Eastbank Book Club
Seeing the beauty in random humans feeds my soul
I hang out with unhoused people in the Central Eastside Industrial Area of Portland
We socialize and discuss comic books.
Every month the club buys a backpack full of comic books. I pass them out and then on the 1st Thursday of the month we discuss them over pizza. We will meet by the Vera Katz statue on the Eastbank of the Willamette River at 4:00 PM. Come join us!
A trade paperback comic book is about $8 to $12 at Powell’s Books. Individual issues are $5 at Books With Pictures, Excalibur Comics and direct ordering. I fill the backpack with 4 to 6 trades and 10 or 20 issues each month. The 4 to 6 pizzas we eat at the meetings cost $5.55 each at Little Caesar's. This costs $150 ± $50 each month.
I make book club membership cards for anyone who wants one. A picture ID can be handy, and homeless people are always losing stuff. The cards are quality plastic like a credit card. The back reads “Identity verified by a paid background check.”
I order cards from instantcard.net for $6.70 each. I pay a private investigator $15 to do the background check. About 40% of the cards I make go undelivered. I probably make 4 to 8 cards a month. This costs $130 ± $45 each month.
I make a one page newsletter to remind people when and where the book club is. It sometimes has short stories about Eastbank gossip, Portland politics or maybe a review of last month’s book. Join our mailing list!
Each month it takes me about 10 hours to put together the newsletter. I use constant contact to manage the mailing list for $35 a month. I do the pictures in Photoshop which is $20 a month and the rest in Word which is part of a $6 per month bundle. I am careful not to endorse candidates when I write about politics. This costs $60 ± $0 each month.
Helping the general population understand homelessness is part of our mission. We livestream the meeting if people want to. We make YouTube shorts about homeless life when people feel like it. We dabble in other social media, but mostly just YouTube and Twitch. Subscribe to our YouTube channel!
Every month it costs $23 for the Adobe video editor and 16 hours of my time to produce 16 minutes of YouTube content. I also spend 4 hours a month managing the website and the club’s social media. I use squarespace.com for the domain name and hostmayo.com for the server. It costs less than $5 a month for the website. This costs $25 ± $0 each month.
I keep some phone chargers in the backpack. If someone has a dead charger, I offer to trade them. I ask them to trade back when I see them at the book club. The chargers are engraved with the time and place of the book club as well as my name and cell number.
I buy large capacity chargers on Amazon.com for $35.08 each. They have a 50,000mAh capacity and can keep a phone going for a week. I trade out 6 to 12 of them each month. I get about half of them back. I spend about 10 hours a month passing out chargers on the Eastbank and doing other miscellaneous errands. This costs $160 ± $85 a month.
Your religion is your own business. Someone’s friendship and help should not be contingent on you changing your beliefs to match his, hers or theirs. If xhe is only your friend when you agree with xir then xhe is not really your friend.
Personally, I’m an Atheist. For me, the idea of God or the afterlife just seems like wishful thinking. You are welcome to believe whatever you want, and I will love you for being human. I think Jesus is a historical figure worth emulating. I try to be like Jesus. The separation of religion and public good is important to me. This costs nothing.
We recommend the benefits of not doing drugs, but we accept people’s life choices and meet them where they are. Still, there is no drinking allowed during book club and anyone who shows up intoxicated will be asked to leave.
We have a very fluid definition of “social good”, and prohibition is not really a part of it. While we are a 501(3)(c) non-profit, we don’t like being told what to do. The principle that freedom should only bow to democracy is also important to me. This costs nothing.
To be clear, the goal of this book club is to create a fun social activity for houseless people in Portland. Anything more is a bonus. We do not see people as problems to be solved. We are not trying to “fix” anyone. We are not even really trying to make people not homeless, especially if they are not interested.
The monthly fundraising goal is $1,830. I treat this like a quarter time job and pay myself $30 per hour out of club funds. Each month the club needs to pay for 43 hours and 20 minutes of my time and $530 ± $170 for program expenses. That makes administration 71.04% of the budget, which is much higher than most non-profits on charitynavigator.org. Donate if you want. If there is a shortfall, I’ll probably pay the difference myself.