Eugene’s Lucky Enough Social Club creating community, boosting mental health through murals

Rodger Deevers knows he’s a lucky man. He’s a financial advisor in Eugene with all his basic needs met — and then some. But two years ago, after he and his wife took a vacation to the island of Curaçao off the Venezuelan coast, he wanted to bring some of the sense of community and vibrant public art back to the Eugene-Springfield area — and contribute to area nonprofits.

He says he didn’t know quite how to begin, so he just started with an idea for one mural, at nonprofit NextStep Recycling, and decided to see if people were interested in helping him paint it. Dozens of people showed up — and the nonprofit was thrilled to have a mural on a space that would otherwise have remained unadorned. Deevers calls the project Lucky Enough Social Club, and now has a system of sorts, and volunteers who show up to paint. But he does most of the legwork, outreach and designing of the mural, in collaboration with whatever nonprofit is getting painted.

He says he’s seen the transformative power of creativity in the people who show up to volunteer, and calling attention to mental health and suicide prevention is one of the biggest motivations driving him. We hear more from Deevers about the creation of the club and how he hopes to see it grow in the future.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Have you ever looked at a mural and wondered how it got there or who painted it and why? If you’re in the Eugene-Springfield area, the answer could be that the mural is there because one man wants to build a spirit of community, creativity and connection. Rodger Deevers is a financial advisor in Eugene. Last year he started what he calls the Lucky Enough Social Club. Anyone can show up to help paint murals at local nonprofits – they have done five so far.

Rodger Deevers joins me now. It’s great to have you in the studio.

Rodger Deevers: It is amazing to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Miller: How did the Lucky Enough Social Club come to be?

Deevers: The very inception, the roots of the program really lie within myself and my own mental illness. I know sometimes when they say, “How did it start?” You go, “Well, I was born on a certain day …” You take it back too far. But my mental illness journey started when I was 13 and I could legitimately say, honestly say that art has saved my life. It has kept me on the planet. So I have this massive love for art, and sharing art, and sharing the energy, and the transformative power that it brings.

The whole genesis of the project came after a vacation that I had to the island of Curaçao. I highly encourage it. I’m not sponsored by the island of Curaçao, but I was there, and I enjoyed it to a great degree, for a couple of reasons. One is they have public art everywhere. Everywhere you go there’s murals and sculptures, and it makes me feel good to see public art. And then the second thing is, we’ve all been to places where everything’s private. All the cool beaches are owned by resorts or whatever. On this island, all the beaches are public. The cool part about that is at every beach they have a social club. It’s whatever the beach name is and they say, “social club.” A lot of times it’s just a covered area with a picnic table. That’s the social club. But what happens is that for locals in that area, it’s their gathering place to come together, to spend time and to build community.

So I came back from that vacation kind of rejuvenated to do some public art and to build community. I have a group of people that I hang out with regularly. But the whole idea is to encourage people to join me and in doing that I make it as simple as possible. A lot of times when someone says, “Hey, come paint a mural,” you’re like, “How would I paint, put a cohesive image on a [space]?” So I do all that. That is my part of it, me and Kathy, my right-hand woman. She helps me dramatically. But we put the design on, wherever we’re doing it, the outline.

It’s like a coloring book. That’s what I’m trying to recapture for a lot of people, is to get them out, give them some paint, a paintbrush, in an area. They can’t screw it up.

Miller: I want to go back a little bit. So you had this transformative experience on this vacation, and came back and said, I want to do some version of what I saw, this some sense of community, and art and public art. I want to do it in the Eugene-Springfield area. What was the first place that you approached?

Deevers: The first place was NextStep Recycling. I know the executive director and she was wanting to liven up a space where she brings in kids with cognitive disabilities to work on computers. It’s a really great program, but it had been shut down since COVID. She had a grant, and she was doing this ... and she had a big wall that was just blank. And I said, “Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna do a pilot program.” I’m gonna put it out there and see if this has any kind of … because I will do the mural by myself if I have to. But I put it out. I said, “Hey, come help me paint a mural.”

And we had so many people that we had to do it in shifts. I mean, there was not enough wall space to fit the number of people who wanted to be a part of it. And that just cemented in my brain that this viable. People want to give back, people want to help create things.

Miller: What was that painting day like?

Deevers: Oh, it was, I was stressed. Because I’d never done anything like this and part of my stress …

Miller: You’d never painted a mural before?

Deevers: Oh, I’d painted murals myself.

Miller: OK, but never had a kind of barn raising mural party?

Deevers: Exactly. I mean, it would have taken me days to paint that myself. So part of the stress was like, I’m gonna have to paint this myself if nobody shows up. But we had a great turnout. In doing that, the whole idea is that I know that I have about four to six hours to do a mural, for the most part. And bigger murals will take shifts. I’ll have to have people come at different times.

But the whole idea is to get people in and get them reconnected with this art thing that we used to do when we were kids. The teacher would come and put some paints or crayons, and we wouldn’t care. We would just start drawing and coloring. It was so good for us. Along the way we attached our egos to it, we attached value to that. Then Suzy’s or Jimmy’s picture was “way better than mine and I’m no good at this.” And as soon as you say, “I’m no good at this,” you stop doing it. You move away from that, and it really becomes less of a part of your life.

There’ve been so many people who’ve come, helped out and reconnected with that energy, the creativity that creation can give to a person. And that’s really what I want people to tap into. Because I know for a fact how transformative that could be and how it can bring peace to the storm. That was a lot of the story of my early adulthood. I was trying to find a reason to stay on this planet for 24 hours. That gave me a sense of purpose. It gave me a sense of ability. So I am a full-on believer in the power of art and what it can do for a person.

Miller: You said at the beginning, and then you were filling in the details a little bit just now, that art has saved your life?

Deevers: Absolutely, yes. I’ve been suicidal for 25 years. And what happens is, it usually initially takes some time for someone to get to a place of suicidal action. It would take me a week, week-and-a-half, two weeks of just being in darkness, to get to that place. Well, the second time, the third time, it takes less time. Right now, I have what’s called treatment resistant disease. My mental illness is treatment resistant. It’s evolving to match the efforts that I’m putting into it. So over time, that period of bad juju to suicide gets shorter and shorter.

So now, since I’ve been dealing with it for 40 years, if I have a bad day, which is often because I have four mental illness diagnoses, I fixate. So I’m thinking about suicide at least once a week. And what I’ll tell you now is, what you get for living with that for 40 years is a passion to talk about it. It’s a passion to change the way that people think and act around severe mental illness and suicide. I think that there’s a massive discussion that isn’t happening on any level.

Miller: What do you think is not being talked about? Because I do feel like we’re talking more fully, if not truly fully, but more about suicide in recent years than I can remember, say, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, as suicide has skyrocketed. What do you think we are not talking about enough?

Deevers: I think that what we’re not talking about is what people are actually going through. We’re missing the voices of people like me who have been dealing with long-term suicidality. That conversation isn’t being had. A lot of times I tell people, suicide, if you’re unsuccessful – which I hope you are unsuccessful every time – that’s not the end of the story. I equate it to walking the plank. Every time I get suicidal, I feel like I’m on the plank and there’s nowhere to go. You either pull yourself off the plank, or you jump and it’s over. Every time you go out on the plank, it becomes easier and easier to be on the plank.

We need to work on the real discrepancy, the fact that this is a long-term disease that gets worse over time. We need to prepare people for that. I use something that I’ve called “preventative resilience” in my life. That’s my soapbox that I stand on now. That’s a fancy way to say self-care. And not just self-care, [but] the authorizing of the self-care. Many times, people know what self-care is, but they don’t authorize themselves to use it. That’s the biggest thing. We hand over power. As a mentally ill person, we hand over all control and power to other people, with the hopes that we will find relief. They will provide relief to us.

What we have to understand is all these other things are tools that we use. Those tools, like any other tools, may or may not work for any specific job. So it’s matching the tool to the job and giving people the authority to use those tools every day if they have to. There’s so much stigma. We’re swimming upstream against the stigma that’s associated with severe mental illness and suicide. And the thing that shuts stigma down, the thing that is the most powerful tool is just transparency. It’s just telling people, “This is what I go through” and then demanding the accommodations for that. Not just asking, “Hey, do you think maybe I could take 10 minutes to take a walk around the block and clear my head?” No. I’m going to take 10 minutes to go walk around the block to clear my head because I need that in my life.

So it’s just a shift of mindset. That’s what I’m trying to encourage people to do. That’s really the impetus for the art project. Art is a massive part of my life. I have an easel set up in my office. So if I don’t have a client, I’m painting. I’m painting a picture and those pictures, everything I do is for nonprofits. I don’t like to monetize my therapy. And as soon as I paint a cool picture and then, “Oh, give me $10,000 for it,” or whatever it is … I’m gonna tape a banana to a thing and – “Give me a million dollars for that.” No, it’s just about plugging into the tools that you have at hand.

Miller: I just wanna mention this important phone number. If you or someone you know is struggling right now, you can call or text 988 to reach a suicide and crisis lifeline. Help is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

To go back to the Lucky Enough Social Club – I’m curious about what those words mean? What do you mean by lucky enough?

Deevers: The lucky enough comes from a saying. If you’re lucky enough to be at the beach, you’re lucky enough. If you’re lucky enough to be upright, you’re lucky enough. So it’s really to acknowledge where we’re at and to be grateful for that. So hey, if we’re lucky enough to be able to paint a mural, we are lucky enough.

Miller: Do you feel that on a regular basis? Taking into account everything you’ve just been talking about, the massive struggles that you have dealt with and the tools that you have developed over decades, do you consider yourself lucky enough?

Deevers: When I’m able to do things like that, absolutely. 100%. I feel privileged. That, in and of itself, is an example of the power that this has, to be able to give back, to be of service, especially when you’re in your darkest place. People talk about happiness. Everyone’s pursuing happiness.

Miller: It’s in one of the founding documents of our country.

Deevers: My happiness is in developing control. If I can get out of bed in the morning and I could do something productive when I don’t want to, that is happiness for me. That, for me, checks all the boxes. So on those days … and I have a lot of these days where the only thing I wanna do, when I’m making the bed, is getting into the bed. I’m thinking about tonight when it’s over and I get to get into bed. That’s almost every day. So I need to do something with that. I need to change that. Because life is not sitting on a couch. Life is not taking your power away from the whole of society because you have a disorder, an illness.

And that’s the other thing. This is something that I was born with. This is not something that I chose. And I want people to understand that when you don’t have a choice, you have to make the best of it. If you can’t get out of it, get into it. It’s a saying that I’ve heard and I believe it. This is something that’s gonna be part of my life every day. Am I going to let it control me or am I gonna turn that around and be able to do something good with that?

Miller: Rodger Deevers, thanks very much.

Deevers: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.

Miller: Rodger Deevers is a financial adviser in Eugene and the founder of the Lucky Enough Social Club.

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