Mobile Showers for Portland's Homeless

This week the Preble Street Resource Center is closing their shower and bathroom facilities permanently. This facility is being converted into a new 40 bed shelter, and food services are being converted to operate on a mobile basis. The showers and bathrooms alone were a vital resource that were used by many. Within this community now many have been left with little or no access to bathrooms or showers. We are very glad the city is creating more shelter beds, and that is why we are hoping our organization can fill this gap so everyone's needs are met in the easiest way possible. It is because of this that we are starting a fundraiser to try and meet a need we are seeing among Portland's most vulnerable community right now. With the resource center closed currently to be converted into a shelter, many of the city's unhoused residents have minimal or no access to shower facilities. In a time where sanitation is so imperative to everyones safety, we are looking at renting to own, or purchasing a mobile shower facility with laundry capabilities. We feel if our organization had access to one of these, we could ensure that our unhoused community members always have access to a shower, bathroom, and clean clothes if need be. We've been looking at several options of the best way to obtain one. Ideally we are looking at a 30 foot unit with 8 shower stalls and a laundry room. We've got a general idea of how much one costs, but are still evaluatingif its more economical to convert a trailer into this facility ourselves using local contractorsthat reached out to us.  The goal and purpose behind this would be as follows: Where we are moving towards now to providing mutual aid to our homeless neighbors on a daily to weekly basis, establishing one day a week where we could help those in need and offer a variety of services will improve what we can do locally by a lot. With this trailer, we could get permits to offer free community lunches each weekend, offer laundry and showers for free, and distribute supplies in a much more effective fashion. Having an established day and time each week where we can meet as many of the needs we can within our community is the end goal. Over time, this trailer will make it possible for our organization to help a lot more locally, and ensure these services are mobile. Likewise, during the week the resource would be available if needed. As many of us have reenergized around organizing behind housing issues and advocating for our homeless community we've found many needs that are regularly going unmet. Luckily with so much community support recently, we've been able to assist with a lot of these needs on an ongoing basis. We don't know how long it will take, or how hard it will be to achieve this goal but we know it is important. Having these showers available will not just help people stay healthy, but improve quality of life for many. Among many of our ongoing projects, we hope to work hard with the community to make this dream a reality. Thank you in advance to anyone who is able to donate, and for those who can't, please help us out by sharing. Again, thanks to everyone out there who has supported this mission. We are so grateful that you have helped us make a difference in our community. Since creating this fundraiser we have received a lot of educational resources from LavaMaex who has been at this for years. Their advice was to not finance, but instead fundraise the full amount at which point there are many different ways to either build or purchase a prefabricated unit. Local contractors have volunteered to assist in creating a unit once we have funding. Likewise community parters like milestone, amistad, and other orgs have agreed to partner for outreach. GoFundMe wants us to clarify our withdrawl process for donors. We intend to leave the funds in the fundraiser until we reach our goal. Our steering committee (jess, syd, and adam) will at that time set up the purchase of the shower unit and withdraw the funds into a bank account and pay directly for the shower unit this way. At this time Adam intends to run point on this process, but any one of us can oversee the purchase once meeting the goal if needed. With all things, we do democratically and will be making decisionsas a group with consensus. It is our intention to not remove funds from here until then, and to have the purchase lined up ahead of time. This way there is no need to distribute, or move funds multiple times and instead just purchasing the entire unit without any added interest or fees. Once weve established a plan between lavemaex and local contractors we will be updating folks both here, and on our social media in thorough detail. Funds will be spent directly on the purchase or creation of a mobile hygeine and laundry unit with no-barriers for access by unhoused residents. Any excess money will be set aside to utilize for initial operating costs.