigma. Additionally, without access to laundry, when clothing or bedding gets dirty or wet, people often have to discard those items and find something new (or go without), making laundry service a great way to cut down on waste.
The Wash House takes waste reduction to the next level by laundering recovered items picked up by GLITTER trash collection teams along their routes, as well as recovered items from IRP’s property storage warehouse. In the last fiscal year, waste collected by IRP crews through garbage pick-up, combined with the discarded pounds of unclaimed property from the property warehouse amounted to over 5,700 tons of trash taken to the landfill, and textiles make up a big percentage of that waste tonnage each year. In a recent study conducted by Katie Lindsay analyzing the composition of discarded items set aside for disposal by Portland homeless camp residents, the biggest waste type by weight was found to be textiles, at almost 17% of all the waste analyzed.
Those reclaimed, laundered textiles go back into circulation, distributed to people living outside or in shelters, typically. Ground Score Association redistributes some of the items themselves, and has also shared clean clothing, bedding and shoes with partner organizations like Hygiene4All, Blanchet House, Portland Street Response, and Transition Projects, among others. According to Nic Boehm, manager at The Wash House, finding eager recipients was not difficult, “Once people realized we had winter clothes the calls started coming in. Durable items are in such high demand.”
For Boehm, managing the flow of laundry at The Wash House has been an ever-evolving balancing act. After a slow, pilot program roll-out last September, The Wash House had just started to have good word-of-mouth awareness building, with regular customers coming back for repeat service. Then, a new need surfaced, and The Wash House team was ready to pivot in order to help. Boehm and The Wash House’s staff of six moved production up from three days per week to five in January to accommodate the need for laundry services at the City’s two new emergency overnight shelters. Boehm estimates The Wash House is processing at least 10,000 lbs of emergency shelter bedding per month, currently.
Whether providing clean, warm sheets and blankets for people in shelter, or working with walk-in customers, helping others is a big part of what makes working at The Wash House meaningful for the staff there each day.
For staffer Andrew Nelson, the people are the best part of the job. Andrew has worked with the GLITTER program for years, starting out on informal pick-up shifts with the trash collection teams, then getting promotions first to a team lead, then to a driver, before taking the opportunity to help establish The Wash House last fall and be among the first to work a shift there.
Terrance Freeman is a newer GLITTER participant but is already passionate about his work and talks proudly about his 20 months of sobriety. Unwavering support for his recovery is one of the things he appreciates most about the job, and he says The Wash House team is “like family.” People take care of each other and working together feels, “like a community, like what I had out on the streets,” Freeman says.
The importance of the people and the close-knit, family atmosphere at The Wash House is echoed by Annette Collins, another staffer who has experienced profound loss of family as a part of her past, living through the death of a partner as well as two children. Annette has built valued connections at The Wash House and loves how everyone who works there is different, everyone shows up as their individual self each day, but they still work together as a strong, united team.
The Wash House is located at 2609 SE 6th Ave in Portland. Walk-in customer hours are Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9am-4pm. Customers can bring one bag per day, max 40lbs. Cleaned, dried items will typically be available for pick up same day or next day.